Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 106 posts

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#14

Post by holografix »

There’s been some debate about this here on HN and someone made a point that resonated with me:

The quality of _the web_ has been in decline lately.

With ML’s capacity to paraphrase original content and to generate plausible rubbish content from scratch, it’s very difficult for Google’s pagerank (or whatever they call their algo these days) to fight back.

That been said, there does seem to be a fair bit of scraping and paste going on. I’m surprised G is not looking at published dates and lowering the the scammers ranking.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#15

Post by greenthrow »

It's not just you. Google is now what Altavista and the other search engines it replaced became. The difference is that those went to crap in only a couple years where Google held out for decades and then suddenly has spiraled to where it is now. And it's the same reasons those search engines in the 90s went down the tubes. Everyone who wasn't there will tell you Google's superior technology (PageRank) is why it won. But that's not really why. It's because AltaVista, Lycos, etc. got awful to use, which cause us to look for an alternative. There was this nice clean upstart that said "Don't be evil." is their motto.

It's time for the cycle to begin again.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#16

Post by _8j50 »

With all the Googlers here and this question being asked again and again including by myself I wonder if this feedback has already reached the right folks at google but there just isn't much that could be done given the business incentives at play.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#17

Post by PuppyTailWags »

I think a small variety of issues...

1. Search has to be hard because filtering spam is a cat and mouse game inherently.

2. Useful information has moved off of searchable sources. Instead of forums, we have discord, facebook groups, slack channels, twitter...

3. There is simply more shit, exponentially, than when I was young, and therefore there's more garbage lying around. The ratio of shit:not shit hasn't gotten better.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#18

Post by ldjkfkdsjnv »

My vision for the future of search:

Text search on the web will slowly die. No one trusts the results of random text. Google is in the adversarial position of wanting to censor certain answers as well as present answers that maximize their own revenue.

People will search video based content instead, and use the fact that a human spoke the information, as well as comments/upvotes to vet it as trustworthy material (like on TikTok).

Google search as we know it will slowly die, and then will decline like Facebook. TikTok will steal search marketshare as their video clips span all of human life.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#19

Post by wruza »

Kukumber wrote: post #6

I don't think it has declined It serve its users, you are probably in the niche category that's declining, or rather the casual group is growing in number and as a result your category is being diluted even more, tech stuff usually are old stuff, users prefer new and up to date topics If you are looking for something specific, i suggest trying few tricks to get better specific results: https://betterprogramming.pub/1…

link

That’s exactly what gets worse every year, ime.

Post reply on HN