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

Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 127 posts

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#21

Post by dharmab »

yuy910616 wrote: post #19

I never worked in search, curious what are the technical difficulties of implementing a YouTube-style "Don't Recommend This Channel" are? From the outset, the YouTube recommendation can be an offline process, and much easier to scale. Google pretty much has "F-you" level developer man-power to throw at this problem, so I'm somewhat surprised they haven't implemented it yet (the "bad result is good for Google" reasoni…

I'm using Kagi search that allows you to raise, lower or block websites from your search results.

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#22

Post by slig »

napsterbr wrote: post #15
2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #4

It's really disturbing just how bad Google search has become. For so many cases Google actually is only useful as a search interface for Reddit, StackOverflow, and other sites that accumulate (and actually garbage collect) knowledge. Without such a qualifier Google will just give you absolute SEO trash results for many types of searches.

> It's really disturbing just how bad Google search has become I just want to be (yet another person) to echo this sentiment. For the first time in my life I had to resort to Bing (!) instead. The lower quality of results must make business sense somehow, I suppose...

Before 2020, it was possible to google random phone numbers and figure out who was calling. Nowadays, googling random callers is useless, but Bing somehow still works.

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#23

Post by birken »

2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #4

It's really disturbing just how bad Google search has become. For so many cases Google actually is only useful as a search interface for Reddit, StackOverflow, and other sites that accumulate (and actually garbage collect) knowledge. Without such a qualifier Google will just give you absolute SEO trash results for many types of searches.

I'd just like to note the irony of saying how bad Google is while at the same time saying that Google's general purpose search engine is still better than any of the specific search engines of these individual sites.

Perhaps the issue isn't that Google is bad, and the issue is that search is incredibly hard.

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#25

Post by ignite »

buildbot wrote: post #17

Actually though, is SEO/spam so out of control that allegedly the best software engineers in the world are unable to counter it? Are bad results actually good for google in some perverse ad-based way? Do people at google actually use their products at all?

The best software engineers in the world are generating it.

It pays better than google.

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#26

Post by randomdata »

IvyMike wrote: post #16
addaon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems almost exactly as good a match to Google's search business as Google Groups was...

Google Groups was never at the level that Reddit currently is, at least in terms of search results.

Deja News/early Google Groups provided great search results. Google, in usual form, has been working hard to destroy any property outside of Web Search/YouTube for a long, long time, Groups included. The internet is bigger now, so Reddit has an advantage there, but Groups could have been what Reddit became if it received some love instead.

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#27

Post by slig »

birken wrote: post #23
2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #4

It's really disturbing just how bad Google search has become. For so many cases Google actually is only useful as a search interface for Reddit, StackOverflow, and other sites that accumulate (and actually garbage collect) knowledge. Without such a qualifier Google will just give you absolute SEO trash results for many types of searches.

I'd just like to note the irony of saying how bad Google is while at the same time saying that Google's general purpose search engine is still better than any of the specific search engines of these individual sites. Perhaps the issue isn't that Google is bad, and the issue is that search is incredibly hard.

They are bad now, but they were exceptional few years ago. Same thing with Gmail, now I get obvious spam in my inbox and real email in the spam folder. Looks like they gave up.

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#29

Post by asdff »

neovialogistics wrote: post #2

I think there is a third cause: the low visibility of high quality non-Reddit forums on Google against the tide of low-quality results. There's some kind of SEO exploit that Google is unable to counter. Apparently, by creating bot accounts on a semi-reputable social media platform like LiveJournal, Baidu or Reddit and having them post endless links to each other from website X, website X is inflated on Google even if…

Google loves to group results by domain too. Say you search for something related to your hobby. Somewhere on the page is going to be a hit from the forum for that hobby, but just below it in a smaller font will be like a half dozen sub hits from that same domain, then that's all there is for that domain in the search results. Never mind that all the relevant knowledge online on this something might be contained in that forum, effectively below the fold until you expose it with the the site:forum.com flag, but this requires a priori knowledge of forum.com being a good source to use for your something.

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#30

Post by lotsoweiners »

kylecazar wrote: post #24

I haven't noticed this, but have seen the complaints. I don't tend to see many reddit links in my search results, and haven't noticed a change since that blackout. Perhaps just the nature of my searches?

I usually don’t see many Reddit results in my searches either. According to previous threads on HN a lot of people append site:Reddit to their Google searches so perhaps that is what they are referring to.
Post reply on HN