Been using ddg for years and my use of !g has reduced considerably because it doesn’t result in better (but often worse) results. Google stopped being an innovative company many years ago. They’re in their Ballmer era. They’ll hopefully get a Nadella soon but not before it gets worse.
Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
41–50 of 158 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#42Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#43I get a captcha ("our systems have detected automated queries") and the wrong language. I suspect this might be deliberate to get users to turn off iCloud Relay as YouTube doesn't do this.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#44I personally do something similar, pretty much all my searches have 'reddit' as an extra keyword.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#45Sometimes I worry about how long the "site:reddit.com" gravy train will last... It is getting too hard to make the Internet useful these days.
For example, yesterday I was looking for a good toaster oven. The _only_ brand that gets recommended consistently is Breville, on multiple different subreddits. However, there is nothing that makes me believe their product is any better than the competitions. Mass produced in china out of cheap materials, lots of reviews stating that they break once the warranty is up, etc etc. All of the Reddit comments are also very simple. Doing due diligence as a consumer has become a nightmare.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#46I recommend skipping Google and going straight to:
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#47Quoted post unavailable.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#48Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#49Google is increasingly useless, but there is a Garbage In Garbage Out aspect given that the vast bulk of what they're indexing today is junk. Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising. There seems to be a growing chunk of automated site propagation as well (90% identical content but with keywords/names/etc tweaked), perhaps for scams, perhaps again for advertising. There m…
Google bet the farm on their ability to do just that though. PageRank and other technologies where suppose to suppress content farms that just aggregate the same content over multiple sites for ad revenue, I have not done SEO in a long time but back in the day (early 00's) that was a sure fire way to get your site demoted in the google ranking was to have content 90+% similar to another site. It was a big problem for…
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#50Google is increasingly useless, but there is a Garbage In Garbage Out aspect given that the vast bulk of what they're indexing today is junk. Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising. There seems to be a growing chunk of automated site propagation as well (90% identical content but with keywords/names/etc tweaked), perhaps for scams, perhaps again for advertising. There m…