All websites are doomed to eventually have too much content to store in one index. So you want multi-tier indexes. And then you're incentivized to keep people in the first tier index.
Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
51–60 of 89 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#52I've ditched Google Search for DuckDuckGo a while back: first for privacy, but the more I used the more I realized that for some reason the results of DDG are just better than the ones of Google.
I still use Google for super-specific things that I know DDG might now have indexed
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#53I've been struggling with context. I fight for Google to know I'm talking about Rust the language and not the game or the oxidization. "Rust Vector Drain" really struggled today. I'm a bit surprised that Google isn't prepared to remember context. "User has been looking at a lot of Rust Lang so let's promote those kinds of results"
I would love the ability to add "domain:programming" to my searches like that - just let me tell google what area I'm interested in, it would so make life simpler.
I have a feeling DDG already allows something like this.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#54More than anything, I've noticed that Google prefers to offer search results that are from advertisers. This isn't surprising. Another commenter mentioned that context has gotten worse, and I'd agree with that. It's still a "good" search engine. I say "good" in quotes because I have yet to try a search engine that's as effective, but the "good" aspect of Google is now debatable in many contexts. For example it's "goo…
ddg feels more like a friendly portal.. you don't have to think about privacy much, no ads, lightweight. it fails very often, we probably all use !g half the time but still
also i was surprised liking bing 'way of things' a lot the few times I used it. something felt more like home there.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#55For whatever reason, some times I search for (lots of) emails in public oss mailing lists. In the last 1-2 years I have found some emails that Google just won't find. Bing does.
So yeah, my impression is that Google is getting worse. And it's not just search. I'm planning to abandon gmail, and it's not just because of privacy.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#56As a sort of related question, what do people use search engines for? I find that 99% of my searches fall under the "I know exactly what site I want to search" ie: docs websites, github, wikipedia, etc, which I can search trivially in my browser's url bar. For the last 1%, I use duckduckgo, which almost always ends up just proxying me to one of those other sites. Search feels very "solved" to me, I don't see the poin…
It's because you don't know what you don't know and living in the Google bubble isn't helping with discovering those things.
I'm not sure what you mean. I don't know all sorts of things. I watch a conference talk or I read a paper, and I start looking things up.
If it's a paper reference I search for the paper's ID/ title - Google won't do any better than DDG, this is a pinpoint search. If it's a term, like recently I was looking into Entity Resolution, I wikipedia it. I run into things I don't know constantly and my search engine has virtually nothing to do with how I discover new information.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#57Yes, and the loss of advanced search syntax hasn't helped either (ex: + operator, quoted strings, etc). They also have weird issues around date ranges (ex: reddit results that appear in date range searches are wildly incorrect). I've been trying to force using DDG as a habit since they first launched, but rather than DDG getting better, it's been Google getting worse that has actually accelerated my use of DDG.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#58This has been a thing since Google did their RankBrain update 5 years ago. They essentially released a system that used ML to negotiate unknown "long-tail" queries into more common queries and then returned the common queries results. One of the immediate effects was quoted strings became less relevant, sometimes completely ignored, and a lot of the other tools for negotiating with system were lost. It's only continu…
Interesting. That explains alot.
Ye it has got worse alright. I don't know the timeframe since it has been a slow boil.
Easy queries like "who is the king of Spain" has got priority over hard queries making hard queries even harder.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#59It seems to be a perennial problem, as I was looking back through old tweets and saw that in 2010 I was complaining about the same thing.
In my search results today, they're doing a good job of putting wikipedia style facts onto my screen, while simultaneously pushing wikipedia results further away from the top. I'm usually shown lots of "news" related results - maybe some kind of optimization for temporal relevance?
It's hard to know how to respond to a request for something like "octopus hat". As myself, I know I would prefer to see results from Etsy over Amazon for this particular query today. As an outsider, I don't know how anyone would know that without being around me for some time, and knowing the exact mood/mindset I'm in at that moment. In comes all of the data collection to make this algorithmically/heuristically possible. It's a bit concerning that everything coming up at the top of the results for this query are trying to sell me something - making, thinking & doing are falling way further down the page.
It makes me curious what a naked search experience would be like these days, without the personalized bubble. I try it from time to time via DuckDuckGo, and when deeply curious I suspect I'll try to navigate Google through tor.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#60More than anything, I've noticed that Google prefers to offer search results that are from advertisers. This isn't surprising. Another commenter mentioned that context has gotten worse, and I'd agree with that. It's still a "good" search engine. I say "good" in quotes because I have yet to try a search engine that's as effective, but the "good" aspect of Google is now debatable in many contexts. For example it's "goo…
ddg feels more like a friendly portal.. you don't have to think about privacy much, no ads, lightweight. it fails very often, we probably all use !g half the time but still also i was surprised liking bing 'way of things' a lot the few times I used it. something felt more like home there.
I use ddg exclusively for bang operators to search where I need to search but default to typing in !g if I need to actually use a search engine