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

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

#81

Post by solarkraft »

mister_goo wrote: post #78
electromech wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This greatly appeals to me, but I don't quite understand how these work. I looked into searx and friends, and it seems too good to be true. Like, if it's turning around and making requests to Google, don't they detect that as bot-like traffic? Seems like a good way to get your IP blocked or worse.

There is another option: Google offers a paid API for search.

Is it feasibly priced? Often enough APIs from big walled services don't seem to be any more than something to point towards when regulators raise concerns about market dominance.

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

#82

Post by solarkraft »

MahajanVardhan wrote: post #70

I get amazing results while programming if I use DuckDuckGo. I think google dorking make the suggestions better. Also, using bangs on duckduckgo has vastly improved my search results. If you know where to find stuff, you will get good results. For example if I am looking for review or recommendations, I use site:"reddit.com" .

For easy queries DDG seems to be better at showing the primary source. For more complex stuff I still find Google much better - often enough the right result, which is ranked highly on Google, can't be found at all with DDG.

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

#83

Post by mister_goo »

solarkraft wrote: post #81
mister_goo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another option: Google offers a paid API for search.

Is it feasibly priced? Often enough APIs from big walled services don't seem to be any more than something to point towards when regulators raise concerns about market dominance.

Feasible for my personal use. 100 free daily quota. 1000 calls per 5$. I'm not affiliated with Google.

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

#84

Post by solarkraft »

mlongval wrote: post #3

Ask a technical query and you will invariably get a bunch of sales offers for the product in question.

Pretty much the core of the issue. Shouldn't it be possible to, somewhat reliably, filter out all commercial content? That would probably increase the average result quality by a lot.

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

#85

Post by solarkraft »

borapdx wrote: post #59

No, it is not just you, the quality of Google results has gotten dramatically worse. BTW, you can ask Google 'is Google in decline' and see for yourself (DISCLAIMER: my answer on Quora is highly ranked where you can go into more details). In short, Internet as we have known it has fallen apart because there are hardly any true organic links left. They used to be the lifeblood of the Web, the links based SOLELY on the…

> Users expect much more than returning bunch of blue links with matched keywords in response to their queries. They want much of the time direct answers to their questions.

Well, yes (and Google does that remarkably well sometimes) ... but also no. I often just want good results, damn it.

I do suspect that this type of technology would be helpful in judging whether a combination of words might actually be relevant to the query rather than just containing some of the same words - so the underlying challenge might end up being the same.

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

#86

Post by internet_user »

jtode wrote: post #64
dougmwne wrote: post #40

I suspect, but can’t prove that the entire internet is rotting. I get the feeling that organic user contributions are plummeting and being swamped by bots. HN is a small life raft. Many of the niche subreddits I’ve been following for years are seeing their post frequency drop, from dozens a days to a few a week. All the other forums are gone. Maybe there’s something going on in the apps, but they aren’t searchable. T…

I have also noticed a kind of implosion happening - an emptying-out of real human-generated thoughts and content. I have hypotheses but they would be considered highly "ideological" in this forum.

>highly "ideological" in this forum.

now you got my attention?

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

#87

Post by shash7 »

gundmc wrote: post #13

This topic is posted about once a month for the last 13 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

13 years ago this won't be so true. But this topic is generally regarded as true amongst even the non-technical crowd.

Google search has gotten that bad recently.

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

#88

Post by blikdak »

They want to make as much money as possible so they can go into space, or fund their extropian fantasies, and can afford to pay lots of unimaginative people like lawyers, marketing and bean-counting people lots of money to achieve it. Advertising is the crutch.

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

#89

Post by t-3 »

electromech wrote: post #72
t-3 wrote: post #5

Google search has been in decline for at least the past decade, and been surpassed easily for at least the past 5 years. Try running a local instance of a meta-search engine like https://github.com/searx/searx - you'll never want to go back.

This greatly appeals to me, but I don't quite understand how these work. I looked into searx and friends, and it seems too good to be true. Like, if it's turning around and making requests to Google, don't they detect that as bot-like traffic? Seems like a good way to get your IP blocked or worse.

Why would it look like a bot? Does your normal search traffic look botlike? It's just a search multiplexer.

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

dougmwne wrote: post #40

I suspect, but can’t prove that the entire internet is rotting. I get the feeling that organic user contributions are plummeting and being swamped by bots. HN is a small life raft. Many of the niche subreddits I’ve been following for years are seeing their post frequency drop, from dozens a days to a few a week. All the other forums are gone. Maybe there’s something going on in the apps, but they aren’t searchable. T…

[deleted]
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