Google Search Is Dying • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#871

Post by propter_hoc » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 2:18 AM UTC

zucked wrote: post #76

softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…

I, too, search " + reddit" often for product reviews and such. Thing is, the results on that front have started to slide as the paid review side of the internet catches on. I'm finding that it's getting harder and harder to trust the reddit search results - lots of shill accounts and obvious junk. That's not a google problem, specifically, but it's another degradation of a workaround for declining search result quali…

Use " site:reddit.com". That will exclusively restrict you to results from reddit.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#872

Post by unobatbayar » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 2:19 AM UTC

Wait, really? I still want to work for Google.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#873

Post by ehsankia » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 2:19 AM UTC

bradgessler wrote: post #380

softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…

I too have found myself searching more in Reddit. Not to throw shade on Reddit, but even if I find exactly what I’m looking for in there, it’s depressing that it’s all bound up inside of another walled garden who will eventually have the same incentive as Google: squeeze every last advertising dollar out of the produc… I mean users. Like Google, it’s just a matter of time before they too lose their balance. A questio…

I "search" reddit a lot, but all my searches are always through Google. Reddit search is notoriously bad, even after multiple attempts by them to fix it. Suffixing my Google searches with "reddit" though gives all the results I'm looking for.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#874

Post by bobsmooth » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 2:22 AM UTC

bloaf wrote: post #278

valdiorn wrote: post #38

Google used to be really, really good at finding exactly what I told it to find. Nowadays, it's turned into the yellow pages; sponsored content from businesses trying to sell me goods and services. Can people suggest good alternatives or search patterns for certain categories of information or search types? Some of the search patterns I currently I use: * Youtube for product reviews and demos, entertainment, music an…

As a bit of a weird hobby, I like to read up on right wing conspiracy theories. That means I do a fair number of searches for specific terms and people mentioned in fake-news facebook/forum posts. Google seems to slowly oscillate between thinking that I am a right wing loon, and thinking I am Joe Public who must not be shown misinformation. That is, sometimes google is perfectly willing to vomit forth results from th…

Limiting search results by date is essential if you're trying to find something with a popular name of something else that just came out.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#875

Post by mr_beans » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 2:25 AM UTC

I wish wish wish Neeva was already good. I dig that they have a better aligned business model but their search quality still sucks. I was looking for a specific gun to buy and Neeva took me to a scam site as the first hit and I stupidly trusted it and completed the purchase through it (luckily was able to cancel it and get my money back). They also pushed an update which crashed their Beta iOS app and never fixed it. I’m rooting for them but I was not a happy customer so they will need to earn back my trust for me to subscribe.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#876

Post by oarabbus_ » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 2:25 AM UTC

Summarizes almost exactly how I feel. I also searched the title of the article, and one of the autocomplete suggestions was "why are google search results so bad 2021 reddit"

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#877

Post by timothylaurent » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 2:28 AM UTC

richardsocher wrote: post #823

Yea. Reddit is a super useful content island. The idea that folks prefer certain such content island was one of the many reasons we started you.com (other than privacy, time saving, developer focus, etc) We are the only search engine that allows you to set that Reddit preference once and then whenever relevant - the reddit search app will come up. Same goes for Stackoverflow and other apps. It's changed the way I sea…

you.com is so refreshing -- I've been using it since learning about it and I see it getting better and better.

Been loving the twitter integration, the code blocks, stack overflow -- and the lack of adds. Love it!

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#878

Post by girvo » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 2:28 AM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #390

Ah, young whipper snappers, everything old is new again, and clearly the world is always getting worse. Well, some things are (reverse image search, ease of accessing 'Cached' pages -- now I have to go to archive.org Wayback, etc), but forum search has always been bad. Long before Reddit was big, USENET/DejaNews and forum software like PHPbb/UBB ruled supreme (and before Markdown there was UBB Code). Google, despite…

> forum search has always been bad

Man, that's almost an understatement haha. I always wonder if it's just a "Hard Problem", as I still don't know any forum software that solved it.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#879

Post by throwaway984393 » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 2:30 AM UTC

Google is still a high-quality search engine, it just has ridiculously poor product and consumer focus. This could easily be turned around by better product management.

Some search results are poor, but they can be very easily changed by Google. Recipes, for example, are only poor because of Google's own published recipe metadata HTML format. Their results prioritize matches that include that format, and 99.999% of matches are pages from a single WordPress plugin that uses the format.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#880

Post by friedturkey » Wed, Feb 16, 2022, 2:34 AM UTC

bnralt wrote: post #308

An important thing to realize, too, is that this is a problem that keeps getting worse. The article talks about product reviews and recipes, but it's been spreading a lot further than that. Recently I was trying to look up a technical error, and found a lot of web pages that seemed to be auto-generated with "How to solve [error_scraped_from_the_web]", complete with a list of generic things unrelated to the error (IE,…

Yeah, looking up technical stuff now for anything outside of very major tech is an absolute nightmare. It's nothing but auto-generated pages made of random parts of random forums posts smashed together under some weird url like tech-helb-4-yuodbajdasdasd99234029242.co.xyz.com.org.

I've clicked on a few out of curiosity, immediately recognizing they were garbage from the description text, and it's just endless SEO links and completely random text.

You'd think one of the richest companies on earth could make a freshman intro to CS-level spam filter. If they can't, then they truly do hire the most incompetent people on earth. If they won't, then they hire the evilest people on earth.