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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

If they're gonna push their silly instant answers, they'd better make sure the results are correct...

Google Search so aggressively massages my queries that it's become almost unusable.

I recently searched "80's rom-coms" and an instant answer came up on top. It was a list of 90's rom-coms. Similar, yes -- but not at all what I typed, and completely useless to me.

I'm glad it's not just me.

bing seems to get this right in both instant search and otherwise.

I'm slowly switching to Bing--not because Bing is getting better, but because Google is getting worse. Google consistently ignores key terms in my queries, and searches are getting slower and slower. Remember when Google used to have that little timer in the top-right corner of the search results? Not anymore...

That’s just general search. When looking for code issues and snippets it’s worse

Don’t even get me started with github. Half of humanity’s code seems to be in some bucket that doesn’t understand punctuation when you search

If you look at my post history, at some point I used google to determine the average words spoken per day. I initially trusted Google's answer indicating women speak 2 to 3 times as many words per day on average as men (which is not true).

A quick Google search on my phone for "average number of words spoken per day" gives similar results right now. Although the text starts with an ambitious sounding phrase "previous research" it ends in present tense and has 7000 in bold for men and 20,000 in bold for women.

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