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Comment by jhanschoo | Hacker News Reader

> Google's purpose seems to have changed from helping people find the most useful information, to funelling people to information that Google wants them to find on a particular topic

This statement needs examples to stand.

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Normally I only use Google, but I've also experienced this. In contrast with a few years ago, more recently Google gave me such bullshit that I was like, "Just give me the pages that have these keywords, this is so obvious" and I went to duckduckgo.com. There, with literally the exact same query, every one of the top links was relevant and had my search terms. On Google none of the first page of links had what I searched for. This certainly supports "they show me what they want me to see", rather than what I asked for.

On the flip side, I still find Google useful and I must say that I often am happy to read what they decide to give me: even if it's not what I searched for.

I've done searches on Google with 3-4 words and the results given back had excluded all but one word. The "not on page" results are usually pretty infuriating since that's what I am looking for

Those aren't "examples". Can you be specific?

If you haven’t run into this I submit you don’t use google much.

It’s infuriating

It is impossible for me to give you a search term that will be garunteed to show you this effect. Google tailors every search to each person too much.

It ends up feeling like you've been gas lit by Google when you report one situation and no one else can see it

Add double quotes around the words, works like the old +word syntax.

(I don't work on Search, but use it a lot :))

Quotes or pluses stopped working a while ago.

Even "Verbatim" isn't actually verbatim.

I am amused that people are only now realizing just how awful Google has got compared to 2000s.

That's simply not true. Quotes superseded pluses and they definitely still work and it's trivial to demonstrate.

"mainframe" "kubernetes" vs mainframe kubernetes

https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en&fg=1

agree on ‘not on page’ then why are you showing this!? facepalm

Stratechery has a great article about how Google chooses to show their local results over more useful results from its competitors:

https://stratechery.com/2018/the-bill-gates-line/

The relevant explainer video: https://youtu.be/k9UqqmIJW4g

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