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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Every now and then I search for something and don't get the results I'd expect. So I turn to Google, but for the past year or so I noticed that Google can't find what I expect for those search terms either. The difference seems to be that Google starts guessing and excluding keywords, without understanding that those keywords where important.

For me personally, Google is a less pleasant experience these days.

The DuckDuckGo privacy extension is currently the only type of "ad-blocker" I currently use. I really like the look and feel, as well as the functionality. The automatic downgrade from an A rating for the lack of an entry on https://tosdr.org/ is a little over the top for me though.

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THANK YOU. I feel crazy when I tell people this but I 100% agree. Google seems to look at your search as a general guide now rather than actual parameters. I also have to surround each word in quotes or they get excluded on the SECOND OR THIRD RESULT.

I'm very upset because this hinders my daily work and research. I'm starting to rely on Bing which is definitely worse than old Google but may be better than current Google.

I want to like DDG but it's normally missing article dates or other small features I depend on. I'll keep checking in to see if this changes.

Agreed. Feels nice to know others have the same problems.

ha, a few weeks back a very similar post came up and i expressed that i felt the DDG results were letting me down. I just actually switched back to Google yesterday, i tried hard, but it just got too annoying having to search for 50% of things twice.

Is there any possible way the old google could be resurrected? By google themselves or just someone cloning the tech? My google-fu keeps getting worse, on pages I know I've found handily in the past. I'd almost pay for a good search, cash or personal data or whatever.

Google offers the verbatim mode (search for exact words of phrases) which you can activate in tools or by adding the tbs=li:1 parameter to the URL.

I've always used that, but it annoys me that verbatim can't be combined with e.g. restricting the date on a search, because both use the 'tbh' parameter.

That annoys me too, I tried with lite.qwant.com but their exact match operator annoys me, as I have a spanish keyboard.

Results are decent but I just hate that.

I know this could be overcome by me being less lazy, but my favorite thing about Google is the results I get without ever having to click a link. This is especially true for searching things like TV shows, actors/directors, athletes, etc. It's just great UX.

I tried to switch to DDG on mobile recently (using the Brave browser) and I found myself really missing those inline results.

Try https://startpage.com They pay Google to proxy their generic non personalized results.

Some people are going to ask "How does Startpage make its money?" and fortunately they've put that info in their Privacy Policy:

  Our search result pages may include a small number of 
  clearly labeled "sponsored links", which generate revenue
  and cover our operational costs. Those links are retrieved
  from platforms such as Google Adwords. In order to enable
  the prevention of click fraud, some non-identifying system
  information is shared, but because we never share personal
  information or information that could uniquely identify 
  you, the ads we display are not connected to any 
  individual user."

For those on mobile:

> Our search result pages may include a small number of clearly labeled "sponsored links", which generate revenue and cover our operational costs. Those links are retrieved from platforms such as Google Adwords. In order to enable the prevention of click fraud, some non-identifying system information is shared, but because we never share personal information or information that could uniquely identify you, the ads we display are not connected to any individual user."

this always seemed like the right kind of trade-off - the sponsored links are generated from the search terms, not the 'personalised' search_terms+surveilled_data blob. if this is _all_ that Google the search engine did, I probably wouldn't have switched.

> The difference seems to be that Google starts guessing and excluding keywords, without understanding that those keywords where important.

I still find this weird because it's the exact opposite for me. I've posted this here several times, but to say it again: Everytime I use google, they honor all my forced terms. DDG, as soon as they don't have a lot of results, says "As we can't show you a lot of results, we decided you want something completely unrelated instead. Have fun."

Google also shows you which terms they excluded, DDG quietly drops them.

I like DDG, but when they made that change, it made me use !g more often.

edit: Because people tend to downvote me when I say this, here are examples:

Query: google "amp" modal

DDG: Google Maps SO issue, Google Sheets landing page, more google maps results. Only 7 is related by simply showing the AMP homepage.

Google: Only google amp results related to "modals" in some way.

And yes, the results google shows are actually in DDGs index, it's just that they decided they know what I want even though I forced the amp term.

Google has gone from incredible to shitty over last few years. When I am looking for specific things, Google will most often present me with links to big websites. This happens most with medical searching like when I tried to find if low body temperature is somehow related to depression. Google showed me completely irrelevant links from WebMD, nhs etc. I had to go to page 4 to find some links to forums where people were discussing about it.

I've found myself using double quotes more often now than ever before. Google just doesn't seem to understand what I'm looking for.

The growth of content marketing has ruined Google search results.

Doesn't DDG also exclude keywords it doesn't think are important? And it doesn't have a "missing `keyword`" warning below the results either, as imperfect as that was.

Ex: `libwacom huion gaomon`, missing libwacom in first result.

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