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Comment by scoutt | Hacker News Reader

Google has become more and more useless lately, at least if you are searching for specific tech info and not "10 weird hacks to". For example, I've been doing lately some Android AOSP and BSP customization for a custom board. To get useful information and avoid "top 10 Android tricks" and Android hacking/cracking forums I often end up with a query composed of 10% search terms and 90% filters.

Or if you do a search for name surname it may return results for "name" with "missing: surname". That is, how on earth if I search about (for example) Peter Petrelli a result about Peter Thiel would be the same thing? That's a full 50% of my search query that Google is discarding...

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Agreed, the results with the "missing" flag are the worst. I can abide synonymous substitutions, for instance if I search for "interesting articles" and the results include "fascinating", "intriguing", etc. But it is boneheaded to serve up results that completely ignore one of or more search terms.

I increasingly suspect that Google is entering the lengthy death-by-design-by-committee phase that will ultimately unseat them as the top player in their space.

> But it is boneheaded to serve up results that completely ignore one of or more search terms.

Then you've never worked on a search engine. There's a real bias in the comments here because the way technical people search for technical topics is dramatically different from the way the general audience uses a search engine. Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Requiring exact match for every term in a query would vastly reduce usability.

No major search engine has worked that way since the 90s, I don't know why this is suddenly becoming a narrative on this site now.

>> I can abide synonymous substitutions, for instance if I search for "interesting articles" and the results include "fascinating", "intriguing", etc. But it is boneheaded to serve up results that completely ignore one of or more search terms.

> Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Requiring exact match for every term in a query would vastly reduce usability.

He wasn't talking about that, and actually said he was fine with synonyms (and I would assume stemming, etc).

His problem was Google flat-out ignoring some of his search terms, thus giving irrelevant results. I don't have examples handy, but I'm under the impression that Google often ignores some of the more relevant terms in my queries to give me more popular results.

Which is ironic since most pre-Google search engines defaulted to OR'ing terms together, and one of Google's innovations was to switch to defaulting to AND. Now they seem to be revisiting the mistake of their competitors and wandering back to something like default-OR.

now I have to control F a term to visually ignore results without my term.

what is really amazing is how bad youtube search is. I can search for the exact name of a video, and it wont show up in the results. many times I have to use google search to search youtube

> dramatically different from the way the general audience uses a search engine

How many people have you actually talked to? Over the last few months I've had more than a few non-tech friends/family/etc complain to me about Google's broken search results, often asking if I knew of a way to fix it. The "missing: <query_term>" behavior is particularly enraging: I've seen multiple people yell at Google's search results variations of "F* you, Google! Stop telling me how you're ignoring half of my search!"

> Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search.

Most people have a wide variety of behaviors that cannot (and shouldn't) be reduced into s single group. That said, a lot of people have learned to use Google in ways that work for them, even if it sometimes seems inefficient or unusual to those of use used to using query languages. Assuming you know what they "meant to ask" is often wrong and usually considered offensive. Priding tools people can choose to use is great; attempting to DWIM[1] - interpreting what the user intended instead of what they said - has been a terrible idea that ruins tools even since it was first attempted >50 years ago at Xerox PARC[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15628014

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM#Software

Yeah, Google has steadily become more and more infuriating to use to answer questions that aren't already answered on Stack Overflow. If they're going to use NLP, how about they use NLP to prioritize things that aren't exactly like the 10 or 15 results pages which give a 10 year old solution to my problem or which are written for an esoteric package and not the one I'm mentioning in my search results?

They're probably running web queries through the same or similar NLP engine as the Google Home and Android voice query to stress test it with additional input. That roughly coincides with the time frame that results have gotten worse.

> No major search engine has worked that way since the 90s, I don't know why this is suddenly becoming a narrative on this site now.

I understand the idea, but you are wrong or at least not completely right (I can't speak for all markets).

I know someone who learned to spell as a kid using Google, because if he didn't spell the words correctly he wouldn't get to see pictures of the moon or whatever he wanted to see.

Also after they learned to guess what people meant, Google used to be able to respect +, "" and also the verbatim option hidden beneath a button.

For a while they would also ask politely: did you mean x?

Since then it has become worse and worse: silently rewriting, fuzzing without asking etc.

Normies ruined search engines.

No, really. Especially if Google is using search queries and clicks to update ML models - non technical people "pollute" the algorithms with poorly formed queries and overwhelming numbers of clicks on non technical articles.

There's probably enough of a niche now for a genuine technical search engine. Which treats keywords like Google used to, maybe with some regex thrown in and what not. None of this full question nonsense.

I personally believe that allowing people to search with full queries has had a negative effect on society - very little critical thought goes into which parts of your question are actually important, and searching is no longer a learnable skill; just ask a literal question and let Google do all the thinking for you.

It is an interesting viewpoint. One of the advantages of Twitter is that people can weight, or Twitter itself can weight who is posting and sharing that information. For instance, if Fred Wilson writes something about startups or VC, I generally find it interesting, if he writes about public markets, I largely ignore it. Originally, page rank probably solved quality of the source well enough, but as more interesting content is appearing in podcasts or niche, subscription blogs, does the approach need to be drastically different? What I mean is rather than Google's algorithm likely boosting the popularly clicked and shared post, "10 Things I learned as a VC Intern", should Google's ML algorithm weight that click based on the expertise of the search user or subject matter density, etc.? Like should Linus Torvalds clicking on a link be given far more importance on a technical/software related query than myself?

So, ClickRank? Makes sense to me.

Or at least, rather than factoring in the expertise of the clicker, factor in the similarity of the clicker to the new searcher, so as to predict the new searcher's behaviour.

Having never worked on a search engine myself I will avoid guessing as to why Google's results are the way they are. As a search engine user I noticed Google's results seem to be less useful than they were before. After a particularly poor series of results I tried DuckDuckGo and found the results better. It seems similar to when I switched to Google from MetaCrawler. Whatever the reasons I just want to find what I'm looking for.

It's not sudden.

We can see the start when HN complained when Google removed + and said use "" instead.

And then went on to ignore both that as well as the verbatim option and serve up stupid results despite our carefully crafted query strings.

I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago and I can repeat it: if they pay my tickets and a fair price I'll be happy to hold my course "how to continue being best by not nerfing your market leading product".

Personally I gave up last year and I'm now on DDG. Not perfect but less annoying.

I've gone over almost completely to DDG as well, for at least the last few years, but have noticed that DDG has been ignoring required terms more often lately. But they're still better than Alphagoog.

DDG has a feedback mechanism (the almost invisible "Send Feedback" thing in the lower right corner), but I'm unsure if anyone there actually sees the feedback and cares enough to do anything about it -- as I said, the problem is getting worse over time.

And while I'm on my soapbox, I'm going to continue complaining about having to use quote pairs instead of + for required terms. That still _really_ grinds my gears.

Sadly, I've been seeing similar behavior from DDG lately. In some cases it's been even worse than Google. I really wish there was a search engine optimized for technical work.

Having a list of stopwords is different from discarding half the query.

Yes, most search engines have ignored commonly-used words since at least the late 90s. But Google only started doing its idiotic "Missing: [key word from your search]" fairly recently. And it's a step back.

Although I personally don't think this is the case, it's something that's going to provide ammunition to the conspiracy theorists who'll swear they're just doing it to drive clicks to pages with Google ads.

Yes, I caught on to that change with Google a long while back (when they started removing useful search modifiers).

The problem is that Google can't even get the right search results with natural-language sentences or sentence fragments.

So is there another search engine for techies?

Just today I had to ask Google Scholar for a lot of things since Google itself was completely useless. So it's not like it can't be done. Maybe that's the way going forward, one general search for grandma and specialized search engines for everyone else.

Even for non-technical searches, Google is becoming increasingly worthless.

I think a lot of it is about giving too much weight to (its flawed) geolocation.

Last night I searched for "Vintage computer store $location" while I was in $location. All I got back was Best Buy locations, eBay listings, irrelevant Yelp lists, and local newspaper articles about computers in general.

Today I'm in a different place, but performed the identical search, including the $location where I was last night, and guess what -- helpful results!

Google is trying too hard to be Yelp, and not hard enough to be a search engine.

I barely think of Google as a search engine for the web anymore. Modern Google is more like an "ask a commonly asked question and get an answer" engine.

My problem with this is that the usefulness of web searching seems to have been sacrificed in order to be good at answering the common questions. It's great if I have a question a bunch of other people have asked too, not so good if I'm looking for anything more than that.

It's great if you want a major brand, shopping site, or easily answered question that wikipedia and sport sites can answer. Which has been the direction they've been going in for years with updates to prioritise brands, recency and frequency of update etc. Add in the search bubble from your history, and "Google knows best" including also words and considering even quoted terms optional. Not much search engine left.

Course it makes it ever more useless for the difficult, the rare and the old. The personal homepage, blog, or random site with the best knowledge on something esoteric almost never shows any more.

Bing isn't much better, DDG became best - it's certainly not worse any more - almost by default.

What's interesting re: getting better results is how much my own behavior has changed in response to how Google behaves now.

In 2006 I would never search "how do I ___", "what is ___", because "how", "what", etc. were just noise, and sites weren't formatted as a question/FAQ like that. I knew to use a series of keywords to find pages that contain the content I was looking for.

I wonder too how much the decline of personal homepages, blogs, random sites, etc. has to do with how much harder it has become to find them in Google.

A very, very large percentage of searches are for local locations, which is why you see these cards and 'answers' as your result. Most of the time it's what people want.

> Most of the time it's what people want.

It really sucks being a frequent traveller, and frequent VPN user and having to REALLY go out of my way just to get some useful default behavior.

VPNing through Iceland and now all the Google Flights prices are priced in Icelandic Kroner and not even a clear dropdown to change this preference. Try the URL hack to change the currency code in the get parameters and MAYBE get what I want.

There are so many ways to detect this and assume this preference, and they opt for the most debilitating one. Many services are following this trend, all because of blindly following some A/B test iteration.

Add the human sense back into it.

And god forbid the VPN server you used was used by someone else doing something odd, welcome to CAPTCHA HELL! Where we make all the assumptions about what you want until search is no longer useful for you, but don't let you access search at all by assuming you the current user are the problem based on IP address alone!

Sorry, but you’re an edge case. I wouldn’t expect everything to work perfectly when you’re VPN’ing thru different countries.

Only an edge case because:

There are more and more reasons to VPN through different countries.

There are more and more teams using A/B tests and completely removing the human element from their UX design process.

A human would say "hey it makes sense to have a currency picker here, thats super easy since we already have this on the backend"

The A/B test says "hey nobody taps the currency picker so therefore it must be REDUCING your engagement" When its really completely unrelated.

This was actually solved for languages long ago through NavigatorLanguage but now we've regressed to stupid IP based country lookups.

I wonder if NavigatorCurrency.currency should be a thing!

Today I searched for a phrase including the word “Swedish”. First result was an article that contained the word “German”, which Google had helpfully bolded in the excerpt, as Swedish and German are basically the same thing I guess?

I guess you're lucky they didn't return a page about Robert Bork where the surname was repeated two times.

sounds like they're allowing substitutions based on their word2vec stuff. and doing it a little too liberally

I installed a browser extension that adds a blocklist to google's search results. So every time I visit a '10 wierd hacks to...' type of page I block the entire domain from ever showing up in my results again. It take a while to filter them all out, but it drastically increased my search experience. Anyways I use duck duck go nowadays so now my plugin is irrelevant...

Which extension are you using? Personal Blocklist broke for me a while back, and now my days are filled with scrolling past w3schools.com to get to developer.mozilla.org

A duck duck go search of something like

<what I'm looking up> javascript mdn

give me developer.mozilla.org at the top every time. It's somehow better than site:developer.mozilla.org for some weird reason.

Just put !mdn in your DDG search and it will take you right to MDN. Same with !g for Google, !w for Wikipedia, etc.

In Firefox, right-click the search box at developer.mozilla.org and select "Add a Keyword for this search". Put a keyword, something like m.

Then you don't even need a search engine. Just type

  m your search term here

in the URL bar to search the site directly.

Wow! That's wicked cool- thanks for the tip!

EDIT: I'll add for others that this keyword is stored as a bookmark, so you can find it in your bookmarks and edit/delete/etc.

!mdn uses mdn's search and returns their results, but I actually prefer ddg's. And using only mdn has the side-benefit of including relevant SO results (and others) lower on the front page sometimes.

Anecdotally, so many of us do exactly that scroll.

It must be millions of us, but apparently not enough for Google to decide MDN > w3schools.

Tyranny of the majority I guess.

Same here. There's still times where a !g actually improves the results but usually duckduckgo's results are fine.

Google used to have that function. But it was very useful, so of course they removed it.

I wish there were a way to exchange that block lists between the users of this extension.

This may be a controversial opinion, but it also seems that Google's (intentional or unintentional) biases are severely hobbling results. Unpopular political opinions and non-mainstream narratives are increasingly de-ranked. I get a sense that naive individuals at Google are applying their world views when training algorithms to weight results based on content.

This didn't used to be the case. It used to be, if I searched for it, I could find it, no matter how popular or controversial it was. I used to live in China and it reminds me of how Baidu works.

This is an interesting one because we’re also seeing an increase in propaganda and misinformation being propagated online by some pretty resourceful players. Doing absolutely no curation can also have some pretty significant consequences.

The mainstream narrative has always been propaganda. This is not new. The powers that be are not happy that propaganda other than their own is slipping through.

> Unpopular political opinions and non-mainstream narratives are increasingly de-ranked.

Citation? Examples?

I'd really like to see this tested somehow, because I have friends along the political spectrum that complain of the same thing. I'm not sure how google is somehow hindering results for left, right and middle.

I think they mean that when they search 'donald trump news' they have a set of results in their mind they expect to see, and Google gives them back something different.

That's a really hard issue to solve...

Can you remember any of your queries? I'm happy to pass them along to debug. If you have your search history turned on you can find them here: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?product=19

One example that continuously irks me that recently started happening is if I search for "python list index" (without the quotes) the official reference material is ranked 7th. I don't need a tutorial or a second hand source, I need the information I'm looking for which is in the official python documentation. Not on programiz, or tutorialspoint (twice), or w3schools, or geeks4geeks.

Thanks!

This is a UX issue, not a technical one. Google doesn't want people abandoning the site if they see zero results for their searches. So if a particularly obscure search doesn't bring up anything, Google will show you some results it thinks is close.

I find the message "missing: [term]" more helpful than not. Anytime I see that, I don't click the link. That sends a small signal to Google (compounding with the scale of search queries) that their #1 link isn't what the user was looking for.

That would make sense if the bad search results were limited to searches that have few results. But Google's results are suboptimal for all searches.

My biggest problem with Google search these days is their recent push towards localized results.

I speak two languages, english and german. I set my search preferences accordingly and expect the results within those languages to be ranked by their actual quality. However it seems Google favors results in my local (german) language, which often don't appear to be the best results if both languages were weighted equally.

Particularly when searching for "{popular game/album/film} review" I perceive the returned results as subpar, simply because my local media landscape doesn't seem as thorough, high-quality and in-depth to me.

google.com will give you German ranking from Germany. You can still workaround that with google.com/ncr. The results are night and day for programming related questions. I've heard a while ago that they want to deprecate ncr though.

Personally I use Google only for local searches and DuckDuckGo for almost everything else. Works well for me.

Search isn't a Google product anymore, it's a learning tool like reCaptcha. Sure, the ads at the top of your search results are a product, but the real value of search is that they can capture everything you do to learn more about you. So every time you refine your search and try again, they learn a little bit more about what you're interested in, or what you're doing, and maybe what you're working on for your job, and advertisers will throw money at them to get the "better" information for targeting. Search is just the latest casualty of the war for your attention online.

Googlebombs have "been a thing" for 20 years...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

"Google bombs date back as far as 1999, when a search for "more evil than Satan himself" resulted in the Microsoft homepage as the top result.

In September 2000 the first Google bomb with a verifiable creator was created by Hugedisk Men's Magazine, a now-defunct online humor magazine, when it linked the text "dumb motherfucker" to a site selling George W. Bush-related merchandise."

I just put quotes in half my queries these days.

A hilarious example of this last week; searching 'email CTR' brought up pages with email/center... Google of all companies should care about CTR!

Maybe you didn't mean literally but for me it doesn't show me anything about Peter Thiel.

Yeah the listicle type results have really started to increase in search relevance for me. ESPECIALLY when I search on mobile. I think mobile Google Search is a truly awful experience with an extremely cluttered results page that I can never properly navigate.

Google is becoming a service that no longer performs searches and instead attempts to project reality back at me based on a keyword cue. This is how the AI takes over society.

The quality has definitely gone down. It seems a lot of sites that play the SEO game heavily have floated to the top and far fewer smaller sites with quality content show up.

I've been using Qwant as a search engine, so far its much more palatable than others I've tried (like DuckDuckGo).

I'm working on a project that involves the bsp too. If you found any great resources I'd really appreciate a link.

Is google becoming useless or the majority of the content people are putting on the web is useless?

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