Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattkevan | Hacker News Reader

After switching to DDG few years ago, I used google search again for the first time in a while was surprised How bad their search has become. Not because it’s not good, it’s still better than DDG at certain things, but because the results have been crowded out by so much junk.

There were so many ads, snippets, did you also means, and AMP widgets that there was only room for about eight actual search results.

How have they let their core product get so lost?

View on HN

Google realizes their biggest loss leader is directing customers off of their website to other websites, so the best way to turn a profit is to either keep users on the site (snippets, calculators[0], amp) or to send them to other sites for a price via ads.

0: https://goo.gl/search/right+rectangular+pyramid+calc:+find+A

Except that people will stop using google if it can’t help them find useful information. Google’s leadership seems to not understand or not care about how the internet works

I think it's highly naive to suggest that Google's leadership is operating in complete ignorance of their own product. This is the company of analytics - whatever approach is being taken is probably backed by a gargantuan amount of data.

That doesn't mean it's good for the web, but "what (the most) users want" is Google's strong point. And this is par for the "the internet is now 4 websites" course, so I don't think it's possible to claim that this isn't "how the internet works" anymore.

If they are operating on top of a mountain of data, then they have a problem (what honestly would be good, even too good to believe).

People are not the memoryless automata that statistics handles best. People react positively to a bad change up to a point where they don't anymore, you don't even need to keep changing to trigger this.

I really hope you're right, but who's to say Google might not be one of the few that manages to correctly figure out how far they can go based on their historically unprecedented amount of data? I wouldn't rely on it, either way.

>This is the company of analytics - whatever approach is being taken is probably backed by a gargantuan amount of data.

Take a look outside your window. Have you understood quantum physics yet? No? I guess all of the available data doesn't help you, because it still requires effort and careful observation to glean insights from it.

The same goes for Google. Data by itself does not guarantee anything. You can look at a piece of data and not reach any conclusion, or reach the wrong conclusion. More data does not mean more insight.

In my field (biology) we are suddenly drowning in data - we are producing new datasets much faster than we can analyze them. Our understanding is not increasing at a commensurate pace because we lack the ability to turn these data into useful knowledge.

I don't think it's "what users want" as much as it's "what makes the most money out of the things that we can convince users to want". And "what can we manipulate our engineers into believing about what they are building so that they won't protest".

The thing about data is it only tells you about the past.

The unfortunate truth is that even as I do my level best to use another search engine, DuckDuckGo most recently, I still find myself disappointed and trying the Google results at least half the time.

I still think Google today isn’t as good as Google 10+ years ago, but I don’t think anything is as good as Google 10+ years ago. They don’t have to be flawless, they just have to be better than the rest, and they are. I settle for DuckDuckGo when I can, but when the results matter, I’ll still end up using Google.

Yeah, I'm on DDG but not too infrequently (particularly with news search) I find myself wondering why I can't find what I'm looking for before remembering to try !g and lo and behold Google is able to pull up what I'm looking for.

That might've been true in the past when the internet was still young and there wasn't as much data around to monopolize. Look at the history of the auto industry to see how the development of a new tech industry plays out long term. To be overly reductive, thousands of companies got distilled to GM + Ford (like Google + Facebook).

Data is the most valuable commodity today. The mountain of data and network effects Google has cultivated ensure they will remain on top for the foreseeable future. It's similar to the crazy expensive industrial supply chains that manufacturers in the past leaned on to maintain their market position. No other company (outside maybe Facebook/Amazon) has that kind of a data moat.

food for thought: there used to be 30-40 american car makers, now there are 3.

3 big ones. Tesla and like a dozen smaller ones.

It depends. Most people, only want the answer to the “question” they typed. And if that is answered in a widget, cloaking the original content, they don’t care. That’s what google realized.

Earlier today I wanted to search for info concerning whether a person had to turn in everything they found in the street. Which one returned any relevant results?

Bing: https://www.bing.com/search?q=do+i+have+to+turn+in+everythin...

Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=do+i+have+to+turn+in+everyth...

Wow... that's the single, most impressive thing I've seen supporting the use of Bing over Google...

So, Google better get the right answer every time. Because when they were only pointing to a larger knowledge base, people understood that they should search a bit for their answer, but if they show it on a Google frame, it better be correct.

Funny thing is that I moved to DDG because Google couldn't reliably guess my answers, and I am satisfied with an engine that tries to guess to a much larger extent. This is because DDG guesses are better, and they don't hide the web results so I can fall back to them.

Indeed! I too was slapped with this when I did a recent Google search. I had to wade through a ton of what I’d call “story cards” - I.e. a square around some story Google wanted to highlight. I couldn’t get to the actual results until half way down the page.

Luckily, DuckDuckGo has been improving and now it’s even what I recommend to non-technical people; as I never use “!g” any more.

Really dislike those story cards.

They get in the way of actual results, steal traffic from the sites the content is from and don’t deliver enough information to be useful. Not once has a story card provided what I needed.

Same here but I wanted to add that search is at par 100% on the main search tab. Almost identical but less ads on DDG. Not sure about the images, they seem to just be different images. Google is better at news search. That's the only place I've noticed DDG not being as good at. But DDG is FAR superior as a user experience IMO because of the bangs https://duckduckgo.com/bang

My only issue with DDG (which doesn’t stop me using it) is if you turn off safe search (eg to prevent false positive blocks for something you want to find) holy shit does a lot of porn show up - for completely non-sexual terms.

I’m a big boy, I’m not offended by most of it (the frequency of bizarre Simpson’s porn is a little weird) but it’s somewhat weird the way it appears.

I searched for “power Mac case door”, all fine (with safe search off), as you’d expect. Change “type” to gif, expecting to see images of the hinged door on the g3/g4 series... oh wow that’s a lot of porn. And lots of other weird unrelated stuff.

It seems that "gif" is bound strongly to "animated gif" which is bound more strongly to porn than other image types, possibly due to Tubmlr.

If you just click the image tab, things look fine.

FWIW, when I search for "power Mac case door" on Google, I only get crap above the fold. I have to scroll before I get to the results, scrolling one page only gets me to the first two results.

> “power Mac case door”

I have the same results for animated gifs with safe search off, but I think it’s more because of the presence of “power” or “mac” in so many of these gifs or related pages, compared to the number of gifs of computer related stuff.

Put it another way, I think these are legit results, and not false positives or usurping the search terms.

This is probably why people tend to think google search sucks. It's probably true that most search terms are not going to give you want you want to see. Google disregards the precise terms because they aren't useful to search for, and instead tries to understand the intent of your search.

For nerds, this makes google search suck, because they still construct search queries they way they did in 2000 (that's me too). For most people, it makes google search magically good compared to what they would get from a more "precise" search engine.

Do you find false positives after turning the filter off?

In the example search the first two “pages” of image results (with the adult filter off) have no actual matches for what I wanted - two contain laptops I think.

I have been using startpage.com. I find it even better than ddg. It feels as google used to a few years ago.

Startpage is just anonymized Google search right? Or did I miss a change to their service?

Correct

>You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs.

https://www.startpage.com/

Still has ads -- but a sweet UI. Great find!

I tried DDG in the past for privacy reasons but struggled due to poor results. Recently I switched to DDG because of poor results on Google. On certain controversial subjects, Google seems to how filtered out many results for political or advertiser pressure reasons. Even on non political results, the wrong sorts of sites seems to be pushed to the top.

That is because DDG is not a real search engine, since they do not index the web (at least by the 2019 meaning of the word). Unless you are search in Russian, DDG is basically Bing search results.

Unfortunately if you're a long way from ddg servers it's many seconds longer than Google to load, making it a poor proposition in many parts of the world (southern Africa for example)

I switched to Firefox and use the dedicated search widget with bing as the default. It’s only a couple clicks to repeat a search on google. I’m fairly happy.

Google search has definitely gone down hill IMO because I find bing to be close enough in quality now that I don’t find myself searching on google a lot.

>for about eight actual search results.

judging from what I understand of how people use Google, it looks more than enough.

This is a good reminder for me to switch my default search engine to DDG again.

I try it every few months for a week or so and then switch back to Big G when I find DDG isn't right for the types of searches I need.

I look forward to the day when I forget to switch back to Google.

Same! I just did a test search, and the results seem much more relevant than ~1 year ago (last time I tried)

Just switched thanks to this recommendation. DDG looks very clean and functional. Thank you

Also "people also searched for" (which can be tricky to uBlock), which is about 80% of the reason I prefer DDG these days.

>How have they let their core product get so lost?

Search is not their core product. Google is an advertising company, and everything they do is centered around that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com