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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic - has anyone else noticed that in the last couple years Google results have just become....crap? Like, as a programmer I'm used to googling all sorts of things, but lately it's almost useless. Like, my recent fail was searching for "<class name> C# programming" and......the entire first page had both the class name and C# crossed out and was showing me generic results for programming. Top result was some website offering courses in programming. What the shit Google. I personally think it's the rise of devices like Google Home that's to blame - Google tries to reduce every search query into something that can yield a short snippet that can be read back to you - so it's very aggressive towards highly technical queries that it used to be so good at.

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They seemed to have abandoned the technical user fanbase around 2012 and are now just openly hostile towards them.

Especially on mobile, making it challenging to edit URLs on their latest chrome browser. UX consistency has gone out the window for weird things like like swapping around the tab ordering for searches (check out chicago, chicagos and chicago's here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cm0C1o8VYAgLv2O?format=png)

Other things like not providing custom date ranges on mobile search are just utterly baffling. Booleans are gone, ranges are gone, and it ignores most of the words I put in. I honestly think alta vista results circa 1997 were better than what I'm getting these days. In fact, they most certainly were.

They've also abandoned their namesake "googol" ... they don't seem to care about http, newsgroups or many other things. They should probably rename themselves to "Around300orso"

Google ceased providing functional tools for technical people a while ago. There's some decent open space for another firm to come along (like DDG or perhaps the Microsoft Renaissance) and just snatch the technical user, create compelling products for just that, and own it.

I'd even pay probably $250/yr or so for such a no-bullshit resource stack - a high quality searchable answers-oriented quick-to-use, quick-to-read technical reference without a bunch of wrong information or concrete answers buried in pages of theory. Heck, I'd probably consider dropping $2,000, that sounds amazing.

Have you tried just using DDG? I’ve been using it for years and it’s about as good now (for my searches) as Google used to be.

I should do it more. Maybe exclusively for a week and see how it goes.

I've actually run into Gabriel a few times online and had a bit of conversation with him. Nice guy. Can't really say I've chatted it up with Eric Schmidt...

Once I internalized "just add !g if the results suck" using ddg became practical for me. And I don't know if it's me or ddg actually improves over time but I feel like I'm doing it less and less.

Sometimes Google seems to be better at guessing the context especially if you search for C and some other term that has a bunch of different meanings.

Yeah, it's been months since I tried searching Google for something and the last few times I didn't find anything better than what DDG was giving me.

!g is wonderfully helpful (but not too common for me).

I find it pretty funny that I automatically add !g when the Google results suck as well.

Not the parent, but a stupid reason why I can't use DDG is that it doesn't support IPv6. It's extremely unhelpful when you're doing some IPv6-only testing and then can't search for answers.

As far as I can tell, 6 years ago the reason was that AWS didn't support IPv6[0]. It has for 2.5 years by now though.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180909174057/https://duck.co/f...

That really sounds like a 2 hour fix max on their end; just some user facing dns What am I missing?

They seem to use load balancers, so it indeed should be that easy, unless they haven't migrated to EC2 VPC.

I doubt they have any IP-dependent code, since their main selling point is not tracking anything.

I'm seeing there's some niche cases where it's worse (especially with some extreme quotation-mark-heavy searches) but I've switched a few months ago and never looked back.

The thing is: Most searches aren't even that complicated. Whatever "magic" (read: extra processing power) Google uses is mostly helping for extreme niche cases. The rest they seem to do, nowadays, is "editorializing" results, pushing popular websites before more relevant ones, displaying results from some internal database, etc.

Switched to DDG recently and was pleasantly surprised to find how well it excerpts the top StackOverflow answer for technical questions. Just for this I would it's actually a better option for developers, at least for 95% of your queries.

Custom date ranges on mobile work for me, just use the before: and after: operators. For example before:2018-01-05

The turning point for me was five years ago when they dropped the "Discussions" filter that would search mailing lists and forums. It was amazing for obscure technical and programming issues. Here's an article about it from the time: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-filters-gone-1799...

I am an amateur computer historian, and I can confirm it went from good to shit. For instance, I run an archive at ps-2.kev009.com and there is an oldskool cgi search on my site (Xapian Omega). If you search IBM P/Ns or FRUs on G, versus on my site (for stuff my archive covers), you can see it first hand. My search is exhaustive and it is readily apparent G is not. I don't recall that always being the case, G started to penalize old content, http content, and all kinds of other stuff to the point of oblivion.

This makes me sad, because I will often have very exact queries like a part number and there is content out there on the internet that I cannot locate with search.

I'd love Google to separate "fresh" and "old" into two different search engines. When using a new framework or a version of a language or when searching for news I don't want old results. However, when searching for a part number, old documentation, information about a person I do want old information. Right now it just seems google purges the old instead of building two indexes.

It's better UX to make it a ranking signal from your query or the tools button.

One of the reasons I go to Google is I'm trying to answer a question where I know the subject area but not the answer to the specific question. So I'm asking for a combination of general concepts and a specific thing.

Entirely fictional example: "hacker news comment bold"

And seemingly every time, the specific thing is crossed out. At that point Google search is worse than useless.

I have a few hypotheses:

1) They are trying to turn it into a general directory in their continued war on DNS.

2) The web has got so big that their technology just isn't good enough anymore.

3) The users they care about are no longer people (such as technical or, per sibling comment, academic) who are trying to find specific information. They prefer to focus on mass-market.

Our strongest defence as consumers is to resist the further slide into monopoly.

> 3) The users they care about are no longer people (such as technical or, per sibling comment, academic) who are trying to find specific information. They prefer to focus on mass-market.

This is the only explanation that makes sense. The vast majority of people probably enter questions and queries in natural language so a purely keyword based search is out the window. Why a list of stop words wouldn't cover that I don't know, but let's just assume it doesn't. The second point is that most people also probably hardly ever look for precise information but ask ambiguous stuff that's just hard to properly answer with traditional approaches.

So my guess is that at some point they realized that most queries are of that kind, then shortly discussed keeping two search engines in parallel and finally went with "screw those stupid devs, we're freaking Google!"

Can you put a comment in bold in hacker news?

In the fictitious story, I never found out!

Don't forget about the massive amnesia Google has - try searching for anything over a few years old.

And gods help you if you are looking for something both old and by keyword, because Google sure won't.

Unfortunately, DDG has a lot of the same issues - which is a shame, as if they just used Google's algorithm of a decade ago I'd switch in a heartbeat.

It has been becoming crap a long time now. In the past few years i just need to include, well, everything in quotes just to get somewhat relevant results instead of very generic ones. For me it began with their removal of the + search operator (to boost google+ organic traffic from google). Also removal of boolean operators. Also very, very aggressive typo fixing (i meant "Brose Wollis" not "Bruce Wills" god damn it). I think that google home is just the latest thing that furthers googles' exclusive catering to the lowest common denominator - the people who use google as DNS and fail to do even that. I guess there's not that much of ad revenue from power users.

> For me it began with their removal of the + search operator (to boost google+ organic traffic from google).

Google say they removed it because most searches that included a plus operator were using it wrong.

https://search.googleblog.com/2011/11/search-using-your-term...

> In most cases, Google’s algorithms make things better for our users - but in some rare cases, we don’t find what you were looking for. In the past, we provided users with the “+” operator to help you search for specific terms. However, we found that users typed the “+” operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly. A couple of weeks ago we removed the “+” operator, encouraging the use of the double quotes, which are more likely to be used correctly.

I'd be intersted to know how often the "quotes" are used correctly.

0,5% of the queries used "+" so they removed it? Feels like a dogmatic "data driven" UX change for the sake of change. The interesting number would be how much it was used when the first queries failed and gave to much answers.

"We removed the seatbelts because we found they were used in less than 0.5% of car journeys."

So, I'm not saying I agree with Google here. I'm just providing links to google information about why they said they removed it.

That's my biggest frustration, when I search for "X Y" and they return me results without "Y" at all, and even call that out in the results.

I end up having to put everything in double quotes just to get results that I'd expect.

"I" "miss" "the" "times" "when" "I" "didn't" "have" "to" "type" "like" "this".

I also find that annoying. I wonder if it started because Google favour "fresh" content, and so people keep changing the content of their pages and Google keeps that page even when Y has been removed. Here's MattCutts from 10 years ago saying this is sometimes useful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902999#904784

> Your "Red Room" query is hard in a couple ways. First, it looks like that root page used to have the words on the page: "The Red Room Doors open 6pm $18 Pre-Booked" And it's also tough because it looks like the name changed to the "2nd Degree Bar & Grill" at some point. The fact that you can type [red room] and get a suggestion for [red room st. lucia] is actually pretty helpful in my book because it leads you to the answer that the name changed.

Can't believe how dumb it is. Imagine a surgeon asking an assistant for a specific type of scalpel, and that assistant bringing an assortment of scalpels.. "I specifically specified X scalpel, god damn it!".

I switched to DDG a while ago, and sometimes hit Google, usually with poor results. Aside from getting no results, I'm getting results that have little or nothing to do with what I was looking for.

At first, I thought my search skills had evaporated, but I realized Google has become little more than a digital flea market. Even Yandex is better in many regards than Google.

I particularly love it when the results are terrible, and then you notice that below them it say something like “include <search term>?”.

Why not just search for what I typed? It has gone backwards.

Have you tried using verbatim mode? I have that as my default search mode in Firefox, and it always searches for your exact phrase, spelling mistakes and all.

Still has its problems, but better than the default search mode.

No, I had no idea this was a thing. Will have to try it out.

To me, it looks like they introduced bloom filters to pre-filter their indexing. Basically, they run an offline job to create a list of the top 1 mio search keywords and hash them into a compact bitfield. That one is sent to all the crawlers, who will then only index the keywords that have hashes matching the bitfield. It's a standard way to reduce the amount of data that you need to process, and since search keyword revenue is likely exponentially distributed, they would lose almost no revenue by cutting off the 1mio +1th keyword, but greatly reduce their costs.

As for the sentence search, it appears to me that they are using stemmed shingles. For that, you reduce words to their base form (houses -> house) and then you chop the page down into every 3-pair of words and hash those. The hashed number for 3 words is then called one shingle. Again, that's a common technique for content similarity detection, so Google kind of has to do that anyway to spot verbatim copycats. One can then also use this for sentence search by searching for all the shingles in the search query, but that introduces ambiguity. For example "cats singing in front of the house" would likely have the same shingles as "cat sang about front before houses", as only "cat sing front house" are being indexed. The issue here is that "front" can be used both in a positional way, as well as for a military formation.

To me, both of these look like side-effects of them reducing operational costs. I mean, who would bid marketing dollars on "ISpatialAudioClient::GetMaxDynamicObjectCount" ? Given that you will likely tolerate 2-3 complete search failures before trying Bing, the business value of completing such a query correctly is very close to 0.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has a stronger interest in people finding MS APIs, which is why you will find this result on Bing https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/55776-software-to-s... but not on Google.

Your link is the 3rd result in Google.

I have to put everything in quotation makes now or it gives me a result loosely related to the specific thing I wanted. It takes me like four searches to actually get the result I wanted. Drives me nuts.

No, the results have been consistently great.

Whenever I see someone using DDG as a default they always turn to Google for more complex queries.

It might be that Google hat lost focus of a few search niches where results used to be better.

I tried your search, all results are about C# classes, generics etc.

That's the other thing - I've seen it being completely useless for me and then my coworker does the same search and it's fine for him, or vice versa. I imagine Google builds a profile of what it thinks you'd like to see and modifies your search query accordingly.

For this example in incognito mode without me logged in, results are similar, no problems. It is normal that it for changes results depending on user profile. Do you have other examples?

I get this a lot when searching for exception messages, or for information on how to implement something. It is getting increasingly harder to find the signal in the noise.

Actually this is a well known change to significant term relevancy. You need to double quote words to force inclusion in results. I'm not saying it was a good change.

It’s on-topic for my other tweet: https://twitter.com/liron/status/1137729277359734786

Anecdotally 100% experiencing this almost what feels like daily.

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