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Comment by body12 | Hacker News Reader

Google Search has gotten worse in the past few years in my opinion. It seems biased towards newly published content and content from the top 100 sites or so. Before it felt like you were grepping the internet, but now it feels like you're at an airport newsstand. It will frequently re-write your queries for you if you are searching for uncommon things, and putting it in quotes doesn't always fix it.

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Have you seen Google Image search recently? They have updated it such that when you click on an image to select/expand in view, the selection is now presented in the top right hand side of the page. But the selection is not floating with your scrolling - so selecting anything below the fold means you end up scrolling back and forth between the top of the page and your previous position. Honestly not sure why they changed it. Terrible.

Using image search on mobile is a truly a painful experience

I've stopped using Google for searching for various generic terms and instead search nearly everything as site:reddit.com 2019 "search term".

Sometimes I get mildly useful information that stands out from the page after page of pagerank gamed garbage.

Now, searching reddit.com for solutions has other issues (notably using Reddit on iOS via Safari, is, as of 9/2019, almost entirely impossible), but that's where I'm at currently.

There are many searches that have so much SEO optimized crap content in the results that it is impossible to find any actually useful content.

Yes, they changed how search works - try using "google verbatim" for the old behavior.

The worst is the blog spam that reaches the top of Google's search results.

I don't think it's a coincidence that those poor quality results are given precedence when they also happen to be littered with, and optimized for, Adsense ads.

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