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Comment by culot | Hacker News Reader

Just recently all of the search projects seem to have gotten significantly worse. Image search has been crippled with removal of the size options. Web search seems like a parody or cheap imitation anymore, presenting even worse result than usual, and instead of being able to customize the search to fix that, you end up with Bing-like results giving you crap you explicitly tried to exclude.

Then there's all those silly, frivolous overly-rounded corners mucking up the GUI.

On the up side: I do look forward to competitors stepping forward to fill the space that Google used to fill. That is inevitable.

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Whenever I try to search for anything now on Google I get the same article 20 times from different news outlets, but no substance to find the source of what the articles are talking about.

Duck keeps improving since I ditched GSearch. Duck feels more like the old Google, the one I used for almost 20 years, the authoritative search engine.

Now when I hit a GSearch SERP (when in Chrome for a moment testing something), it feels like spam, and I close it faster than a Pinterest tab.

> Duck feels more like the old Google, the one I used for 20 years

That is the whole point, old Google was easy to replicate and therefore didn't cement their market position, if they still had that then why not just switch to Bing or DDG? New Google requires thousands of top level experts to tune and test things until it gives sensible results to stupid queries and is therefore impossible to compete with.

Unfortunately it also sometimes gives stupid answers to sensible queries but Google removed most knobs that let power users tune results. Instead they should leverage that expertise to better inform non-tweaked queries and results.

I agree, but lately I've noticed that DDG's results have been trending in the same direction. Maybe I'm just imagining things? (To be clear, I still find it generally better than Google for day-to-day search.)

I long for the return of an Altavista-like "dumb" search engine with proper "hard" boolean support. My brain is hardwired to think that way and I strongly prefer it. I understand that this wouldn't be useful for everyone, but I don't care. How on earth does it make sense to have only one kind of search engine for all of humanity.

I could imagine that the future of search engines is more specialization in different topics. As the content in the web keeps growing it only makes sense to only "search in a specific corner".

Maybe it's a good time to be innovative here..

It makes sense because a search engine is a vastly expensive thing to run, there aren't enough users like you to be interesting to advertisers, and you aren't willing to pay the huge sums it would require to make such a niche (useless) search engine sustainable.

>presenting even worse result than usual, and instead of being able to customize the search to fix that, you end up with Bing-like results giving you crap you explicitly tried to exclude.

Is this some side effect from user-tailored search experience, for me personally Google still gives better results than eg DGG or Bing.

Can you give an example of better results? I've been using DDG exclusively for many years and have never failed to find the thing I'm searching for on the first page of results. What am I missing?

> Image search has been crippled with removal of the size options

One quick tip: you can still access the old image size options on the Advanced Search

Google web search' aim is to give most relevant results to the Uncle Joe who is obviously bad in choosing keywords.

* google web search’s aim is to maximize ad revenue while retaining users

Sure, but as we talk about usability and user experience, the point is Google is good in retaining users. Geeks aren't target audience for Google web search as well as for any other really big internet service.

Google Search needs to add an “advanced” mode or something. I’m sure their changes are increasing accessibility for most people, but the power user experience has definitely gone down.

On the other hand, there’s no profit motive there, so why would executives sign off on that.

https://www.google.com/advanced_search

Search is a perpetual battle between the ranker and the content servers trying to game it. I'd agree that over the last two years the 'SEO' gamers have been outplaying Google.

> I'd agree that over the last two years the 'SEO' gamers have been outplaying Google.

I agree 100%. Sometimes though it feels like the Web itself is deteriorating as the bulk of new Internet users increasingly only care about a handful of social media platforms. Where's the "sources of truth" about website quality when we need them? We used to have DMOZ/ODP providing something like that, it had a lot of problems but by and large it worked. But now DMOZ is dead, and there's nothing as of yet to replace it.

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