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Comment by rusk | Hacker News Reader

has anyone else noticed a marked decline in the quality of Google search results over the last 12 months? I swear, around about 2011 I thought Google was going to become self aware but it's declined from that high-point to a point where duckduckgo has become a viable alternative for more than just reasons of privacy. Which is a great thing!

Turns out "Don't be Evil" was more than just a feel-good marketing slogan. It may have actually been good for business as well.

Bye bye Google. It really has been great!

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The one that I've noticed getting much worse over the last couple of years is Google (and to a smaller extent DuckDuckGo) removing the least common search term if there aren't thousands of hits. Precise search terms are very valuable for hitting the right results in a pile of unrelated slop and Google is even doing things like returning all Windows results when I search for linux and some CLI app that isn't available for Windows and never was. I can put in full paths out of /sys and Google will happily remove linux and the entry name because I'm only getting 5000 hits. The only thing I can think of is that they're trying to increase the number of ad impressions by having you need to do more searches to find what you're looking for.

I think that summarises what I have been seeing quite nicely. Its like it has lost all sense!

> over the last 12 months

More like since 2014.

I use google search for one thing only these days: product search, when I'm trying to find a local dealer for a product.

For everything else, duckduckgo, which, to be completely honest, is a lot more like the old google from the early 2000s, than the current google.

> More like since 2014

I do remember remarking to somebody around this time that google search had become something of a glorified grep.

You could still get things though. What I meant in this comment is that it has gotten even worse to the point that its almost unusable. It really does remind me of Microsoft of the 00’s.

I think 2014 was the big change into "AI first" for Google. I remember Translate working fine in 2014 in China with the offline pack, and the offline pack was ~220MB. In 2016, the offline pack was ~30MB and nobody understood the translations over there.

I don't know about overall quality of search, but did stack overflow do something to fall out of Google's good graces? I swear unless I specifically include stack overflow in my search query it's either near the bottom or not include at all. Instead it's a whole bunch of articles from independent websites. This is for questions I know fit the bill for stack overflow too. It's almost like Google is artificial lowering their ranking to decentralize the source of knowledge. That or stack overflow lost 70% of readership in 4 months

No repro here.

Google knows I land on StackOverflow results so often that SO results appear near the top, if not the #1 result, for terms that often have nothing to do with programming or computers. I was recently looking for an online thesaurus service and Google showed me an SO post about building linguistic/semantic search algorithms. Hmmm.

This is my experience too, and also in other areas. I have to include "stack overflow" or "forum" keywords to actually find something useful on the first or second page. Example: drone racing discussions.

I've noticed that for far longer than 12 months. Google search results are frequently crap. DuckDuckGo is often better.

But sometimes I dream about building my own search engine. It would avoid the big ad-driven sites as much as possible, and give preferential treatment to obscure blog posts about topics nobody else has written about. I want a search result to show the many different ways it could be interpreted, rather than assume one of them based on whatever heuristic, and show me tons of identical results that aren't what I want.

That’s Google c. 2011

Yes. When I started using DuckDuckGo it was despite Google's search results often being better and every few weeks I used Google for some queries because I simply couldn't find what I was looking for.

Now my last visit to Google is more than a year ago because DDG got better while Google got worse.

> has anyone else noticed a marked decline in the quality of Google search results over the last 12 months?

I noticed this since around 3-4 years ago.

It seems to be based on region.

Quotes get ignored. Even very specific queries about X prioritize clickbait junk like "TOP 10 X!!"

I THINK they might be anti-competitive too; searching for particular Apple APIs is sometimes more miss than hit, though that might be because of Apple's own poor documentation.

However, most Apple-related searches used to show me Samsung crap, and that's definitely not benign. Like searching for "iPhone" literally presented an ad for the Samsung Galaxy at the top, for a while.

> Like searching for "iPhone" literally presented an ad for the Samsung Galaxy at the top, for a while.

That's how ads work. If Samsung pays more money than Apple to show ads to people searching for "iPhone", then people will see Samsung ads.

I'm curious then; would Google list Firefox and other competing services before their own?

Theyd kind of have to if they were being paid to ... whether what they charge FF etc is reasonable would be the question

Would this be considered acceptable if it was a large company doing it to a much smaller company?

i.e. if Samsung was shoving itself into the searches for all non-Apple phones?

well like I say, that depends ... but big players squashing little players is fairly normal in my experience ...

I think this is a combination of SEO exploiting the methods Google used to use to provide good results and personal data based result optimization only being good at certain types of queries...

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