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Comment by creato | Hacker News Reader

> I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore.

> It kills my curiosity and intent with fake knowledge and bad experience. I need something better.

It's hard for me to take this seriously when wikipedia exists, and almost always ranks very highly in search results for searches for "knowledge topics". Between wikipedia and sources cited on wikipedia, I find the depth of almost everything worth learning about to be far greater than I can remember in, say, the early 2000s, which is seems like the "peak" of google before SEO became so influential.

In general, I think there are a lot of people wearing rose tinted glasses looking at the "old internet" in this thread. The only thing that has maybe gotten worse is "commercial" queries like those for products and services. Everything else is leaps and bounds better.

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There is a lot of stuff you won't find on wikipedia that is now buried, one example being old forum threads containing sage wisdom from fellow enthusiasts on any given topic. You search for an interest and a half dozen relevant forums used to come up on page 1.

These days I rarely see a forum result appear unless I know the specific name of the forum to begin with and utilize the search by site domain operator.

Another problem these days, unrelated to search but dooming it in the process, is all these companies naming themselves or their products after irrelevant existing english words, rather than making up something unique. It's usually fine with major companies, but I think a lot of smaller companies/products shoot themselves in the foot with this and don't realize it. I was once looking for some good discussion and comparison on a bibliography tool called Papers, and that was just a pit of suffering getting anything relevant at all with a name like that.

Add inurl:forum to the query. Google used to have a filter "discussions", but they removed it for some reason. Nowadays I usually start with https://hn.algolia.com/ and site:reddit.com when I want to find a discussion.

The fact that Wikipedia exists, is frequently (though not always) quite good, has citations and references, and ranks highly or is used directly for "instant answers" ...

... still does nothing to answer the point that Web search itself is unambiguously and consistently poorer now than it was 5-10 years ago.

Yes, I find myself relying far more on specific domain searches, either in the Internet sense, or by searching for books / articles on topics rather than Web pages. Because so much more traditionally-published information is online, this actually means the net of online-based search has improved, but not for the most part because of improved Web-oriented resources (Webpages, discussions, etc.), but because old-school media is now Web-accessible.

This. More and more, I have been finding that good books provide better learning than the internet.

You search for quality books online, mostly through discussion forums as search fails here, or through following references of books and articles. Then spend time digesting them.

Wikipedia is surface level knowledge. Using wikipedia what is AM4 socket’s pinout? Do a google search and you find several people asking the question but no answers. On the other hand you can easily find that for an old 8086 cpu.

What’s sad is Google has generally indexed the pages I want, it’s just getting harder to actually find them.

Did you ever find the pin out manual for AM4? Your comment sent me down a google hole...

Clearly, they don’t want it available because their tech docs they host stop at AM3b. I was hoping an X470 (or other flavor) motherboard manufacturer would have something floating around...

Basically, I think you can divide search between commercial interest search and not commercial interest searches. I can find deep discussions of algorithms curated quite nicely. But information curtains, say, that will be as bad as the OP says.

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