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Comment by rurp | Hacker News Reader

Google ignoring what I had actually typed and instead showing results to a more popular query that was similar, but distinctly different, is what finally got me to switch over to DuckDuckGo. Now that I've gotten used to DDG I find Google unpleasant to use. The amount of ads and clutter on the page is distracting, and the organic results seemed ever more skewed towards ecommerce results.

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Indeed! It's got to the point where I have to quote like 80% of the keywords in my query, just so that it doesn't throw them away. Because if I do not, I've had cases where it would throw away 2 out of 3 keywords for some results - and, as you say, it's usually the less generic ones that get thrown out.

Even worse, sometimes instead of striking them out, it substitutes them with "synonyms" that are anything but. For example, if you search for FreeBSD, you sometimes get results where "linux" is highlighted as a keyword. I'm pretty sure that this is some ML crap doing this, because the more obscure the term, the more likely it is to get it not just wrong, but hilariously wrong, even to the point of meaning the opposite.

DDG only just recently added the feature that they show you which terms they ignored… most of the time. This is actually my main problem with DDG (which is my default search engine), that they like to ignore even quotation mark-forced words. My impression is that Google sees "" as an important signal for what you want while DDG sees it as something you probably did by mistake and decides to show you a ton of unrelated results (with the word not even showing up at all), even on the first page. It’s the one thing that annoys me about the otherwise superior search of DDG.

I was under the impression that google ignores quotes, atleast that was my experience starting years ago before I switched to DDG.

Maybe they changed that stance at some point?

They used quotes to take the place of + which used to be a prefix you could add for words that were required. We lost + to Google+.

maybe that's what it was. Used to quotes meant "look for this exact sequence of letters", and at some point that started to maybe work sometimes, and maybe not othertimes.

It sounds like what you're saying is that it acts more like a typical full-text index now? I suppose it's better than nothing, but still not what I would like to see happen.

Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce. I should give DDG another try, it was not that great last time I tried (few years ago?)

Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce.

I don't believe that it's the masses looking for e-commerce sites. I think it's that Google wants people to click on e-commerce sites because it makes money off of those ads. And even if someone doesn't click on a sponsored link to an e-commerce site, that click still reinforces in their mind that Google is the place to start shopping.

There was a comment on HN yesterday where someone wrote something like, "Did you know there are countries where people who want to buy things just go to amazon.com directly and don't search for their item in Google?" I was floored. It never occurred to me that if I want to buy something at amazon.com that I would involve Google in any way. But there must be legions of people who do this, or that person wouldn't have made that statement.

At the same time, I think that Google falls down at this kind of lead generation because it allows so much automation that it can't be trusted.

I just put "rocket to mars" in Google and the top results are ads for Wal-Mart and Michael's.

To be fair, the duck isn't much better. I just put "f-14 fighter jet" into Duck and got an ad for "Fighter Jets For Sale near you" with a link to an auto repair shop.

I've seen people type "example" into the address bar, hit enter, then click the Google link to example.com, without realizing that they could just add ".com" to the end of their initial query and go directly to their destination.

If you have a typo in the name, Google will fix it for you, whereas your browser will happily take you to a domain that is probably owned by a scammer.

One could argue that since Google is JUST as happy to take money from scammers for an ad for the keyword WellsFrago as the Registry would be to sell the domain WellsFrago dot com ... I'm not sure either approach is technically safer than the other if you're prone to typos. I think (gasp) bookmarking the important sites you need is the only safe approach.

My wife does this all the time. If she wants to go to Prime video she types "Amazon Prime Video" into her address bar then clicks the first Google result, often the ad for Prime Video.

To be fair, the actual page navigation to amazon prime video is not straightforward.

If I do not like a company but need to visit their site, I also do this just to increase the cost for said company as Google Ads are 'cost per click'.

^ This works really well except for if the company you don't like is Google :D

Oh, I tried an alternate approach and it didn't work... Search bing for Google and you just get a second bing. https://imgur.com/a/YntBiYc

I started doing that years back. I'm a bad speller and sometimes the url is example.net where example.com exists as some scam that I wouldn't want but looks like the real example.net. Google will correct my spelling and find the correct string to put after the name.

I switched to DDG about a month ago, and the results are always dead-on for me.

I don’t even notice that it’s not Google anymore.

In theory websites could kill off googles dominance by blacklisting their crawler and only caring about traffic from DDG and other lesser known engines

and probably kill themselves off the internet at the same time

If enough websites did it, google would become just a giant resolver for corporate content that everyone already knows about. It would effectively fork the internet into google and non google. We just need a few search engines that can compete of quality.

I think that they are more likely to do the reverse: ban bots but add an exception for Google.

I bounce between DDG and Qwant. I usually can find what I am looking for from one of those two options.

https://www.qwant.com/

https://duckduckgo.com/

I strongly suggest using https://lite.qwant.com rather than the main page in order to keep a more minimalist display.

Thank you for this!

Thanks for sharing, I hadn't heard of Qwant before.

* Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce*

Not necessarily. The great unwashed masses may not be searching for ecommerce, but people not searching for ecommerce may not be monetizable.

Let's say we run a basketball web site that has a search engine. People sometimes type the word "travel" into the search bar.

We can show them results related to the rules violation of "travelling," and/or results related to physical travel such as "trusted partners" who provide charter trips to playoff games.

It could be that we know that 90% of the searches for the word "travel" are for the rules violation. But the remaining 10% are the ones that click on ads. And we get a kickback when someone clicks on an ad on our site.

If all we care about is the web site's revenue, we might choose to prioritize showing travel to basketball games, even though we know it's only relevant for 10% of the users who query the word "travel."

It may only be 10% of our users, but it's 100% of our revenue from keyword searches for "travel." So we show the monetizable results, and maybe--if we are feeling generous--we'll show a little line, "Showing results for travel to games. Click here to search for travel (violation)."

TL;DR: We don't need to assume that Google is trying to provide good search results for everyone. They might be trying to provide the results that maximize their immediate revenue.

This was also my experience. Took me a few days to get used to something new; now I actively prefer it.

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