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Comment by verganileonardo | Hacker News Reader

How is Google worse than 10 years ago?

I would agree that they are doing shady moves that can hurt search quality, but overall, the results look much better today than 10 years ago.

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In my experience, there are two massive pains:

1. For a few years now, it has been very difficult for me to search for specific phrases, even with surrounding quotes, without getting results that don't include those phrases

2. Lately, every search where I am trying to research a topic or look up some instructrions for how to do something leads to to pages upon pages of products and services in that space rather than information about the thing. I can't look up how to install a stove without endless ads (whether posing as explicit ads or as official search results) for handymen or appliance stores. I want to know how to change my swamp cooler motor but instead I get professional HVAC services, and useless sponsored articles that aren't about "how to do <thing>" but "why you should do <thing> oh and by the way hire us".

On google search, results are neither informative nor accurate. The results exist only to sell something.

This is essentially the same thing that happened with Siri, started out really great and functional, then results shifted towards 'businesses' and 'services' rather than just the best content. Google's insistence on surfacing local results first exacerbates that in many cases. Better though for their bottom line.

> How is Google worse than 10 years ago?

GMail is unable using the web client. Google search results are not great when doing research on new topics, its good for telling you things you already know but forgot, but when trying to search about new topics the search bubbles are bad. They beg for adoption of new products and then cancel them within 18 months. Android is essentially a giant spyware platform, using your mic sends everything to google. Using chrome sends everything to google. On and on, I believe Google was a better company 10 years ago.

It is much harder to bypass the you-really-meant-something-else algorithms and search for the exact terms I need. I don't need you to "correct" it, I don't need the helpful synonyms, etc.

When I search for information about specific strings like class method names, now I quite often have to resort to GitHub search.

You don't need it, but 99% of their users do.

This is honestly not a shitpost, I truly feel that Google isn't doing anything better than they were 10 years ago. Search has noticeably declined in the past year, and I am regularly struck by how readily they will rank matches based on removing parts of my query over results that include all of the terms. Every Google Android app I use asks for some kind of interaction every time I start one up. "Got It!"

This happens most surprisingly when navigating with Maps. I have shortcuts for destinations I regularly use, and the number of times I've tapped one of those and had Google cover 90% of the screen with restaurants nearby and the announcement of some feature and the "start" bar across the bottom...my conclusion has been that Google's Maps UX philosophy is based entirely on discouraging use while driving.

Re: Google maps, the recent change where the map orientation changes when the phone changes orientation was almost enough to get me to quit using it. I just want to lock in my preferred orientation and forget about it, not have to fiddle with my phone because it got bumped, the car hit a bump, or something.

I wonder if that's related to this...bug? feature?...where at least once per minute (in Android) there's what is something like a spontaneous app swipe to itself without having touched the device. This infects other apps too, so it's been hard to figure out where it's coming from but I'm pretty sure it's caused by Maps. Like there's a hypervigilance in the attention the app pays to rotation.

I mostly agree, but I do quite like Google Sheets and Docs. Drive is pretty shit though.

Standards support is a big one.

Early Google took pride in following other people's standards and avoiding walled gardens: XMPP, RSS, semantic web/micro-formats.

Today's Google avoids traditional standards and many standards that don't originate from Google, doesn't mind walled gardens in their favor, or "standards" that they (almost) solely control (AMP as an obvious one, HTML nearly with the Chromium monopoly), and doesn't even use standards in many areas where early Google thought it important (communications apps that might use something like XMPP or Matrix to federate, for instance).

Relevance. if the search results has less relevance and historical data has lower importance compared to spikes in interest at the moment of the search, it's worse

For example medical related searches right now prioritize covid related results, they are important _now_, but they are less important than general statistical data

A general purpose search engine shouldn't be about what social networks talk more about

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