Lately I find myself inserting "site:reddit.com" at the end of my Google searches. Most of the stuff that shows up by default is pure garbage that is riddled with ads and doesn't answer my question quickly.
Anecdote 2: I have a close friend that is a high school teacher. She's not all that tech savvy, so I help her out sometimes. Google is damn near useless when it comes to helping her develop her courses. Not exaggerating at all... maybe 60, 70... 80 percent of the results for educational queries are SEO spam. Every result is essentially, "want to learn how to write a monologue? Click here to pay $20/month for the privilege".
It's gotten so bad that I jokingly tell her that it would be more efficient to just walk down to the library and take out a book on whatever topic she's querying. But, you know, they do say that every joke has an element of truth to it...
I doubt the declining quality of search results is a product of Google's own advertising business, as the article would have us believe, and is mostly a product of third-party SEO spam. This outcome also wholly predictable. Part of the appeal of Google to early adopters was the lack of the SEO spam that destroyed the utility of earlier search engines. I recall conversations at the time when Google was so new they eschewed graphical ads that foresaw this outcome, though our predictions may have been a bit on the pessimistic side (i.e. Google held up against SEO longer than we thought it would).
I think this is instead an active choice on the part of Google. When the options are "show someone's personal blog as the top result" or "show some company as the top result", they always choose the latter because a company is somehow believed to be more trustworthy.
Those badass AI should be able to use their image recognition power and be able to recognize products I put on the counter and calculate the price. It seems this is still beyond capabilities AI has (apparently playing chess or go is way easier than working in the grocery store).
Really? Classification of images on a known static background should work very well. Or at least well enough that you can request a manual scan it every 10th item and still get a large speed increase. The bag weight works as a double-check anyway.
Also the AI you speak of can equally be used to produce content that looks real but is not. It's even possible to produce articles that are impossible to determine if a human wrote it.
This is a cat and mouse game that won't end. There's too much money on the line.
My theory, why this is not happening: I guess that most of these SEO-spam sites are actually including Google-funneled ads, so this means there's something wrong there too...
Blacklists are also problematic. I have an email account with a smaller provider that I never bother to use since there is a good chance that their servers are blacklisted at any given point in time. Getting their server removed from these lists is non-trivial in most cases. Once they are removed, they usually get relisted within a few months. The problem also runs in the opposite direction: I have corporate email accounts where every external email (including those from certain departments of their own organization) is labelled as such and as potentially suspicious simply because blacklists are not sufficient. The only reliable outcome of blacklisting is the reduced reliability of communications channels.
User reported abuse is even more problematic since it opens up avenues for abuse. While it may be relatively easy to filter out bad reports in situations where there is a minimal vested interest (e.g. finding something disagreeable), that won't be the case when there is a considerable vested interest (e.g. attacking the competition).
It's a totally different thing be selling Angular templates, when your website is titled "Tutorial: Learn how to write Angular services"
One the two is clearly misleading.
Try searching for
site:reddit.com best headphones
And click "Tools" and set the date filter to be "Past week" for example.
Click the first result. You will notice it's from a year ago. Click the second result, it's from 2 years ago and so on. Not a single result matches the date filter. Similar issues with the other filters.
It's 100% broken and been this way for at least a year now as far as I remember.
Or alternatively, improve their algorithm for detecting page changes.
Somehow it should be improved, as it’s a useful feature.
Unless the redesign of Reddit broke this somehow? But as far as I know, this has broken for other sites too. And Reddit redesign is over 2 years old now.
And then this. An unsolved problem that they could have solved 20 years ago - recognising that pages are not necessarily one atomic unit and that different parts can be updated at different times. Or more generally that different types of websites require slightly different approaches to search.
It's not a trivial problem if you think about it. But for a search company to get this completely wrong even for a global top 100 discussion forum requires a severe lack of incentives.
And that's where I get the sinking feeling that I shouldn't be encouraged by Google's failure at all, because those incentives are difficult to fix for anyone. I'm pessimistic about Ramaswamy's approach. Putting a paid ad blocker on Bing isn't going to fix this.
While smaller companies seems to have a hard time implementing A/B-testing Google seems to be running tens or hundreds of tests continously.
Here's a nice trick: If you report any issue on a search results page it seems to opt you out of the experimental group and you get normal results for some hours/days/weeks. Still not great like in 2009 but not as crazy as whatever bugs you now. At least it has worked for me on a couple of occasions.
Googlers: If you are relying on people giving feedback to know if a change is annoying users, be aware that your feedback process actively discourages people from submitting feedback. Even I have to be reaaalllly motivated to send feedback.
How quaint.
A common human fallacy is to pick a medium size number and think it is big. People have trouble grasping large scale (perhaps due to how our senses instinctively use a logarithmic scale)
If you use Firefox, some results that are full of a Firefox-specific scam where "you are the billionth search result" (maybe it also happens for other browsers). This has been going on for years now - I noticed it because scammers were scraping my blog for content and republishing it but making searches terms redirect to scam sites.
Sure having a search engine do exactly what the user requests would be great for us, IT people. Not sure it is possible to build much traffic with that alone, though.
I can't say for sure if this got more frequent in recent times or not.
I'm working off the thesis that combining highly relevant vertical results is the best way to combat SEO.
As a fun aside, when I did a Show HN for this tool, the title was "Runnaroo, a new search engine that didn't raise 37.5M to launch" as a friendly joke toward Neeva. Dang changed it later to be just "Runnaroo, a new search engine."
[0] Example search for "bose headphones reddit": https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=bose%20headphone%20redd...
Regarding, "what's your distinct advantage over the easy to remember site:reddit.com"
It's arguable that just typing 'reddit' with the query is easier to remember than typing "site:reddit.com" for most people, but you can have the best of both worlds and still use the site operator and get direct Reddit results [0].
[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=site%3Areddit.com+best+...
I saw from your previous post that you're using Google for the web results, but the only option listed in their docs has a 10k queries/day limit. Have you been able to get them to agree to a higher limit, or are you planning to move off of Google once your traffic grows?
Also, your example search has a character encoding issue - "Stolen iPad Pro & Bose headphones".
it's great if I know what I want to search (i.e. I know the field and the keywords and I need the specifics) but when I don't know what I want to search I can't use it for discovery (i.e. when learning new things and I lack the terminology)
The bangs are painfully slow over the main duckduckgo site.
Miss the bangs.
Also, for non-trivial results, Qwant is mostly a fancy Bing front-end, so you might as well use Bing.
And yes, it was around that time that search quality took a nose dive for me.
Also unless you work at Google or have done extensive research: I think you are still wrong.
I think part of the reason for that is that off-reddit there's so much emphasis on SEO and analytics (trying to hit all the right keywords, linking to other pages/sites, tricking people to stay on a page/site longer etc.) that everything becomes very cluttered very quickly.
I use !g for Google pretty frequently, but there are many searches I just send directly to the site I think has the best answer.
I'm still tricked every time though, I see the result matching exactly what i'm looking for, I disable my reddit block from browser, click the link, and am 99.9% of time disappointed in the result.