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Comment by uniqueid | Hacker News Reader

Last week I blocked every * .google.* domain on my network except "youtube-ui.l.google.com".

Google Search: (1) ask a natural language question (since actual search is hobbled) (2) get unrelated garbage and ads back (3) blame yourself for "not being technical enough" to understand why the results aren't actually garbage.

Google Search has deteriorated to the point that so far I haven't missed it at all.

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I've been slowly degoogling myself this year. For ~80% of my search, DDG has been entirely adequate.

I do miss some of Big G's cards, and their Maps is vastly superior to DDG's Apple Maps integration, even despite GMap's advertising. DDG's solution is wild, really: they use Apple for static-image-only maps with no real contextual interface, only a sidebar for search results. If you want directions, you must search for your destination by text alone, then in the sidebar choose to get directions from one of four providers (defaulting to Bing).

But when I just want an engine to match the text I give it (i.e. most of the time), DDG performs at least as well as Google's increasingly-fuzzy matching.

use OSM it's much better anyway

I'll miss browsing street view for fun. I doubt I use it more than six times a year, though.

For actual turn-by-turn navigation, I never used a Google or Apple product. I use an offline iPhone app (Navigon).

Google still good for coding related searches

Ever spent three minutes opening useless links from Google's Search results, only to realize they dropped the keyword you searched? That seems quite common now, especially with programming keywords, which are often obscure.

Remember Google Code Search, and Google (Usenet) Groups? Back then, Google cared about this stuff. Now they seem only to want to show you furniture ads, or get you to use their Zoom knockoff, etc.

These days Google substitutes the heck out of searches. Perhaps it's better if you've logged in, but I'd rather hack my leg off with a rusty saw than voluntarily log in to an account just to search the web.

This is also very common with DDG. And the strange thing is that many times, DDG will even ignore if you are using parenthesis. The parenthesis seem to add weight but I will still get tons of results that don't contain the required words at all.

Never seen this happen with DDG. Required words should be in quotes, not parenthesis.

To be fair, I suspect "coding related searches" are easy for any search engine, given

1. the immense online/open-source nature of the profession: every blog/forum question and answer/documentation since the origin of the profession being in plain-text and mostly publicly accessible by default

2. and it all revolves around a precise, limited vocabulary.

You get SEO crap very often though IME.

Depends on the platform and what you're looking for. Some operating systems and languages/ecosystems are worse than others. Windows stuff is largely incredibly bad (not saying Windows is bad, for this reason anyway, just that search results for anything MS-related tend to be awful). The nerdier the OS and less "corporate" the language, the better the results get.

The nerdier the OS and less "corporate" the language, the better the results get.

But don't get too obscure. Otherwise, you'll discover that Google has dropped the information you require from its index because it's not new or trendy enough.

If we can get Taylor Swift interested in the old internet, then Google will suddenly snap back into usefulness.

Depends on what coding-related search, I think. Searching for C is useless unless you know to search for clang, for example; but then you get results for the compiler. If you're trying to search for lesser known languages with short names or names that overlap with common words, then forget it! (Arguably that's a fault of the language, but arguably arguably you shouldn't have to choose what to name your creation based on Google.)

i think github code search is sometimes more helpful that google (when searching for specific examples in code)

github search has its own search operators:

https://docs.github.com/en/github/searching-for-information-...

What is it you are searching for that the results are useless?

For example a specific error string which is definitely in a github repo - it won't find it. I was trying to find why the error is printed. In the past, I used google to even find codes related to my interest (so I additionally specified language keywords like "void" "define" "float") - not working anymore. Fortunately github search works for that but it's slow. In the past, Google ignored "c++", amusingly now it doesn't ignore it but it has much much smaller index, it seems. Google is now useful only for "programming" queries like: why is c++ popular. And most results are then Quora / Stack Overflow / YouTube. Google is sadly a tool for masses and their simple queries about restaurants, actors, etc now. :(

Indeed. This seems like a bit overreacting. Google is lots of things, but a shitty search engine to the point of deserving being blocked is not one of them.

    > a shitty search engine to the point of 
    > deserving being blocked is not one of them.

Google's search quality isn't why I blocked Google. I've wanted to block Google for over half a decade, but the excellence of their search stopped me. That stopped being an issue this year.

What search do you prefer and why?

I prefer Google circa 2005, but DDG and Bing work better for me now.

I've never wanted anything fancy:

- don't show me paid search results - show me a blank page if there are no results - make it easy to 'AND' terms (+include +search +terms) - most importantly: search for my damned search terms! If you want to "did you mean" my spelling, fine. I don't really care. But it's unacceptable to ever drop a search term.

I have plenty of other complaints about Google, but in terms of search quality, those are the relevant ones.

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