In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

I wager that most people don't perceive a decline in search results quality. At least not to an extent where they'd notice and switch to using Bing.

I guess it's time for something new to do the same thing to Google that it did to those companies years ago.

It's the switch from lexical/syntactic search to semantic search. There are benefits and drawbacks to each and it would be nice for Google to give you the option to try each.

“Product vs. Product” -> list of spam websites that just show them side by side with ads.

“Product Review” -> same as above, spam.

“Product referral code” -> sites with spam and no codes.

Interesting web content is in Reddit (and youtube), Google exists as a tool to search Reddit since the “new” Reddit site is awful.

Programming questions are mostly stack overflow, but occasionally you get a useful blog.

General knowledge is Wikipedia, news is axios.

Amazon for most purchases (except for products that have their own brand and sites that are at risk of being faked). Etsy for boutique stuff.

Most of the rest of the web is junk.

I think we could probably go back to curated 90s era web portals and have a better experience.

I can't say I've really counted how many days that's true. I can't even say that I really remember what searches I did yesterday or the day before. But if I'm not totally weird and google searches were dramatically better in the past, then they must have produced the desired results every time on almost every day.

I don't think it has a lot of to do with new search algo. I think it is the opposite, the algo is mostly the same as a decade a ago, but now it is abused by SEO expert. And Google doesn't seem to care yet

This should destroy Google, but for some reason it doesn’t, and it baffles me that they are still surviving in this.

https://www.google.com/search?q=See+them+more+than+my+friend...

I don't know what other people see, but I just get SEO garbage listicles. Nothing even remotely relevant. Add "lyrics"? You get lyrics..... for other songs! https://www.google.com/search?q=See+them+more+than+my+friend...

You have to quote the entire string! Which won't work if you misremembered a word or two.

This feels very true... the majority of my searches go like this:

1. Search with all relevant terms with some parts that should be exact combinations in quotes => nothing or BS results

2. Remove words that Google is fixating on without context => no or seemingly unrelated results without search terms at all

3. Reduce specificity to 2 or 3 words, topic and subtopic (trying to locate context only and search the rest myself) => sometimes ends me on sites where I can then just browse for the result i'm after

4. Worst case reduce to single search term to find huge context sites and manually search myself. Sometimes at this point I just give in and manually navigate to other sites where I know I can manually browse and narrow down context myself and then try to find what I'm looking for... it really feels like a curl web scrape and grep would work better than Google at this point (yes I know google "site:", it's doesn't work properly anymore).

But this needs to be public effort to create any meaningful action from search engines.

How many of you would be willing to contribute to such platform by submitting your bad search results?

I thought the main issue here was Google directing searchers to its own services and scraping data from non-Google websites to present on its own pages? It's declining search result quality is certainly an issue, but I don't think this link is about that at all.

* shows results despite having zero actual matching results

* ignores parts of the query even if they are surrounded in quotes

* gets completely thrown off by keywords (and, or, etc) and symbols (=, ;, etc)

A lot of people say this is because Google is worse at returning the desired search results for various reasons (algos, ads, spam, etc). I've come to suspect it is more deliberate on the part of Google.

I've said it before, so I'll belt out the chant again: "Google doesn't make money from providing the right search results. Google makes money from keeping you searching for the right search results."

This is especially true for the vast majority of people on the internet who do not know there are any (better or worse) alternatives to Google.

Back in the 90s, search engines were driven largely by sparse vector representations of the documents such as TF IDF vectors before latent semantic indexing, topic modeling, and other dense vector representations like sentence embeddings entered the fray (not to mention non-content features that use the web graph, click stream, etc.). A lot of NLP applications use a mix of dense and sparse features but it's hard to get the balance right in a way that works for all inputs. Google's pendulum has swung too far in the "dense" direction, as it certainly seems "dense" a lot more often lately!

I have ZERO doubt in my mind that a Google search update that decreases their ad revenue would be rolled back and metrics tweaked to make it so. So...

Specifically, it's handy to have the query, and the URL that you think would be the best result.

Google engineers can then peer in and see why that URL didn't rank highly.

The most common reason is it's behind an invisible captcha or blocked by robots.txt, so do check that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

I think it's a popular opinion on HN that Google search sucks, but I just don't agree. I used DDG on all my devices for the better part of last year, and bailed when I noticed by g! usage ratcheting up.

Lowes has made a video, so have dozens of contractors. It's amazing how tool rental firms have not advertised on there ... actually that is a bit weird...

SideNote - for some reason I replied to an email outreach from Rand, and he actually replied back within a few hours, clearly having read my words and come up with a real answer.

I was frankly shocked. Either he works an inhuman amount or he has secretly invented AGI to respond to his emails for him.

Kudos and good luck

Mostly ignoring what is on the sites

Oh, and then there's a bunch of weird links that come up to obvious content generated by AI being peddled. Odd.

communist revolution?

The financial sources for information-collection-and-creation undertakings throughout human history have been manifold (wealthy patron and collective financing, to name two). It is entirely possible, if Google finds its data sources drying up, that Google itself will pay for data collection (they already do this with several categories of data they host).

This has already happened. People put content on their sites only long enough to figure out what works, then turn that content into a book that can be sold. Every Cal Newport book came out of his blog posts.

Others are turning content into paid newsletters, courses and Patreon-only walled content.

Wrote something 15 years ago? Just set the "Date Modified" to last week and Google will think it's been updated.

The 'content' you and I are seeing are just second and third-hand summarizations of popular topics written by content marketers.

It's an interesting hypothesis, but it assumes the only reason people bother to seek and aggregate facts is to get paid (and the only way to get paid is click-through to ads). No doubt that early surfacing of data could disrupt payment-for-visit-dependent models, but that doesn't guarantee the data evaporates from Google's view or that new payment models don't arise to replace the old.

The company mission statement is "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Nothing about that statement says "redirect web traffic to third-party sites." They consider it an inconvenience to the user (a negative signal) if the user has to click through.

The worst thing is that content creators are manipulating this to build content farms full of low quality content and overwhelming ad volumes.

I miss the old web where Google was really great at finding that one guy's blog post that was actually useful.

Dunno, but this might be the sort of perspective you're seeking: there's a book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes about the culture of managers at large corporations. And a series of posts on it -- I'd start with the one near the top that's just quotes from the book, to see if it's you're after: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS

For instance, searching something like "what is the most common car color" shows me an exerpt of the answer from a article on automobilemag.com without having to click and read the whole thing.

5-7 years ago, I would've had to click and skim through an article.

Moreover, Google compiles independent lists of their own. Searching "what animals mate for life" or "movies tomorrow cruise has been in" will pull up an interactive list. No click-through required.

Disagree. It's completely relevant. There are two reasons why people do not click on search results - either because they got the answer directly from the rich snippets (like you suggest), or because the results are so trash that you need to now perform another search to narrow the results further.

Good search was historically one of the harder unsolved problems on the web, even back in the 90s. The problem is that nowadays we treat it rather like a solved problem when in reality it's still probably one of the harder unsolved problems on the web.

This is faster for me that opening Wikipedia and searching.

(YMMV: it depends on your specific searches, I'm sure.)

Considering 2/3rd of searches end there, I wonder how many people are walking around with false information that Google fed them.

Google would probably make a "de minimis" defense of the practice. A previous case (Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation 2002) allowed thumbnails in search engines as fair use, but that's not quite the same. And current interpretation seems to be pretty restrictive on what's insignificant enough (witness various music sampling cases). And while any individual result may be small, doing so on an industrial scale is probably not "a trifle" and harm can probably be demonstrated. Ultimately, it would have to be tried to tell.

They might also argue implied license. In cases like meta tags, that's probably reasonable. For straight-up scraping, it's more questionable.

If I want to control the revenue then I use a different protocol.

I can also just simply set up a robots.txt file telling others what to do with it and lots of indexers, Google included, respect and abide by my wishes.

When people misuse a tool it seems easily fixed by them properly using the tool.

Trying to change the web because I’m too stupid to understand it seems like a bad thing.

You could probably make the case that someone who would rather read the snippet on Google isn't likely to contribute, but it likely has an effect on the margin.

And that's ignoring the donate banner they throw up there from time to time.

This alone should be setting off alarm bells for everyone, the government should be raiding Google offices to find the necessary facts to answer these questions. Google operates as the de facto front page of the Internet, the default starting point for the vast majority of the public, and they're incredibly dodgy about the real facts about how they use that power.

It's incredible how often Google both states a "fact" that is extremely biased in their favor, and simultaneously suggest it's indisputable because only Google has data on it, and of course, Google will not share the data because it's confidential business information.

This stonewall is behind incredible lies like the idea that targeted advertising increases revenue by 50%, despite independent data finding the difference closer to 4%.

I think the issue at hand here, is that Google should be legally compelled to disclose the real answers to this question, and a lot of other questions about how their algorithms work.

> The data in the article comes from 100 million people dumb enough to infect their devices with malware

This is ironic, considering the Google Toolbar, headed by Sundar Pichai himself, is much of how Google got it's mass adaption as well as browsing data to improve their search rankings. Perhaps the difference between "malware" and "useful tool" is how successful the business behind it is. ;)

The purpose of Wikipedia is to improve human knowledge and all their content is CC so unless Google is altering content or biasing searches, sucking it into Knowledge graph seems like one of the main reasons Wikipedia started.

People who create and curate content quite often want to be paid for their work, they create businesses to support themselves, often in the form of a website. If Google scrapes and repackages that content, so the searcher never even visits the creator's site, what incentive does the creator have to continue making content freely available?

That's not to say the results on Google aren't getting worse, because they are, but DDG still has a long way to go.

Sure, Google also has a flight tracker widget, but it's not that much worse than DDG. If you really want no widgets or inline responses, https://www.startpage.com/ has that.

EDIT: Startpage does have a time widget (search for "time in <some place>"), but doesn't have a calculator, timer, or literally anything else. How odd...

"Startpage acts as an intermediary between you and Google, so your searches are completely private. Startpage submits your query to Google anonymously, then returns Google results to you privately. Google never sees you and does not know who made the request; they only see Startpage."