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Comment by cung | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I am going crazy that this fact is not discussed at all.

I recall google from a decade ago being able to answer all my questions, where as now all I get is mediocre, politically-safe, canned answers with a ridiculous amount of ads.

It is enough to look at recipe websites to see that Daily Mail’s claim is clearly true. Recipe sites providing a user hostile ad-filled experience gain the top place, where as simple recipes without stories and tons of ads are nowhere to be found.

Why would Google do anything else? Website owners are paying Google to be ranked higher by essentially buying ads from Google. The difference between the ppc of a competitor and Google is the price the website owners pay. In return, Google will rank the website higher.

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I believe you've got the cause and effect completely backwards. Someone that has a recipe site with no ads and no stories isn't in it for the money. In contrast, recipe sites with a ton of ads solely exist for the ad revenue—the recipes are just there as bait.

The difference is that the ad-laden sites spend 90% of their time getting their rankings up in google, the recipes are usually taken/copied from elsewhere and the big long stories are there to make the site look unique to Google, to fool it into thinking there's legitimate content there.

In the end, of course the person who spends all their time gaming Google is going to rank higher than someone who actually cares about their recipes and spends 90% of their time curating, experimenting, etc.

It's a sad state of affairs, but spammers have ruined Google.

What strikes me the most is that simple queries ("how much sun does [plant] need") only return 5 page keyword soups that barely answer your question. Google works reasonably well for more specific technical questions, but really struggles with the basic ones.

https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=how...

The top promoted answer leads to what looks like a reasonable site.

I think the greatest problem here is individual user bubbles. My take is that this would all go away as a problem if Google did away with behavioural tracking - thus the same query would lead to same answers globally.

The question is, how much would that degrade search quality?

The most obvious is location - 'show me chinese takeaways' is a different query depending on where you are and your past ordering profile. But its a solvable problem

What plants are you having trouble finding that number for? I just tried corn, strawberries, rhubarb, and beans and got the answer in the first or second link.

I just remembered this because of the latest plant I bought, but I forgot which one it was. It's just an example. I felt similar frustrations with other simple questions, for example related to cooking.

I'd wager there's vastly different quantity of spam sites for things like gardening than more technical topics.

> Google works reasonably well for more specific technical questions, but really struggles with the basic ones.

In the past it did, but when I try to search a line of logging output, or a line from a stack trace, Google decides to omit much of my search terms, and even goes as far as replacing some of my search terms with other terms that do not fit the context of my queries at all.

I agree, it seems like results are getting worse, a few years back I could ask a question and get an answer. Now I don't even bother and go straight to sites to search, be it wikipedia/ github/ stackoverflow/ ebay. Googling for it is just a waste of time.

It’s gotten especially bad in the past few years. I had a minor health scare recently and found it incredibly difficult to find relevant search results given hundreds of different queries describing my condition.

Did you try using a different search engine?

The amount of health-related blogspam on Google is criminal, IMO. I've come across dozens of sites soliciting health advice, treatments, and "cures" that were not only not approved by the FDA, but weren't written, approved or edited by medical doctors at all.

There are going to be sick or desperate people who follow that advice, or attempt to use those "cures", and some of them will be harmed because of it.

The amount of spam in general is horrible, lack of legislative methods to stop spammers is wasting a lot of human resource every second.

it is hard to talk about an issue for which no solid data is available. To make a comparison, a decade ago, one would have needed to have started recording searches. Unfortunately, and this is why algorithms can be so insidous, collecting data to prove the decline of google is almost impossible.

So despite being blindingly obvious, it is difficult to make a mature discussion based on 'feelings', vague as they are.

A research that would work would be to show how irrelevant current results are. Certainly, that wouldn't be hard to prove, even without comparing it to external data.

Over the last few years, Google has prioritized blogspam that also happens to be filled to the brim with AdSense ads.

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