This is also slowly getting into more niche topics too.
Does anyone else feel the same?
For the majority of seekers, Google may actually be performing better, but for a minority of hobbyists/specialists/experts looking for niche and jargon terms, its anything but an improvement.
After all, the ability to do it was Google's main improvement over AltaVista at the time.
I'd love for someone in-the-know to share some of the technical details. Because I could bet that the sloppyness with quoted strings could be about dumbing down, but could equally be a consequence of some implementation choice at this scale and the way the data is indexed.
I'm speculating that the majority of uses cases need some kind of work equivalency, so the major index is built that way. Whether that's just for the search terms of the average user, or ranking/clustering used to derive which pages are important. Then any additional indexes is a trade off with the magnitude of resources it would consume.
If this was the entire reason they shouldn't have botched the verbatim option as well.
My guess is incompetence or arrogance or something.
I don't mean incompetence as dumb and I'm not saying I'm smarter, but clearly something is missing that the previous maintainers had.
My best guess is they threw out a bunch of integration tests somewhere around 2006 and never recovered ;-)
Anecdotally, Google tends to favour newer content so there's a lot of content recycling going on serving no purpose other than pleasing the algorithm.
And of course if you're say, a UK retail site and you suffer an algorithmic penalty, that's potentially half of your traffic gone (G has 95% of the UK search market, around 50% of information discovery is via search). A lot of power for one company to have, too much.
https://presearch.org/signup?rid=
Use the above if you want or you can attach my ref id: 2320736 if you so choose...
only get like 25 creds, but trying to get to 1k so I can start staking without having to pay for the privilege.
Or you might just be able to use https://presearch.org/
to search without signing up at all...
I wish people would stop saying something is "dying" when they personally dont like it anymore or don't use it as much, you don't speak for the world.
I want privacy but I also want good services, Duckduckgo for example gives me a good privacy service but its searches have nothing to do with what I wanted to find.
At the moment I sometimes get better, almost good results which is maybe even more infuriating as it proves they can if they want to, they just don't care.
DuckDuckGo.com is reliably mediocre but annoy me less and it is easier to jump to Google that from google to DDG.
It used to be that a challenger would get no traction because why would one bother when Google always popped out good answers to searches. Now... I'd at least try something new to skip all the makeuseof, wikihow, and similar dross without having to explicitly constrain it to reddit.
So no, it's not dying. But this is how it could die.
Recently I put something together in Common Lisp, a language I’m a novice at, so I often had to search. The first result returned in all my Google searches was a copycat website. Someone had clearly taken some previous high-quality Lisp reference and extensively rewritten it to avoid copyright violation, then loaded it with SEO. However, their English was rather poor and so this rewrite was a pain to read.
I would love a search engine that would allow me to zap certain domains and hide them permanently from results, but at the same time without retaining information about me for advertising purposes.
Exactly. I wonder how a person could construct a highly curated google search. Not just blocking of sites but also a bit of parsing on the site for disposal purposes. Could it all be done on a local machine?
On a related note, as eBay became more of an all-purpose webstore I'll tend to use it rather than Amazon search to find products. The actual purchase, if it happens, is wherever.
You'd lose all the long-tail quality stuff (e.g. my own write-only blog :P ), but also all the garbage. It might be worth it.
I don't think you could kill Google with that, but it might make a viable lifestyle business.
Edit: and I meant to add - I was looking for info on a specific Synology device the other day. Google turned up Synology's own website (good) and a zillion crappy affiliate-link-spam sites. eBay and Reddit were the best sources of info when I sighed and started constraining the search with site: prefixes.
I know basically nothing of the mechanics of search, although I expect that a boutique search engine would have trouble accessing the guts of third party sites as they don't want to get hammered by the world.
I did just think of an interesting specialty engine. If you had fast access to the full library on libgen or sci-hub, a person could produce a pretty interesting set of abilities.
My impression is that if you're not dealing with people trying to game the algorithm then it's all a lot simpler.
As to data sources - with a constrained set of sites the creation of custom adapters should be do-able I'd have thought.
Not that I have any plans. Maybe I should though :)
Edit: come to think of it, it's practically an internet law that stuff you think of already exists. So maybe I should just post an Ask HN for the link to the search engine in question...
(I have similar thoughts about diacussion fora fwiw)
Ask HN posts are supposed to end with a question mark
I think Google is dying because they're including more and more adds on the pages. The ads used to be separate and distinctive. No longer. They're often ads for competitors or other distractions. It's just annoying and it gets in the way.
I get your point about google being popular for the millions of phone using consumers that are too busy caring about other things than to change the defaults that are being sold to them,
using "dying" and "google" in a sentence when speaking for webmasters / people who have web sites - is certainly a thing though.
I said some time ago that google is to become the new yellow pages, and apparently last year more than half the web searches got zero clicks via google.
More and more people are becoming aware of privacy concerns and how to do things without big F and G. I know this is not at a tipping point for google, but look at the whatsapp privacy debacle and how a good percentage of users can be lost in just a month.
I see more and more people skipping google and going straight to youtube/reddit/amazon / etc.. I expect more and more people to continue to 'search' starting with other portals.
Now I do see google keeping dominance with local search / maps - mainly because people/businesses tend to update their google local listing as being the most important (as opposed to people updating their fbook listing, which for most, I believe is easier.)
this is partially do to the default with android. Should an Msoft like antitrust thing force removal of gmaps / gmail / similar - like the courts demanded of IE with msoft long ago.. fbook could take the place for most current 'yellow pages like' information.
Sure there could be places for others to jump in, especially if open maps gamified with foursqaure - combined with visa/mc rewards.. so yeah, big things are possible.
Also, I wonder how much of that is inflated by defaults on iOs / Android, including apps like maps / mail.. Also after seeing dozens of people "search" for google, by typing google into the search bar, before googling it.. I think it's fair to say the results are a bit skewed.
Anyhow, google is still looking more and more like the yellow pages - this is good in some ways, however as for web site owners who are not in the top 3 of g search results, and especially those not in the top 10 - google is less important than ever, and actually it's existence and it's ads are a detriment.
I expect more web sites will be catering to Bing and even instagram / fbook / reddit, etc... as this happens more and more, and google continues to censor and keep clicks more and more - I believe a few anti-google / hiding info from google protest kind of things couple have a similar paradigm shift that occurred with myspace.
I also think we will see a more divided net as whole not too long from now - different rules for different countries and states will continue and all that.
Anyhow I do believe google is the new yellow pages, and right now they are the most used 'not-the-Real yellow pages' - so they get the most money for ads and people find their local space important.
Yet google as many of us once knew it, has been dying a slow not-so-painful death for a long time, and I don't see it going back to the cool it once was. Sterile, yes.. cool.. not so much.
I know, small data points don't speak for the world. But what number of of 'former 100% google users' need to change to alternative sources before it's okay for people to say 'for many, google has been dying' ?
I for one used to teach people how to use google.. these days I teach people to use alternatives and why.
https://search.slashdot.org/story/21/03/23/2015235/in-2020-t...
That’s...not actually skipping Google.
> But what number of of 'former 100% google users' need to change to alternative sources before it's okay for people to say 'for many, google has been dying' ?
The premise of the question—that it is meaningful to say Google is “dying” based on exits without considering entrances, and the only question is what number of exits to use as a threshold—is fundamentally flawed.
I've found a lot of great stuff on random independent websites (i.e. https://woodgears.ca/, http://gizmology.net/) that have no Reddit presence. Filtering those out is a great loss.
Something like the Yahoo Directory (hierarchical tree of hand-sorted topics) could work, but that's long gone.
Thoughts?
Starting at 4 seems to cut a lot of the SEO and content farms.
I suppose a client side extension could do the trick. It might be a good option for a side project if anyone is feeling generous with their time.
Finding answers to very specific problems? Eh, it's still ok.
Searching for specific content? It's fukken gahbage.
Going on for a decade. I have it written down on my old blog when they first started ignoring doublequotes.
Edit, not a full decade since I wrote it down at least but still: https://techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with...
For the youbg ones here: it used to be better. A lot better.
Reddit, stack overflow, writing sites like wattpad, and content sites like substack, all make content publicly available. There is also a lot of real public content on youtube. These are indexed and show up on a search engine.
But lately, a lot of platforms wall off their content, for privacy (facebook, linkedin), or to allow content creators to monetize it (udemy, patreon, medium). Search engines can often surface content based on e.g. course title, article title, but the in depth content is not accessible so they don't rank.
I think what you are seeing is the end of the open internet, and search results just reflect that.
For example, I would wager the average person is happy with the results of googling “best running shoes” over “best running shoes reddit” where an authority like RunnersWorld.con pitches some shoes with a quick blurb.
Meanwhile, I clicked through some threads on r/running and it’s the usual mix of ok advice couched in banal, inconclusive convo, rants, and infighting. We’re used to wading through the cesspool, but the average person just wants some damn shoes.
I think adding reddit to your search query and being happy with the result isn’t a knock against google, but you just knowing what you want, shaping the query to match it, and google delivering. Seems like a non sequitur when used as evidence of google’s decline.
But in the last year every time I've needed to find real reviews about something it's the only search results that weren't bot spam or obviously copy and pasted product descriptions from someone that hadn't ever touched the product.
It could be that I'm just searching for different things, but I'm not the only one that has noticed. I've seen the "add reddit" suggestion from a bunch of unconnected people on Twitter as well, one of whom started off with "I hate reddit, but..."
So it may self-correct. May.
Google search may be dead in the sense that Google has gone as far as it can go in ranking the relevance and quality of content. What we need is a value ranking of content — contextual to a specific person’s needs rather than as an answer to a one-line query.
The reason so many of us append “Reddit” to our queries is because humans are the only things on this planet capable of making evaluations about value. At least, for now.
There's a different question about the quality of the results and how that's changed over time.
I bet that non-digital cameras had their highest-ever sales numbers right before digital cameras hit the market.
That's the problem with all "it won't die, it's more popular than ever" arguments.
That's not the argument I made. Of course Google search can die, my point is that it isn't happening right now or in the near future.
That's an excellent point, especially since the financial cost and effort to switch search engines is effectively zero.
I'm seeing top 10 search results with malware, redirects to affiliate links, sites with just garbage content, the SERP quality is way down.
I would love if they would launch a new product.
Google Classic Search
Search like it used to be.
The internet landscape has fundamentally changed and there is a constant arms race against SEO content farms. I get that you mean you long for the nostalgia-tinted user experience of yesteryear, but if Google actually reverted to that older state things would be much, much worse.
Quite true, but as I ranted here[0] Google screws that up, too. If you try to limit your search to only post from e.g. the last month or year, they'll happily show you archived posts from 5 years ago as well.
I'm sure half my Google searches during work end up in a GitHub issue page.
Imagine if Microsoft built a sourcegraph style search for code inside Bing
It certainly has gotten worse, ever since they started thinking it's a good idea to let AI "guess what you want." But such a widely used product doesn't die quickly...
Anything else I search for gets a quick "site:<authoritative_website>" to filter out the cruft. For random subjective topics "site:reddit.com".
For example, if I look up a given book. The first results will be amazon and good reads, fair enough, but the reviews have been gamed so I'm not going to bother with them. Then it's the blogs that have managed to figure out SEO. They read in a similar style to recipe websites, and I haven't seen any good ones in that category. Then I will find a reddit thread about the book, hopefully on a subgenre subreddit and not just r/books, that convinces me to get it or not and has recommendations for books similar to it.
If you get far enough you will find some personal blog that doesn't care about SEO. HN has link farm threads every now and then where people post theirs, and I have seen some individuals who post insightful book reviews, but you will not come across those in a search engine.
Eg if I type best linux distro the first suggestion often is "best linux distro reddit". It happens for me too.
The fact that a lot of people are doing that is obvious from your observation that it's the first suggestion
The reason is that, Google can support my quick checks about English usage that can be minor to native users, such as
"as a result" vs "as the result"
or
"looking for the X factor" (I feel like I can write this phrase but not quite sure I understand what X factor really is or if there is anyone really using this term)
or
"someone advocating for implementing" (I want to use this phrase to indicate some colleague but I want to know if saying this is natural enough (or has more search results))
Silly but I do rely on Google to do this for me. Sometimes I feel guilty about this because I know these search requests costs energy and increase carbon emission.
DuckDuckGo is nowhere near the performance of Google for this. Also, it frequently returns NSFW websites at the first result page.
Although, I won't go so far as to say that Google search engine is dying by any means given it still performs way better than other search engines out there and even though I've tried switching to Bing, Google just has more data on me and the predictive search results are a huge selling point for me.
I'd say however the results have become more concentrated, like many others have said, these are concentrated around a few platforms. Another I'd say is maybe something bad has happened around SEO. I searched for something I wanted to buy the other day and every listing linked to the same website, even with different search terms, this is despite many online stores stocking it (I found many links on the manufacturers website).
It's probably not so much search that is dying but non-profit content on the internet. Not a whole lot that search engines can do about that, unless they become search "walled gardens" ala Apple.
The main causes of the decline are the rise of content farms and SEO and dubious "improvements" to browsers that make them better software platforms but worse browsers of the written word.
They are not covering some user stories as well as others, e.g. security minded users and DuckDuckGo, but overall still doing more than ok. "Googling" is also a verb so there's that.
It used to be simple to find drivers with Google. Now it’s easier to go to the vendor’s page and try to navigate their mystery meat hellmaze. That’s terrible.
I switched to Bing on my phone because of the amp links
I only fallback to Startpage (which use google result) when DDG doesn't spit good enough results (happens mostly on rare topics / Chinese search)
anecdotal conversation, ppl don't know what you mean by reddit etc
I find that if I am searching about programming topics, especially in option, DDG does great. If I am searching about more general things, like say a list of smoke points for various cooking oils (last night), google seems to do better.