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Comment by keyme | Hacker News Reader

Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault.

I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated software and keygens, detailed instructions for a variety of useful things. That was the golden age of the web.

These days, all the "interesting" data on the Internet is all inside closed Telegram chats, facebook groups, Discords or the rare public website here and there that Google doesn't want to index (like sci-hub, or other piracy sites).

The data that remains on SERPs is now also heavily censored for arbitrary reasons. "For your health", "For your protection". Google search is done.

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> And it's mainly not even their fault.

It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users. Two examples just from top of my head: ignoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do. Another was ignoring completely the exact phrase search with double brackets.

Ignoring double brackets drives me crazy. That's the last straw that sent me to DDG, although I have to say that DDG isn't much better either.

What made me really angry aboyt Google Search was when they removed their function to search in discussion forums. But even then you could more or less filter out crap.

Nowadays it feels very hard. I find myself using the site: flag many times, but you need to know the site beforehand, which is another problem.

I also feel like some product manager decided that having a blank results page is horrible. So even if I put terms in quotes, and there are no results with those quoted terms, Google decides to show me results that have virtually nothing to do with what I want to see.

Except a blank page is exactly what I want to see if there are no results or if I mistyped my query. These shoehorned-in results throw me off every time because it takes extra mental effort to reinterpret them as "oh, google has no results for what I typed in past this point, so they're showing me random crap". I miss the old days when search was as precise as a scalpel.

Maybe I'm naive about the complexity of the problem (every article I read about the difficulty of what Google's doing certainly suggests so), but I honestly believe that we've reached the point where a talented and well-founded startup could outplay Google at their own game.

>"blank page is exactly what I want to see"

I literally couldn't agree more. I can't stand how bad searching has become.

While we're at it, you know what else I really hate? How google switches the order of the buttons for Images, News, Shopping, Video, etc. on EACH QUERY. Who in the world ever thought this was a good idea?

I've always assumed that this is a bug in their A/B tests, because I cannot even imagine how utterly degenerate their product design process must have become to come up with this on purpose.

Exactly, it's very easy to see how Google doesn't leave the user unspammed. YouTube's search works the same way, and even if there are useful results on top, they quickly trail off into clickbait garbage. Plus the unrelated lists of ‘people also watch’, injected every few items. The search filters are barely enough to dial in when you want to skip obvious trash, but give up on anything slightly complicated. On Play Store, it's worse: you just get troves of what Google thinks you should be getting, with no control on your side—because if people could skip apps with payment inside, they would, and who in Google wants that.

I feel like YouTube's goal is to always get you to watch something else. Scroll down in search results? See unrelated videos. As soon as the video starts? See a 'Recommended' badge. Pause the video? See an overlay with other videos. Leave the video running? Autoplay fixates on something else.

I think there is a market here. "Dumb" search engines, that search exactly the words you type, maybe with advanced features like regex, metadata search, etc... It won't replace Google's guesswork, but sometimes, I just want to grep the internet.

All non-Google engines are all about privacy, which is nice, and almost a requirement if you want to compete with Google, but I'd like to see features that actually improve search too. DDG gets a honorable mention with its bangs and applets.

I'd like to go a step further and hope for "dumb" search engines that are tailored towards indexing specific subsets of the internet as a whole. As an example, imagine a search engine that is specifically tailored towards programming questions. Or one that specifically omits some of the more annoying SEO optimized results, like Livestrong and USA Today.

My current product started off as precisely that kind of search engine.

User adoption is a huge problem - almost no users made it their default search engine because even programmers need to do non-programming searches and it's too easy to go into your browser, hit ALT+d, bang out your search query, and hit enter.

And because google and ddg do a good job on most programming related searches, they get to be the default search engines.

I think so too. It'd really be nice to get a search capability that doesn't take my past searching into account. I want an unbiased search, and give me good tools to filter.

> DDG gets a honorable mention with its bangs and applets.

Yeah but it ignores most other operands. It's fairly frustrating to be unable to mandate a search term.

«I just want to grep the internet” +1

Yeah, I also try DDG first then and only if not okay I go !g. Now I wonder, why did GOO break such a useful thing? They could have shown advertisements also in their "classic" search (let's call it like that) so I'm really at loss - what was in it for them to change??? Germans have a word for that "verschlimmbessern" (or even two words - kaputtreparieren) which means breaking something by trying to make it better.

> Now I wonder, why did GOO break such a useful thing?

As far as I understand it, they want to catch synonyms and different tenses for the words.

But they do a remarkably shit job. nginx and apache2 aren't synonyms, but completely different tools for the same job. Yet apache2 instructions appeared as a match when I've used "nginx" in my query (the word apache2 was in bold in result snippet).

I guess it has something to do with Google Internal dynamics. But I'm not the one being paid big bucks to think about such stuff. Maybe they've done their due diligence and made their tradeoffs, but I'm clearly not the target of the search engine anymore.

I'm only a dumb nobody, so if this is a problem for me, I wonder how it is for all the smart people that hangs out here at HN.

It just feels very uphill to use Google right now. No matter how many flags or tricks.

The median Google search user probably never learned to use any of these "advanced" features in the first place. For them, having Google ignore the precise wording of their query and show results for more common related terms is almost certainly an improvement.

> It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users.

I think this is an overly harsh take. I strongly suspect that any algorithm for ranking search results is open to gaming and manipulation by malicious users.

Google changed SEO from a seedy practice to something they actively encourage, promote and support.

Google stopped shitcanning sites that that present different things to Googlebot and regular users, including sites that require a login for normal users but show content to Googlebot.

Google imposed arbitrary ranking criteria that favor long-wided blogspam over concise articles that immediately tell you what you want to know.

Yes, this is their making.

> gnoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do

Also the opposite: insisting on pushing local and localized results on google.com even when I set my browser language to english.

They used to have google.com/ncr

'ncr' stands for no-country-recognition and it did what it said on the tin.

Of course like all useful power-user features it got deprecated for the natural language query non-sense we have today.

Nowadays you need to VPN to the target country. For a reason to complicated to explain here I searched local businesses in the city of Melun, France. There were no reasonable hits. Well, my IP was Finnish (to my best knowledge they have no other means of localizing me) and "melu" means noise in Finnish with "melun" being a common form. No addition of French shopping terms could convince Google that I am not interested in noise abatement. Accepted language header did not help. After switching to a French IP it worked like a charm. And one would guess searching for shopping and businesses would be Google's strength.

How do any of those make people talk inside closed Discord groups instead of the open web?

I'm sure public human SEO manipulation is at least partly to blame. The only thing that is surprising is that it isn't worse than it is. At least the first half page is usually close to what you want.

One of the last use case for Google is being a proper search engine for Reddit. But I think they are aware of their downfall, that's why the top of the page is increasingly taken by their widgets to provide directly the information.

On the other hand, Youtube is the second most popular search engine and I don't see it slowing down. What an insight they had when they bought it.

Edit : I entirely agree to the fact that valuable information is found more in communities nowadays. I also predict that the web in 5 years will be mostly explored through communities

> that's why the top of the page is increasingly taken by their widgets to provide directly the information.

Another reason for that is user retention.

If you get your information directly on google.com, you won't navigate away, probably search again, and bring in more ad revenue.

When I’m looking for reviews of a product I usually type XXX review Reddit to avoid the XXX top 10 list blog spam that google returns. I don’t want a review from someone who just jumbled together a top 10 list without ever looking at the product in person.

YouTube search is regressing quickly. They're losing there too.

> Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality

49 out of 50 review sites are now just affiliate links to Amazon. “Check the price on Amazon” buttons is the main content there

I've noticed this a lot lately. There are words on the page that look like a description of the product and a review, but once you really read them you see that they could be generated by a bot and they don't actually review the product, just describe the basic properties of it. Then they provide that button.

True, although Google has been knowing about this issue and has released guidelines alongside a "Product Review" algorithm update three or four months ago.

Let's see if things improve in the near future.

And many are on first page of Google search, the “best search engine” lol. We get what we pay for it. Where is pay for web search startups?

https://neeva.com/ is trying, but I doubt they're succeeding :-/

I think it depends on what you’re searching for, for dev related stuff no other search engine I’ve tried comes close. But there are whole industries now that are so heavily SEO’d that finding useful information without knowing the exact keyword to search for is incredibly frustrating

I agree, and I‘ve read the opinion too that it‘s a problem people have with DDG. Yet google doesn’t feel excellent at that. Could it be worth competing with google there? I‘m not gonna say it‘s "easy", but maybe worthwhile and possible?

I don‘t think I have used more than 1000 different sites in all development searches ever. It‘s the stack exchange network, github, official documentation, non-github official issue tracking/communities and some high quality blogs. That seems very manageable. You could probably index that into one elasticsearch and one sourcegraph instance. Add a little more specific faceted search, add back powerful and precise query syntax and still maintain "just past in whatever and hit the first result" functionality. I‘m likely underestimating the breadth of other developer needs than my own. I don‘t know.

I think a tool like that could be very valuable, as you said in most cases you end up in the same few common locations. Most of the time the reason I fall back on google is because I'm not sure whether what I'm looking for is going to be in a github issue, in a bug tracker, in a forum, in a stackoverflow answer, in a mailing list, etc.

There was a docs aggregation site I tried at one point that was quite useful, but without search across issues/forums etc. I didn't end up sticking with it

Google scholar search is still very useful.

DuckDuckGo is nowadays more useful than Google for my web searches.

You should try yandex.ru for all that interesting stuff. They don't censor any of it.

Google seems to also place less emphasis on search phrases. When searching for exact article names I easily find them on DuckDuckGo, but not on Google. Two recent search-term examples:

1. the scientific worldview needs an update

2. from reproducibility to over reproducibility

In general, google no longer primarily searches what you asked them but for what they think you want. This might be better for the average user but can be extremely frustrating when you are trying to find something more niche.

I think it is also the result of the whole "Ok, google" voice assistant push. It seems like Google switched to natural language processing and the old-school system of keyword searching is no longer effective.

Yeah these algorithms are so stupid. They always assume you want more of what you've seen before. For me it's usually the complete opposite.

Your examples seem to work for me (the second one only if combined with double quotes). Do you have more? https://snipboard.io/PYhNHW.jpg https://snipboard.io/HvRaiE.jpg

It would be cool to find datapoints for a proper bug report for Google :)

Well, there is always stuff Google thinks you shouldn't read about. Try these (both are first hit on ddg.gg and nowhere on google):

- Politics Influences the Science of COVID-19

- Ten elements of false covid narrative

- Josh Mitteldorf unthinkable thoughts

Whether or not it's Google's fault depends on how much you attribute the development of the advertising-driving distraction factory internet to Google's business. We can debate whether or not Google was ever really in the search engine business – certainly at one point the search was a useful tool. Today, Google search is a sort of glorified Yellow Pages*. Their main product is selling ads in this Nouveau YP. The results their search engine returns are now heavily skewed towards revenue-generating sites. Such sites may incidentally be informative, but they are generally selling something.

Edit: see this other HN story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27993564

This is not to say that all search results are bought, although of course those are present now, too. But overall Google presumes that whatever the user is searching for, the best result is one where the answer is "buy this thing".

For those search results that don't lead directly to commercial products, the revenue generation is indirect: through the collection of user preferences and activity, Google can refine its search results towards maximizing revenue. At the very least, the result is likely to be a site that has ads, some of which generate revenue directly for Google.

*In the old-fashioned Yellow Pages book, you couldn’t really “search,” but there was an index by category. It had many of the issues inherent in categories, but it didn’t take an expert to find things. Google search eliminates the needs for anyone to understand a taxonomy of businesses.

Google only recently started to totally butcher the Swiss search results. For some reason I could still find direct download links to movies and music a few years ago (kinda legal here).

Now such search results often don't even get a second page...

If 90% of what you’re searching for is keygens and „inside closed Telegram groups“, it might just be time to grow up?

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