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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

I’d pay a good deal of money to have early 2010 style Google back.

Mainly:

- No AMP

- If I quote a string, you better be goddamn sure it’s present on the pages that you show me.

- One ad per query. These days the organic results are after the page fold. This is unacceptable for something that’s supposed to be a search engine.

—-

The second one gets little attention but it’s infuriating to me. I mean, I’m explicitly telling the engine what I want. If it’s not including it in the results, I might as well not even be here typing. Just show me whatever it thinks I want based on everything it knows about me. And no, unfortunately verbatim doesn’t always help.

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This is symptomatic of the fact that the users are not Google's customers. Google search is intended to direct you to the pages which are most profitable to the company. If you happen to find what you're looking for, so be it. If you don't find what you're looking for (because it's obscure and unprofitable) and instead get distracted by something Google would prefer you to see (because it's profitable) then all the better.

The fact that you're a power user puts you in the minority of (likely unprofitable) users anyway, so Google doesn't mind inconveniencing you. They seem to have a pretty fierce anti-power-user culture, as evidenced by all of the (power user/ hacker popular) products and features they've killed over the years.

We've got a lot of work to do if we're ever going to bring back the web we all remember from the old days.

>If I quote a string, you better be goddamn sure it’s present on the pages that you show me.

I'd pay significant money for this (20-30 USD/month), plus very few search operators that actually make sense (i.e. and, or, not).

But yeah, we got AI instead ... (pure crap IMO)

I’ve been craving for a “grep for the web” for decades.

I had a funny one today where I had some weird arguments for a CLI thing I was googling, so I put them in quotes, and Google continued to return results with the "not containing: foo bar | show only results with 'foo bar'" thing under them. Clicking the link just put more quotes into the search string, until my search bar looked like: wixl ''''''foo bar''''''.

Check out https://neeva.com/

Paid search engine that I switched to last month. Best feature is no ads. You can hook up your private data silos (Notion, Slack, Google, Dropbox etc) and all results appear directly in regular search.

I don’t ever see myself going back to whatever the fuck Google has morphed into over the years.

I'm interested but most search engines give terrible results for Australian searches (increasingly true for Google too, which used to be good at it). How does this one go at not being America-centric?

Update: I'll answer my own question. They didn't even let me sign up.

I remember when you could put a '+' in front of a keyword and it would be in the results ("+keyword").

Then google+ hijacked that and never gave it back.

How about image results that are actually images? Now all you get is videos unless you type half a novel's worth of site remover arguments.

I think you are describing DDG.

DDG, but actually returning search results.

I made DDG my default, and it's great for 95% of my usage. For specific things where I know there should be better results, then I add a !g or !gi to the search query, which redirects to google or google images.

Yeah, I have done the same. DDG is pretty decent! ... and, I totally did not know about the !g/!gi, thanks for that!!

Check out bangs: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

You usually don’t even need to remember them, for most somewhat popular sites you can just guess the bang, and it searches there.

Ah nice, thanks! I feel like I've seen that page before and just totally forgot about it. haha :)

This. Everyone talks up DDG but it is literally one of the crappiest search engine out there. You never get what you want immediately. I think Bing and Searx are better options compared to DDG.

I thought DDG was bing, just with some privacy

Every time I search for something on DDG and there are no/few results, if I do the same query on Google I only get the insane spam/"hacked small business" websites with random SEO that redirect to arbitrary ads.

And of course Google's own promoted results which are usually only vaguely related to the topic (for example if I search something programming-related, I'll get ads for Udemy or whatnot, but not even a specific course)

In my experience, DDG is just as bad as Google at producing results that don't match quotes exactly, and almost effectively just adding random results...

It's like they both just want to add something to the results, instead of saying "can't find anything else".

I happen to use both bing and DDG occasionally and the results are plain bad so I end up using Google anyway.

I should try the opposite though: when Google SERP is useless, try others.

This has been my experience as well. Google, Bing, DDG, they all fail to work well in some major form or another. Google and Bing don't let you do explicit search demands with quotes; all the power tricks for search are gone and I routinely find myself frustrated with trying to find some things-- especially if they fall into the gaps where Google insists on excluding a term.

I would gladly switch to a search engine that just got it all right in the way that Google pre-2010 did.

I’ve been using DDG for a few years now. They are even worse than google at honoring phrase search. In addition, google sometimes even tells you that they ignored some terms. DDG is just silently searching for some crap you never wanted to search for "to help you". It’s by far my #1 annoyance of DDG.

DuckDuckGo essentially ignores negated terms. Try searching for `49ers -football` and you get a front page full of football links and nothing about the gold rush.

By verbatim I assume you mean quoting a string. Example query using that that you consider unsatisfactory?

After you do a search there's a 'tools' button. Clicking it gives you a dropdown with the option to change from 'all results' to 'verbatim'. There's also the 'Advanced Search' https://www.google.com/advanced_search where even if you enter a word in quotes in the 'this exact word or phrase' box you still get results without your query.

I don't have an example query, but it happens all the time. I put a query in quotes and google gives results that neither have the quote in the page blurb on google nor on the destination page.

Having to click around to get a normal search is clearly an anti pattern. Forcing someone to reach for thé mouse rather than simply typing is an insult.

The default search engine can be changed in the browser so that it always invokes Google Search in Verbatim mode. However, there is a side effect that Wikipedia is replaced with strange mirrors in the search results. And some of the desirable fuzzy searching is also lost.

Is the quote string to enforce it still usable anywhere? DDG was always even worse than google at this, and I miss being able to search for phrases.

This all got sacrificed when the mbas and bean counters took charge of GOOG..

Also not applying a political, moral, business-driven, or any other bias in returning results that they want me to see rather than what I want to see. It used to nearly perfectly match my intentions with the request until they got too big and caved to the establishment and money.

A couple of things.

1) People in charge of these features know objectively how pissed off some of their users are. It's done for one simple reason - it brings more advertisement revenue. Google employs some of the smartest people on the planet and they have the demonstrable capacity to build what savvy users like yourself (and me) like.

2) Vast majority of the people are ambivalent and apathetic to these things. The scale at which Google operates is absolutely mind bogglingly massive. Savvy users are the extreme edgecase.

I just don't see any reason to expect a mass-market product or service to serve savvy users. There is a fundamental mismatch in expectation and requirements.

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