Comment by Reuzel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Reuzel | Hacker News Reader

- There is way more content to sift through, including video.

- There are way more Google users, including grandmas.

- Conversations have moved from discussion boards to walled gardens and chats.

- Google relies more on neural network embeddings, so does a better job when you type full sentences and semantic similarity.

- Google relies on authority signals and incoming links to a website, so non-commercial, hobbyist, or controversial content ranks way lower.

- Websites rely on Google for income, so they start producing what Google and its readers want to see.

- Spammers rely on Google for income, so those surviving after decades, have created massively successful linking rings and spam production pipelines looking at keyword search statistics.

- You were really good at Google searching years ago, having a harder time updating and letting go of what worked for you. Easier to blame Google for this.

As for tips: Anything academic, search on specific websites or Google Scholar. Anything technical/coding, search on StackOverflow. Anything cultural/commercial you want a peer answer, instead of a salesman answer, search on Reddit. Try to join like-minded communities where you can ask expert questions, and research new things in your field. Exact keyword match still works by enclosing keyword in double quotes:

    "sal dulu antasma"

>Anything academic, search on specific websites or Google Scholar. Anything technical/coding, search on StackOverflow. Anything cultural/commercial you want a peer answer, instead of a salesman answer, search on Reddit

This is a completely miserable experience, and walls off useful information into classes of people who "are in the know" about where the most relevant information exists.

And if you're that grandma searching for a birthday present for your grandson? Good luck. She's likely to be devoured by ads, if not an outright scam.

They asked for searching tips, not how to solve the problem of internet search. I have a few ideas for that too though.

Agreed on the miserable experience. Do you have any ideas on how to attack this? Perhaps Google started out with the right experience, but ads eventually toppled it. Perhaps Google never hit on the right experience. What gives?

>Anything academic, search on specific websites or Google Scholar. Anything technical/coding, search on StackOverflow. Anything cultural/commercial you want a peer answer, instead of a salesman answer, search on Reddit. Try to join like-minded communities where you can ask expert questions, and research new things in your field

This is much more like what Ye Olde Webbe was like. Sites competed to build communities that were repositories of information. Things like Reddit tried to build a generic silo so that they could silo information there, which I think is a bad thing long-term.

The biggest problem, as I see it, is sites just give up on doing their own search. Not surprising, as search is a hard problem, but it plays merry hell with the democratization of the Internet to foist the problem off onto Big Corporation Inc. to do the heavy lifting.

A related problem is that many sites simply don't have what could be called a "webmaster" anymore. Everything is contracted out, or part of a subscription service, or otherwise disconnected from the owner of the site having full control. If you're a small business that sells locally produced products, you're never going to appear in Google or Amazon searches, even if you have an Amazon store. You can't afford a full-time webmaster just for your site, and all of the various platforms, like Wordpress/Shopify/etc, deal in such volume that these small businesses will be largely ignored.

The ISV model for products like AutoCAD is possibly a good route. A team of well-versed engineers and designers can build things, but you need a direct customer representative to get at the juicy meat of what the end-user needs. Apply this sort of model to search, and you can aggregate over larger swathes of customers.

> Anything technical/coding, search on StackOverflow. Anything cultural/commercial you want a peer answer, instead of a salesman answer, search on Reddit.

Do you find this better? In my experience it’s nicer to just put stackoverflow, reddit, or (often, in my case) seriouseats in my google query. Reddit search in particular is pretty miserable.

Exact keyword match does not work as well as it once did. I question whether it's working at all on YouTube.

There's an interesting juxtaposition between your last point (people aren't keeping up with the times and instead blaming Google) and the commonality in your tips (don't use Google Search, use special communities).

That said, your tips are good. Thank you.

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