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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

Yes, that is also my observation. They will show content that completely does not contain your query words if that content is just popular enough. The result is that niche technical topics get drowned out by related popular discussions.

Also, I am by now 100% sure that Google has just stopped indexing the long tail. Like if I search for function names of public source code that I downloaded from GitHub, Google won't find it. But of course, it's still on GitHub.

Similarly, Google will sometimes not find a single result for some Windows API function names, despite them being publicly documented on docs.microsoft.com.

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(same poster) BTW, amazon.com is in my opinion even more infuriating. I just searched for "Odense Marzipan" (which is a 100+ years old brand serving the royal danish court) and they show me pictures of gamepads made out of chocolate along with a note: Your search "odense marzipan" was automatically translated into "odicht marzipan".

Then searching for "odicht" out of curiousity, they auto-correct it to "olight". So I start with almond-based sugar sweets, follow their auto-correct twice and now I'm staring at headlamps. And even Google has no idea what "odicht" might have been, so I really wonder how Amazon decided to auto-correct from an existing product into a non-word.

Searching for "odense marzipan" including the quotes then works, but it yields the cringe-worthy message:

Your search ""odense marzipan"" was automatically translated into "„odense marzipan“".

(where the only difference between the first and the second thing is that they converted the ascii quotes to up and down sentence quotes)

"We know what is best for you, consumer!"

well, this particular instance is amazon

Thanks for introducing me to Odense marzipan (I have a job in Aarhus!)

I very much get the feeling that amazon and eBay "Don't like" Denmark – the former redirects amazon.dk to amazon.de saying "we deliver!" and the latter doesn't exist (but it does wholly-own a local alternative). Going to Denmark always makes me aware of how good the local Danish things are, and how inflexible and annoying the "global" options usually are by comparison. Riding roughshod over the language is a good example of this.

I've searched for a product with a unique name and Amazons can't find it. "Do you need help?" not even "I'm unable to find what you need". Nice.

The product is there. It works adding the company name.

I'm getting lots of results on Amazon UK, and also Google Shopping. maybe try setting your delivery location?

Amazon also really seems to push what they _want_ to sell over what they have available.

A while back I spent a lot of time looking around for a basic SATA bluray drive on Amazon before finally giving up. All I could find was burners for several hundred dollars when I really just needed a drive to quickly rip a single disc I'd bought. I spent probably an hour scrolling through results and trying all sorts of variations on search strings.

I eventually gave up and punched it in Google to get... kicked back to Amazon to a simple, cheap SATA bluray drive that had been there all along.

>Amazon also really seems to push what they _want_ to sell over what they have available

This is exactly it. Amazon isn't a shopping site, they're a corporation using third party sellers to offload the risk and cost of providing a wide array of goods. They let customers experiment with product offerings, find products that sell using their web site, then cherry pick the most lucrative ones to produce and stock to compete with their own "customers".

They're not a service for anyone but themselves.

I almost always filter for items shipped from and sold by Amazon. The only times I buy from third-party sellers are when the seller is clearly the manufacturer or a large distributor.

I just gave up on Amazon Spain about 2 years ago already. It's just completely impossible to filter and rank stuff properly, just loads of crap you don't want. I heard it's worse in Amazon US.

What I don't get about this companies (because this seems a problem shared between google, YT and Amazon) is when they optimize for clicks or whatever their KPI, what are they thinking is the outcome in the mid term?

I mean, IDK around you, but I'm the prosumer regular folks ask for recommendations. They may be safe for the time being but of course I'm going to contribute for their competitors getting klout.

I don't have an alternative for YT, but people watches me using DDG and whe they ask for recommendations for buying stuff I don't even bother with Amazon.

I'm not the type who pushes his decisions onto others, but I already got asked why I don't use google and amazon.

Amazon UK is mildly less crap than this.

I just tried using Amazon.com to order something to Hong Kong for Christmas - sweet Jesus I don't know why anyone would ever visit that site more than once. I ended up giving up and just ordering the things with the co.uk version and sending them myself.

They extra postage cost is nothing compared to the insanity of the .com site.

Amazon's search engine was systematically destroyed from within starting 5 years ago. It's entirely driven by revenue now and not at all by their faux customer obsession tenet.

Just try searching for a high-end appliance and watch all the Chinese knockoffs that will get ranked higher than the actual thing you're looking to buy. Sure, they cost less, therefore you're more likely to buy something therefore such changes tend to win web labs and go into production. But they've completely destroyed the intent of the search doing so.

This seems like an opportunity to build a "better" search engine for Amazon and reap the affiliate revenue.

There's got to be a reason no-one (to my knowledge) has done this: They probably forbid affiliates from doing their own indexing and ranking. Does anyone know for sure?

> They probably forbid affiliates from doing their own indexing and ranking. Does anyone know for sure?

They do. I came across a reddit thread where a guy had built a simple php-based search indexer for Amazon and managed to pay for his college through it. After this incident they apparently put changed their developer terms of service!

my favorite is when i see exactly what I want for a millisecond...

only to have it disappear somewhere to page 2 or 3 (if even!)

It must be a recent thing as well as I recall being able to get good results from them last year at Xmas when I was searching for some science books for the kids. This year my searches got absolute garbage in return.

Just a theory, but "dense" in English translates to "dicht" in German.

Amazon.com search is probably the worst offender of all the awful search engines. You can spend hours trying to find something you know is on there.

Yeah, Amazon search results are often infuriating. Most searches are flooded with similar items that need better filters and some notes on product differentiation. Amazon feels like a bazaar set up inside a Walmart where everyone is yelling at you to buy from them and you don't really know what you're going to get. I know it's a hard problem, but I can often look at the results and imagine some easy UX improvements. Maybe they have higher priorities than helping me buy insulated pants.

I wish shopping for consumer goods was as nice as faceted search on Octopart or Digikey. It seems that even for Amazon-sold products, either the products don't have relevant data listed accurately and consistently, or the faceted search doesn't let you query it.

(And that leaves aside the issue of the product page of a really nice wastebasket I bought years ago being hijacked by a meat slicer.)

I just wish DigiKey let you filter by price, or even sort by price on mobile.

Are others getting the same problem? I searched for "Odense Marzipan" on duckduckgo.com, google.com, amazon.com, and amazon.co.uk, and all of them return almond-based sugar sweets in the top links.

Amazon is absolutely terrible. Try this search, for example: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=A1990+trackpad+replacement

There is an actual product (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084GKQB9T) with all of my keywords in the title. I found it via a google search because I gave up scrolling through Amazon.

I actively avoid shopping Amazon where possible these days, just because it's such a trashy experience.

Maybe I am looking upon the past with rose-colored glasses, but I recall a time when shopping on Amazon was like shopping at a huge Target. A lot of well-known name brands mixed with some no-name stuff. It was a nice relief from the limited selection, daytime hours, lines, and out-of-stock errors at department and big-box stores.

Now shopping on Amazon feels like shopping on eBay or Aliexpress with fast shipping. Everything name-brand could be counterfeit, and everything no-name is a complete gamble.

Searching on amazon.com for Odense Marzipan works for me and is not automatically translated. No quotes needed.

Amazon search is horrendous garbage. I was trying to buy replacement ear tips for my earbuds. I knew exactly what to search for. Yet, Amazon search only returned the Large size and none of the others. (Clicking on the large listing only had the large size available. No drop down selection or anything) I go to Google and type in the same search and put Amazon in the search too. Immediately shows up as first result and I was able to buy them. I figured they were out of stock and that’s why I couldn’t get them. Nope - Amazon search is just that bad.

Google does a pretty good or better job of searching amazon.com than Amazon does, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22odense+marzipan%22+site%3...

> Also, I am by now 100% sure that Google has just stopped indexing the long tail.

Rather weird if true, but I can't really disagree with your observation. It seems like large parts of the web have disappeared in the last five to ten years.

Google do most likely index the sites, but their current algorithm just don't use them, because it as much a promotion algorithm at it is search.

I have a public repo on GitHub that just doesn't show up on Google.

Search for "github drv8830pico" - it's literally not in any results.

Actually, that might be because of their antispam filters. They were always fighting websites with countless subdirectories or subdomains, having completely wiped them off their SERPs in the past.

GitHub does fit the "huge website with lots of duplicate content" description very well.

Then again, Twitter seems to be doing fine. But I have a suspicion that they have some sort of agreement (and GitHub doesn't), because I have to regularly "report as spam" (note how that implies Google decides what's spam and what isn't) Twitter emails and they still pop up in the inbox after a while.

I mean, that's probably true, I just made this repo specifically to help people who are looking to control a DRV8830 chip from the raspberry Pico, and I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to find it if there is no combination of "raspberry pi" and "DRV8830" that would get you to that repo on Google.

Maybe, but then you get all the GitHub issue clone sites and all the Stackoverflow clone sites showing up at the top of the results with the original no where to be seen.

It might be anti-spam, but how is it this shit?

Haha I just tried and guess what? Your comment was the only result.

Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse? https://news.ycombinator.com › item 4 hours ago — But of course, it's still on GitHub. ... Search for "github drv8830pico" - it's literally not in any results.

DuckDuckGo works fine, though.

Yeah, this comment chain pretty sums up my experience. Google has become AltaVista.

AV respected your querries if I remember correctly.

And now thanks to you, google recommends me to look into DuckDuckGo for that search https://ibb.co/WKg4h6Z :D

It seems like a lot of github.com pages were removed from google’s index about six months ago.

Weird, is this it? https://github.com/WojTechnical/drv8830pico

Maybe there's no links to it from other places, or somewhere on github thats crawled / indexed frequently enough.

Considering this comment thread is seemingly quickly indexed, just posting this link might be enough!

Yep, that's it - and indeed, HN comment got indexed pretty much instantly by google, but for some reason that repo has been up for a few months and just doesn't show up at all(and it's not like google never shows any results from github either, so no idea what's going on - as someone else pointed out, it comes up first on DuckDuckGo just fine)

Well, ads and information are at direct competition, and we all know who's winning the battle. It seems Bing is better for most searches now, even technical ones because they seem to index more of github and stackoverflow than Google.

Man, ads really are the devil.

Yeah. Absolutely infuriating if you specifically use quotes and you get all sorts of dross not containing what you're looking for. Clearly they have figured out in some way that giving the end user what they want does not maximise income.

Google News too has become flaky. Often does not find stuff you know is there, or finds it one day, but not another. Hrmph.

I'm in a similar boat with the "Google Now" feed on Android. When I say "not interested", it fails to note that as expected, and I see the same news "story" pop up (usually different sites, but occasionally the exact same site!). It's likely related to the fact that it almost NEVER gets the subject/topic correct, so I can never use that option.

There was a time I thought I'd trained it to stop telling me about what celebrity said or wore what, but those are creeping back into my feed.

YouTube has started showing me the same videos over and over again! I keep telling it I don't want to see this content because I've seen it before and it keeps forgetting!

I absolutely hate the Google has changed the semantics of search so that it doesn't really pay attention to your keywords unless you quote them. In Google's mind you're not serious about a keyword until you quote it! Garbage!

Is there a market for a focused, specialized search engine, for example, relatively speaking -- google circa 2010 with all the specialized search operators etc... focused on technical content?

What does the business model look like? Ads (it would be in front of a very valuable audience of technical folks)? Or paid subscriptions (perhaps the community votes which resources get crawled / indexed)

Yes, I actually find Bing is now better for the long tail.

Most of my searches are for really old pages or really long tail stuff and Google just simply doesn't bubble them up, if it has them at all. I keep finding web sites lately from links on other sites and find myself asking "Why the fuck did Google not find this?" .. then I go back to Google and try to find it with keywords from the site, and nothing...

I also recommend switching to Bing. It shows me the results I'm looking for pretty consistently, whereas Google/Duck will sometimes give me Google's home page or the Washington Post's home page instead of anything even resembling the query I'm searching for.

Google definitely changed something about how they index or prioritize GitHub sometime in the last year. I used to frequently use Google to(successfully) find GitHub repos based. Lately, this does not work for me anymore; adding "GitHub" to my search query helps sometimes but I'm forced to search directly in GitHub many times.

You can test this- find a site you think is not indexed, search for the URL of Google, and then look at the cache and the date. I bet it’s been cached more recently than you expect.

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