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Comment by 1_player | Hacker News Reader

Google Search has been going downhill _fast_ over the past 5 years or so. Since it's probably incompetence rather than malice, what the heck is going on at Google Search? It seems to me the "let's use AI for everything" camp has taken over the entire place even though it's making Search worse than it ever was.

And please spare me the excuse that now Google can answer questions. It can't, it just answers with snippets extracted from websites it deems relevant, and often the answer is flat out wrong or irrelevant.

I just hope the ML/AI mania that has taken over these big tech companies proves to be a fad that just goes nowhere like it did in the 70s and we return to plain old algorithms and good software engineering.

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>It can't, it just answers with snippets extracted from websites it deems relevant, and often the answer is flat out wrong or irrelevant.

I recently searched the name of a YouTuber I was watching, the top "People also ask" suggestion was "Is [name of youtuber] married?"

I didn't particularly care but clicked out of curiosity. It expanded to show a snippet from an old (1980s) NY Times article about a completely different person getting married long before this particular person was even born.

Google AI using other companies' content to provide wrong answers to questions I didn't even ask... That says it all.

Just like pretty much every other thing online Google (search) is constantly in danger of being run over by people acting in bad-faith to game the system.

Of course their actions have not been perfect but it is a mistake to say that their search would be better as a "plain old algorithm" no matter how well-engineered it is.

I'm certain that search results would be worse than they are now if the algorithm was just "grep but for the whole internet". Or that, in that case, the careful complexity necessary in each search to exclude all the SEO garbage would be unbearable.

Eh, I don't know. There was spam but search was useful.

Now there's still spam, and search is useless.

Also, I don't think people remember how much interesting stuff is on the internet. There used to be tons of results from small sites of blogs which are still there, but not listed on Google anymore. Modern Google has made the internet incredibly smaller. Everything is still out there, hidden from our searches. It's like their algo has been tuned to favour silos, spam or content silos that is, to the detriment of the long tail of small, hobbyist websites with high signal-noise ratio.

If I search "who gave away Anne Frank's hiding place?", Google confidently gives me the answer "Miep Gies".

I don't know why Google would even suggest this -- Miep was one of Anne's helpers. Imagine all the other people out there having their names unfairly smeared by Google's algorithm.

Interesting. Using that query on Google Denmark (google.com/?gl=dk) gives a more plausible answer, Van Maaren, but Google US (google.com/?gl=us) gives the wrong answer, Miep Gies.

That is interesting! Unfortunately if I try Google Netherlands (google.com/?gl=nl) I also get Miep, so it's not just a US thing.

Happy to report that Kagi Search (a newcomer and one of the three search engines that can answer questions like this) gave the right answer. Both Google and Bing got it wrong.

No way I'm going to pay 10$/mo for search cleaning (they're just a search proxy), if it was reasonably priced at something like 1$/mo I'd consider it.

For a counterpoint, in my world search is a close third after my development toolchain and my browser so I would find it reasonable to pay - given that I get better service from the paid service.

You have to ask the really hard questions. Like the ones every 5 yo could answer without thinking. E.g. try: "What can you do with a car/book/gun?"

Be suprised the answer isn't drive/read/shoot^^.

Maybe some PM realized:

Worse search results -> more Google searches -> more ad views

And if the spammy, garbage pages now appearing on results page #1 also use Google ads....

Good point. Users only know about Google at this point. And won't even consider another search engine.

That backfired then (well, for me). I use DDG now because if my results are going to suck either way, I’d rather have privacy.

I've been using DDG for years, and its quality has recently gone down too. I was accustomed to using !g to search Google, but now I'm very surprised to find that the Google results are worse!

Google has completely lost the plot if DDG is the engine with the better results.

Yeah, it’s at the point where search engines are now closer to shortcut bars for me. It’s rare that I don’t have to append “wiki” or “Reddit” to my search in order to find a decent result (which I assumed existed before I even searched it).

I wonder what the consequences are for discoverability on the web. It can’t be good. Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic, but it seemed like there was a time I discovered new and cool web sites. Now all I discover is ad spam clogging up the tubes.

> I wonder what the consequences are for discoverability on the web. It can’t be good. Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic, but it seemed like there was a time I discovered new and cool web sites. Now all I discover is ad spam clogging up the tubes.

I feel the exact same way too. I can't even discover blogs with solutions any more (even ones I know exist because I've seen them before), it's all just spam.

I don't think it is a PM. Googlers are generally nice.

I think it is a second level machine learning system that has gone haywire and nobody knows how to fix it, or they lost the keys, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397797 for a real life (or not : ) story.

>I just hope the ML/AI mania that has taken over these big tech companies proves to be a fad that just goes nowhere like it did in the 70s and we return to plain old algorithms and good software engineering.

It's now being used by law enforcement. Sponsored by an errant swat raid near you. Don't worry, they'll prosecute you anyway to cover their ass. Can't risk losing their pensions, ya know. /scared

https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/product-feature-artifici...

The plummet began around '08 or '09, to my recollection. It was as if, over a period of a few months, they just completely gave up trying to fight webspam shit. Simply surrendered.

It reminds me of the scene from the original willy wonka from that era, where they are trying to use a computer to predict where the next winning ticket will be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMZ2j9yK_NY

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