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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Yep, search is getting more and more broken...

I remember all the "trump vs reporters" etc. compilations, that were funny... now searching for any of those terms (basically anything at all involving trump, or now russia) ignores almost everything in the searchbox, ignores all the small creators, just picks out the one keyword (trump/russia/putin/...), and show the CNN/MSNBC/... news related to that one term, and unrelated to other search terms in the search box.

We wan't search and "sort by relevant", not by "who we think is right".

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FYI, assuming you're talking about YouTube, you can still see these funny compilation videos by being smart with the way you apply filters to the search. To be honest I am actually reluctant to tell you this online because I think if YouTube knew about this they would remove it, just like dislikes.

Yep, youtube... but google search is not much better... corporate news and pinterest on top, then everything else. Funnily enough, sometimes the pages that scrape github issues get even higher than original github issues themselves.

Bilibili's search also seems to be just about as aggressive for videos on politically sensitive topics in China.

It also tends to prioritize recency a lot. Good luck searching for something with terms that have been in the news lately.

Good luck searching for someone who shares the first name of someone who has been in the news lately.

That's if they don't disregard your query and just return results for whatever they deemed to be close enough. So if you search for Simone Something, it will just disregard what you wrote and just return tons of Simon Something even if there's no shortage of results for your actual query! It's incredible that even when searching for a specific real person/name Google still assumes it knows better and just throw out letters arbitrarily. It would only be reasonable to do so if there are 0 results for the exact name or maybe just a "did you mean?" prompt for suspected typos.

It never used to do that before and that's the most frustrating part imo

it's done that for a long time, and you've always been able to force a match by wrapping a word in quotes.

(I don't think it's a 100% "must have this keyword" in the boolean sense, but it is an extremely strong suggestion to the engine.)

Maybe we have finally reached the point where people don't know boolean operators anymore though

>you've always been able to force a match by wrapping a word in quotes

This no longer works very well. A while ago I was searching for the linux syscall which is identified in the manpages as 'splice(2)'

If I didn't include quote marks, I basically got pages of junk.

If I did include quote marks I basically got a page of junk and then a single relevant link halfway down the second page followed by another page and a half of junk.

I know to use 'verbatim' now but still very much a downgrade in terms of user experience.

I thought verbatim was supposed to be wrapped in " not , '

But to your point, strict "___" searches do not seem to be respected as much anymore.

We have reached the point where google ignores them.

But credibility is also obviously a quality issue for information based search. You give people relevancy without credibility and that's just what we have today with the state of SEO. We might say that Amazon has such an issue with the lack of curation.

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