Hacker News Reader

Comment by kauguste281 | Hacker News Reader

Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they have all the same holes in the search results.

Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see something that organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text search (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever).

I feel there is a lot of untapped potential that gets missed by just trying to be a Google search clone.

View on HN

You mentioned things I hadn't thought of. Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that. It treats its power users like kids, and offers no complex filtering to do things like removing search results that require logins. Librarians love when you come to them to specifically refine your search. Google still has the most useful search, but they've taken away methods to get better results. I remember I was pretty upset when i couldn't search for images by exact dimensions anymore. Bing allows this.

Google's product direction has been inching backwards for a decade.

Going backwards and standing still often look the same. I think its both in this case to varying degrees. Google is competing against itself, obvious competitors but also obvious refinements that appear so regardless of actually being implemented. The no-login filter is a refinement that would be useful to many.

There are so many obvious improvements that could be made to gmail but there's no real way to do them as a consumer.

Googles priorities have been long shifted from products to money. They are now deliberately doing evil things for more money.

It is like taking small dose of drugs for fun, for sure it won't kill you immediately but it eventually will as people can hardly resist the temptation. Google has been came such a monster, even we know it's dying, but its momentum will keep it going for a very long time. And if it can correct its trajectory just a little bit, the collapsing process will be even longer.

> It is like taking small dose of drugs for fun, for sure it won't kill you immediately but it eventually will as people can hardly resist the temptation.

Very debatable.

No fun allowed. Or the implication is taking drugs for anything but recreation won't kill you. I need more guidance!

Taking drugs for fun won’t necessarily make you an addict or kill you.

Hmmm, only if you know when to stop and can actually stop, sure, no it won't kill you. But what if you cannot stop? Most importantly, I did not even mention which drug as those was never the point.

> I did not even mention which drug

Exactly. Heroin is pretty addictive, pretty fast.

Otoh, there is no lethal dose that we know of for magic mushrooms (psylocibin). You can take a lot and have a hell of a trip but no one ever died from a psylocibin overdose. And it’s not addictive in the sense that you’ll get physical effects of you stop taking it. It builds a tolerance that will make it have much less effect if you take too much too often so it kinda takes care of the problem this way.

Alcohol which is freely available to any adult can make you addicted and will Jill you if you take too much of it.

What about sugar? We’re pretty much all addicted to it, and it can kill in the long term (obesity, diabetes…)

I’m not a drug expert but I think it’s very detrimental to say that all drugs are bad, they’ll make you an addict and kill you, and they’ll liquefy your brain. This is FUD and it results in shaming. It also creates abysmally poor public policy like the “war on drugs” which has been nothing but a colossal failure and a misery generating system.

> Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that.

Google has removed features that it had 10 years ago.

I still don’t get why. It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it? What is the incentive to remove it and replace it with a needlessly more complex almost literal but still fuzzy search?

I do suspect the main thing people complain about currently with Google is the abundance of ads and the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long.

Approximate match allows you to sell approximate/related-match ads

Brilliant observation, never thought of it. Now the quality degradation kinda starts to make sense.

Exactly. Even within the ad platform they keep pushing advertisers to target ‘broad’ keywords instead of ‘exact match’ ones.

> It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it?

Greater scale = greater cost of keeping data hot in their search data-warehouses (esp. in light of contention over memory/caches.) Keeping around both a source-text string and its tsvector representation (or whatever Google's version of that is) is a "thing that doesn't scale" that they could provide at 1B queries/day, but probably not at 10B queries/day.

> the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long.

That's not the algorithm's fault per se; that's instead the fact that recipes can't be copyrighted, and so these sites can freely steal + repost one-another's recipes, and so you'll find the same recipe word-for-word on many sites, thus making an exact match in the recipe part not contribute highly to ranking any particular site. The 2000-word blog post, on the other hand, is actual Intellectual Property unique to the site posting it. So it only appears in the one place; and so when your query matches it, it ranks quite highly indeed.

> That's not the algorithm's fault per se;

Yes, it is. There are good recipe sites out there with authoritative, reliable content and fast loading times. Google says it prioritizes those things, I can identify sites that have them, and yet the algorithm doesn't favour them. That's the algorithm's fault no matter what memes about copyright law cause a proliferation of shitty websites.

Try Kagi.com, you can rank domains however you want

What I really want is biased search results of my choosing.

$10 a month for a personal search is a bit much. $10 a month for work related search is cheap. Give me results specific to my industry without having a super long query.

That's what Kagi lenses are for. Just try...

What I'm saying is that the "recipe" part of a recipe website is a commodity – there is no "authoritative" source for a given recipe, unless that recipe is too niche in appeal to end up widely disseminated. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsNLzyqqINw) has a pretty good coverage of the topic.

Compare and contrast: phone-number directory listings. Who should Google cite as the authoritative source for lists of name-to-phone number associations? Nobody. All the lists are copying from each-other, curating and correcting the data taken from one-another, gathering their own original data for additions, and everything in between. Every portal overlaps every other portal, but mostly has the same stuff.

Compare and contrast, in the physical world: printings of public-domain literature. If Google indexed bookstores, which printing by which publisher would you want them to rank first on a search for e.g. Pride and Prejudice?

(Neeva team member here) re: recipes. You might like the Neeva recipe search experience. You can see an entire recipe and reviews (without the ads or intro text) without navigating away from the search results page. Quick example here: https://neeva.com/search?q=baked+potato&src=nvobar

Because somebody could have crafted a superior search using their refined search as an API, destroying the Add Revenue

The last time this came up, Google demonstrated that it still worked. Most of the examples of it not working people tried to provide are actually just unexpected exact matches in the HTML that the standard user doesnt see, so they seem like false positives or "surprisingly good" results not based on the page content.

They didn’t remove literal search. Put your literal in quotes.

This stopped working reliably some time before last year.

Eh, it's not so much that it stopped working as it is that it never worked the way you thought it did.

Quotes have ~always been an exact match on the tokenized query text, not a substring match on the corpus text. No synonyms, reordering, gaps, etc, but the matches -- and failures -- are sometimes not obvious at first blush.

If you search for "don't stop me now", for instance, that "don't" tokenizes to "don t", so it will match the tokenized strings "don't", "don t", "don-t", "don, t", etc ... but not "dont", because that's outside tokenization.

On the other hand, snippets mostly are substring matches of the query text, so if you see a result to a literal query that doesn't have a snippet, you know it's probably one of the weird matches.

Why is it that exact searches used to actually work reliably, then? What's changed?

This has changed:

  term -term

In the past that Google search returned no results for any search. Today the set of results are altered before they are presented to the user. Sometimes the set of reslts is empty and at other times it contains results.

For example:

  steve -steve    returns 0 results
  test -test      returns 4,780,000,000 in my search
                  starting with google/youtube videos

That's easy; there are synonyms added for test but not for steve.

If you search for ["test" -test] you'll get no results; quoting "test" removes the synonyms.

It's probably not new behavior per se, but synonyms have gotten a lot broader over the years, so it was a lot easier to punch [term -term] ten years ago and hit a term which had no synonyms.

[test -test -tests -tested -testing] returns no results for me - teased out the synonyms!

Correct, though it is new in the sense of this conversation, which compares to how a search used to be.

The point wasn't as to what the synonyms were for a specific search term but that they have been added as implicit terms, which makes google search no longer exact.

I mean, I'm confident that the core of how it works -- "an exact match between the tokenized document and the tokenized query" -- hasn't changed in a very long time, but I can't really promise there wasn't another aspect I'm ignorant of that is responsible for the behavior you remember that changed somehow.

"Exact tokenized matching" can look like "exact string matching" a lot of the time. Until you hit some of the edge cases it's like kerning: https://xkcd.com/1015/

This is just patently false in addition to being condescending.

If you use quotes around a phrase, it will reorder terms and make substitutions with synonyms in addition to straight up ignoring the quoted phrase no katter how many times you add +. If you then fiddle with settings (randomly not available depending on star alignment and device) to change it to 'verbatim' it will still reorder and split up tokens in the phrase.

> What is the incentive to remove it and replace it with a needlessly more complex almost literal but still fuzzy search?

Control. They've moved from helping you find what you asked for, to trying to influence you to changingnwhat you ask for to the thing that paid them the most.

Similarly they're they're forcing creators to alter content to match their metrics or fall into obscurity.

>It treats its power users like kids

It's worse than that: Google's power user features used to work reliably and repeatably. Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it.

I've recently noticed that Youtube has a similar feature. If you search for a video, you'll only get a small number of results before Youtube will start showing you "recommendations" which are only somewhat related to your original search. Somewhat ironically, the only way to avoid this is to query via Google (site:youtube.com [term]) where you will get a much larger set of results.

It just seems that raw search is disappearing, and "recommendation engines" are appearing everywhere.

> Somewhat ironically, the only way to avoid this is to query via Google (site:youtube.com [term]) where you will get a much larger set of results.

Even more ironically and many here would have experienced this themselves: the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing

> the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing

Weirdly the same is the case for reddit.

What I really want I guess is, a search engine, where i can provide you sites to index, and when I am searching, I only search through those sites. That's it.

What about discovery of sites you don’t know about. The whole purpose of he internet is that we’re all connected, but you seem to want only an extended private network.

Google fails miserably over there too.

First page is full of results from a handful of sites.

A surprsingly large amounts of time I use Google, is to mainly to search on either reddit, stackoverflow, hackernews etc. Even searching for other sites is helpful using those sites i.e. searching for developer blogs gets far better results if I add reddit to it.

I think Google has it's place. However, I also think that an additional search engine like the one I described would be a very nice and useful tool. At least for me.

> Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you.

Google trying to interpret what you want is, in my opinion, the largest reason that the search has become so bad. It guesses very poorly, and I end up having to try to guess what the magic incantation is to get it to give the what I'm searching for.

"Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it."

This. So much this.

And it is so...bloody...annoying.

Honestly, Yandex has really good image search. I now do all three (Google, Bing, and Yandex) when I'm researching for a design.

I agree with you but I think the problem is that majority of internet users are casual users who don't care about complex queries. Maybe good business idea would be to make internet search engine which enables complex queries like the one you described. Google was made for masses not for power users.

Google had a "search only forums" filter. I was devastated when they took it away.

You can fake it by searching one forum at a time with "site:whatever.com", but you have to do one at a time and that doesn't help if there are forums you don't know about.

Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.

idk if you know this but kagi has a "discussion" filter (among other filters)

I feel this same way about a lot of aspects of Google search.

> Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.

It is now evident Google is not in the business of making its search any better.

Which is why we need more competitors in this space.

When you are an underdog, making something "better" even for no direct monetisation path, is an obvious win because it all creates more noise and attracts people to your platform. More noise = more business - but Google don't need more noise, they have all the attention they need, they are basically king, they just need to figure out how to milk it, which means the only intrinsic business force is direct monetisation paths... completely different incentives.

Where should the profit come from for a search-oriented product/business?

Governments

Because indexing the web and organizing all that information is expensive. It’s also a lot of power so we can’t exactly trust that job to a single government or even a group of allied governments. Universities could potentially handle it by pooling a lot of resources, but I can’t really think of who else I would trust to be The Search Engine. Google isn’t ideal but at least it’s priorities are mostly aligned with the average user’s.

Users?

Imagine that every Internet user pays just one dollar a month. That's still billions worth of revenue, and it can be segmented further such as basic features available for free and more advanced users (such as large-scale API access) can pay more.

Sadly, that's not realistic. You can get a subset of users to pay, but it's vanishingly small compared to everyone who thinks they are perfectly happy with the "free" status quo. Even a dollar a month, it is infinitely more than zero. I just had this conversation with members of my extended family and almost all of them were of the "I don't care if I'm tracked, I've got nothing interesting to hide" mindset, along with "not a chance in hell I'm going to pay for this, or email, when I get them from Google for free."

How about a company that provides a search engine, but as a part of a greater subscription service whose selling point isn't search? Imagine, for example, that paying for Apple One got you access to an Apple-operated search engine.

how about just sell your customers to Google? Apple had do this on Safari

There isn't a single scenario for any product or service anywhere that will get every Internet user to pay a monthly fee - not even for 1¢ a month.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a direct payment. Companies can white-label the service or include it as a value-add as part of their offering; for example an ISP or mobile carrier offering this to their customers.

At the moment I'm not aware of any company whose primary service is search. I believe the demand would be there - OS manufacturers currently have to either put up with Google (even if their goals diverge - for example it doesn't work well with Apple's privacy-focused marketing) or Bing.

A third player whose primary business is search (as opposed to using it as a loss-leader to lure people into their ecosystems, like Google and Bing are) could get some use, not to mention that programmatic access to large web index would no doubt be a service many companies would pay for. Think Algolia or hosted ElasticSearch but pre-seeded with a broad index of the web.

It doesn't have to appeal to every internet user. Not even most internet users. It just has to appeal to enough to make money, which is a substantially smaller number than the total number of internet users.

From a business model that doesn't make money off ads.

But do those forums run Google ads?

Yes

Are there any wrappers for Google search that try to implement a bag of these sorts of workarounds this with a nice UI?

This could be solved with selectable ranking strategies. Of course Google isn't going to offer that.

Shouldn't there be a way to only search multiple forums through some userscript? Only found out about userscript after messing around with an iOS app called HyperWeb.

At least in my limited understanding of userscript's capabilities, you'd still need to explicitly specify the forums you want to search, but I imagine that would solve lots of use cases for search filters.

Google has a limit to how long searches can be. So if it’s a complex one, it can’t be too long.

I think you can only specify searching one site at a time. With site: search filter.

—

Google’s custom search engine’s where you can give a whitelisted amount of sites isn’t very good. At least not any more. It didn’t include lots of pages it’s main index does. Or the rankings were all out of sorts rendering not useful.

Forums were somewhat decentralized. Without attributing motive, platforms are interested in moving in the opposite direction.

You can make custom search engines by selecting an explicit list of sites on top of Google here

https://cse.google.com/all

it requires a google account. I like teddit.net's approach of allowing the user to set up preferences and import them as a json.

> Google sucks compared to Google from years ago.

Sure, in the sense that someone who had their legs broken sucks at running. Compared to yesterdays, Google today has to deal with a whole new level of the entire world trying to game their search. It's easy to fetch good water when the well is clean and no one is trying to actively poison it.

> a whole new level of the entire world trying to game their search

I think their #1 problem is their product managers trying to do "something" to add said something to their resume and making the product horrible to use in the process

Examples include: - Grid view tab switcher in Chrome Android - Removing dislike count on YouTube

I partially agree with your comment, but it feels like in some/many cases the Google algorithm has large flaws that were not previously there and that (superficially) seem solvable. For example:

* If I search for recipes, the Google algorithm seems to heavily favour recipes with a short novel prepended to them. The “novel” does not have to be particularly relevant to the content - I’ve seen recipes with “novels” that I’m not convinced wasn’t partially algorithmically generated. Every human being I’ve ever spoken to hates this.

* Google will search for what it believes to be alternatives to terms, even when those terms are placed into quotes (which used to prevent this behaviour). This can be very irritating when Google’s alternative terms are incorrect.

Both of these are regressions over earlier behaviour, and don’t seem to have any obvious benefit to them.

Don't know about regressions. Did it maybe just take people some time to figure out that Google Bot is really, really captivated by a riveting story to accompany that pancake recipe?

Different types of these strategies have been around since before google existed. Hell, even web directories (like early yahoo!) had to deal with spam, early google had to deal with keyword spam. Paid backlinks, spammed comment sections with backlinks, copied content sites as backlink farms, all of this existed at least as early as 2005-ish. For some sites (some of them with legitimate info) the meta keywords tag (even though google stopped using it very early) was the bulk of their size for just this reason.

What has so radically changed the last couple of years to make spam take top spots on the SERP?

This is not 2005 spam. This is just how people are expected to write now. More people think it's normal. By spam being more content-like, and, in response, content getting inspired by spam and getting more spam-like, spam is getting increasingly indistinguishable from content.

As a xoogler, it was clear when the original search quality folks left and were replaced with people whose goal was to grow the product (and the company) without much care for quality.

Exactly. Google sucks because the internet that we remembered died long ago, hoovered up into social media.

The person passionate about beetles who would have a great website in 2002 now posts 38 post Twitter threads (at best) or Instagram/Facebook posts that are lost forever.

It’s sad as we had this amazing “long tail” effect where a company like Google could set out to organize the worlds information.

Unfortunately the economics drive new behavior, and the next cohort of big web companies sought to monopolize human attention. The more profitable ones like Facebook are masters of psychological manipulation, and the second string cohorts like Reddit who aren’t very smart/manipulative adopt a more hands off approach where undesirable content like porn juices engagement.

Reddit isn't manipulative? Have you been there recently?

They are manipulative, but not effective.

Am I the only person on earth who hasn't noticed any decline in Google results that everyone keeps talking about? To me it seems like people conflate the fact that there is now significantly more stuff on the internet (what's the data volume today compared to 2010, 100x? 1000x?) than there was years ago with the performance of search engines.

People say they now have to append "reddit" to their search and they didn't in 2008. Which is obvious because in 2008 there was only reddit and like 3 other sites, now there's dozens of relevant ones.

Yes. There is massively more spam, and they’ve made it do a lot less direct search matching (many results don’t include the actual word that matters for instance)

I’ve noticed more spam and shit sites but I’m not sure if that’s entirely googles fault. There might just be 1000x more spam sites now then a few years ago.

This is super useful: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

Removes sites that copy SO answers etc...

You don’t give Google enough credit: They totally can add a “report spam site” action in the search results, but they don’t, because they don’t care. It would help immensely to have websites disappear from search after 100 trusted Google users complain about them (after manual review). This stuff already exists and works on Google Maps.

Even the data collected from a personal blocklist would be useful for them, without explicitly reporting sites, but again they just don’t care.

They’ve been in the business of parsing websites for 25 years, surely they can tell ad-infested spam websites apart from good ones.

I think this is also because of potential abuse: there's nothing to prevent malicious SEO gamers from reporting legitimate sites as 'spam' to remove competition, as a means of extortion, etc.

Yes but I mentioned how to limit that:

> trusted Google users

> (after manual review)

> already exists and works on Google Maps

It is their fault when they've actively pressured real content into being indistinguishable from spam sites.

If you don't write like a drunk two year old and fill everything with key phrases now you simply don't appear in results, so any site that can become known has to be rewritten by gpt into barely intelligible garbage that dances around the point for four paragraphs when it could be communicated in four words..

Honestly I use startpage and I'm blocking ads so aggressively I barely know what Google search is supposed to look like.

I've also not noticed. But this is the most common topic on HN so I probably had/have different search habits to have missed the wonderful experience of Google 10 years ago.

Google meets my expectations for a search engine but maybe I'm not expecting enough from search?

> (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever).

These are all truly excellent and refreshingly imaginative ideas, in a conversation too often starved of critical thinking (elsewhere in this thread commenters, unable to imagine any alternative at all, are incredulously asking "what would you even replace it with?").

I would just say that search in it's traditional form is valuable too, and highly efficient. Or at least it can be when done well. I think millionshort search results are a good example of what traditional search can be.

Yeah well, that's what you want, and probably a decent couple of power users. And I totally agree.

But here is the thing:

My mom, dad and even my brother, they don't need that. They need the limitations aka borders, the "simplicity", the synchronisation and the search results. They still stick with Facebook, Google and Amazon because it's easy to use and their gate to the Internet, where all the smart people are living and the "future is real". They do not understand the drawbacks or they just don't care.

And I dare to assume that this pictures the vast majority of Internet users.

Good thing there's more of a market than your mom, dad, and even your brother, or alternative search competitors like duckduckgo and others would be completely screwed.

Maybe the market of people that are significantly different from his/her mom is just too small to justify the significant investments needed to build a search engine.

Or said another way: If 99% are happy with Google, can the remaining 1% pay enough to finance "Google pro" ?

Is there an alternative search engine right now that is both good and not based heavily on an incumbent by a large tech company (ie: bing)? If not then the argument isn't disproved.

This is actually what I worry about more.

I'm browsing with Firefox on Mac with adblockers, and have some knowledge of what the potential scams are.

Is Google actually helping the average user more than a hypothetical alternative?

Don't know, tricky question to answer, but whatever the answer is it's likely a society wide change, involving regulation and new business models and ethical consumer choices, not just a new search engine.

> Google sucks compared to Google from years ago.

Came here to write exactly that

Why are we still using it?

There's nothing better out there.

I've been starting to use kagi for search. I'm still using google by default, but when I get a screen full of ads and clickbait articles I turn to kagi and it's almost always better.

Maybe you should try an opposite approach. When kagi gives you useless results switch to Google.

This is what I do. Kagi gets there 95% of the time. Plus I get to down/up rank results. Plus no ads. Plus I feel confident I’m getting the best result for me and not for advertisers. Truth be told I’ve been using “site:reddit.com” for years now already.

Google still has the lead with the answer box and older results. They’ve been collecting data for longer and I suspect their indexing heuristics are incredible.

I wanted to love kagi, but they still have the same fuzzy search that makes it about impossible to find something odd that shares keywords with commonplace things.

You should try Brave search.

Google is still my default as 9 out of 10 I get the answer I need quickly. Bing does my other 10% where Google provides junk or stale results.... Google Search really is declining. I'm tempted to move my default over to Bing for month or two just to experiment. On the Maps front, I'm really enjoying Apple Maps as it has less junk - I just want a map!!

> I'm tempted to move my default over to Bing for month or two just to experiment.

I switched my default over to Bing about two months ago and it is surprisingly good. Subjectively I would say it is better more often than it is worse.

Untapped potential. exactly. To me the biggest problem isn't the results (even the ads) it's the lack of innovation. The lack of making search an experience and something that generates a value I can store and share.

I've been looking at several of the options talked about here. My favorite so far is Neeva (https://neeva.com) due to their "spaces" concept and how it provides a simple building block I can explore to address many of the use cases I have for search.

Search needs innovation and people trying new things.

> I want to see something that organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text search (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever).

Yes, I would love this. I was recently looking for reviews of a certain woodworking tool. The vast majority of websites googled returned were clearly bot created sites. I came away thinking I wanted a curated list of a few sites actually created by humans.

I really missed those days that I could write URLs I visited frequently on notebook. Unfortunately, we might never be no way back to the good old days. There is literally way too much info on the internet, and thus impossible to index contents manually.

I dont think it is as hopeless as you think. There are only so many websites people actually use for human-created content. Those should be prioritized. There is still the issue of differentiating between bot blogs and human blogs but I'm sure I could figure something out at a 200k salary, and google has plenty of people like that

So you want the search engine to perform a turing test? Nice.

I think there's also some inertia. I know how to tweak google.

I have also used some competitors. They are fine for most things (finding the hours of a local store, a restaurant's menu).

However, when the going gets tough (troubleshooting a technical issue, looking for a recommendation) I fall back to google.

Google works great for most daily tasks software questions, looking for a service/company etc

But when I want to do serious research on things like eczema, diet, backpain, exercise. Google absolutely fails (also Google scholar) I have to buy books, go through Reddit,listen to YouTube lectures etc that point to the correct literature and then you get to know the experts, different opinions etc.

All you find is these generic sites with basic advice which is common knowledge lik WebMD. Not bad, but they dominate the entire search.

I would think a heavy version of Google focused on in depth/experts would be great.

It generally even fails when you are looking for a product. If you don't know certain brand. I have been hunting reasonably priced stainless steel meat grinder(the grinding parts, not the body), but with google due to all SEO spam it feels like impossible task...

Yes, please bring web directories back!

Today we have more possibilities to manage that than in the early days. Many things can be automatically generated/crawled/MLed or crowdsourced. Browser extensions can help to categorize almost all important websites.

Data sources like Reddit, Stack Overflow or Wikipedia already have many websites categorized. We just need to combine the data.

I did a few experiments myself trying to drive hierarchies from tag data. It works surprisingly well. There is even some academic work in this direction.

Honestly at this point I don't think bing sucks vs google. Bing has less random junk in SERPS for a lot of searches, and seems less gamed by SEO companies, but it isn't really better enough to make a point of switching my chrome url bar over and breaking my habit of just going to google. If things keep going like they have been I wouldn't be surprised if I switch in the near future though.

I wonder what do you mean by "vastly superior". For search i use Kagi, for a browser i use Firefox. For mail you can use Protonmail or i guess there are other alternatives also. Only thing i miss is Gmail message threading. Other than that nothing else. So i think people are only used to Google, that's all. I don't think it's vastly superior in any area anymore

Plus I strongly suspect Google search no longer gives the most accurate answer, but the one most profitable for Google ads.

It would be funny if some site with youtube-style recommendations got popular because that's basically what I believe google is using under the hood already and it would be so easy for them to pivot to that style and then take over all the momentum the recommendation-style site got.

Why would an average user use such service? I was thinking about creating such "internet recommendation engine" so to speak but as my hypothetical project was progressing I realized that it started looking more and more like internet search engine as and when I started adding more advanced features. But looking from costs point of view it is cheaper to create internet recommendation engine than internet search engine.

I see the problem with Google search of today vs Google search of 10 years ago being that the first page of search has already become a "Youtube-style recommendations for websites". It's more like a curated list of "approved content" now.

I think companies have tried, but it simply hasn't worked. Yahoo tried to do a lot of this, and simply failed. Arguably they could have done it better, but I don't think many will have a better shot than them for a while more to come.

Brave search is fantastic, haven't noticed a difference since moving

I'm going to second that. Since switching off Google a couple years ago I have had fewer and fewer "failed" searches which required me to go back to Google to try the search.

The more people who use Brave Search (they own their own index), the better it will become. And right now I'd say it's orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others.

Haven't tried Brave, but I'd say DDG results are much better than Google Search.

I think it's down to personal preference or something.

Right now, DDG gives me the best search results of anything that I've tried. I know people who don't get the same quality results from it as I do, though.

I'm 100% convinced that the difference comes down to how searches are formulated. At least, the people who I know that experience poor quality searches seem to enter their queries as natural-language questions rather than search terms.

In my experience Brave is better than DDG for tech topics. But DDG so far is noticeably better for non-english content and image search, so I still use it as a fallback.

> orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others

used brave as my daily search engine for a couple of months and I must say this was not the case for me. Results for global EN topics were indeed better than ddg/bing in some cases (nowhere near an order of magnitude better, though), but results for any non-EN or local queries (think searching for major websites running for 15 yrs) were extremely poor in most cases.

Well that's a good point. I only speak English so I speak for my language. On the point of Brave vs DDG I think my main point is that Brave has its own index and DDG is based on ... Bing? ... I'm not sure. At any rate I don't think there's a comparison there.

I made an earnest effort to switch to Brave, but I'm back with Google for almost all searches because 1100ms+ result page loads are simply unworkable here.

I'm sticking it out, but I find that I have to fall back to Google on 1 out of 10 searches. Mostly technical ones.

But what really annoys me (and maybe I'm doing something wrong) is that one page of (slow) results is not enough. I understand that Google's 1,000,000+ results is also not necessary. But I often need more than 20. Come to think of it, I rarely need pages 2 and beyond when using Google. So maybe that's saying something about the quality of the Brave results? They're just not as good.

> Youtube-style recommendations for websites

Reddit?

Only so long as old Reddit remains intact.

Reddit is heavily biased towards new content and you have to know what subreddits to look for to find the interesting stuff. The nice thing with Youtube recommendations (after recent updates) is that it pulls out a lot of older content and it also has a pretty good understanding of contexts and topics, even pretty niche stuff. Plain Google search really has no way of exploring the web in the same way you can just do with Youtube recommendations. Also helps that Youtube is extremely low on spam, you get ads and product placement, but not the bot generated filler that is cluttering up Google search.

> Google sucks compared to Google from years ago

How much of that is based on general incompetence, SEO gaming, growing complexity of searches or manipulation (e.g. filtering "disinformation")? Or something else.

none.. it’s all because of paid placement taking priority

Search, "what hotel to stay in san francisco soma". You'll see that every single result above the fold is an Ad.

In fact it doesn't even give me a single useful piece of information. #1 result is a link to expedia. #2 is to hotels.com, #3 to the trip advisor. Scroll down Google Hotels widget. Then on the 3rd browser viewpoint page I get actual query results.

The result I got was a list, with maps and prices with an option to refine stay dates.

Not sure how that could be improved to be honest.

Next entry was a non-ad from Tripadvisor.

Here's my results: https://ibb.co/cv06gHg https://ibb.co/BwZX9FQ https://ibb.co/NCnBC6b

Yeah the second looks like what I got. (BwZX9FQ)

When weird search results get posted on HN, they're sometimes fixed within minutes. I wouldn't doubt that the search term was "fixed" by someone reading HN.

I got a list of hotels. not sure how it could be more useful

https://ibb.co/JxfY6BX

Here's my results: https://ibb.co/cv06gHg https://ibb.co/BwZX9FQ https://ibb.co/NCnBC6b

You are using an adblocker though

It's less about paid placement taking priority (as in intentionally degrading results) but more that there's no incentive to spend money improving organic search results where at best it'll do nothing and at worst decrease the profitability of paid results (people are less likely to click on them if the organic results are good), not to mention that crap organic results also benefit Google as these websites often have Google Ads or Analytics.

> manipulation (e.g. filtering "disinformation")?

This makes it basically unusable for anything that isn't a technical question, for which it is still reasonably good if you restrict to sites where it will likely get a reasonable answer.

If special interest groups aligned with google have a position on what you're searching though, it will simply be spammed outright and any evidence to the contrary either concealed or "fact checks" which consist of minor modifications on the core underlying fact in question spiked with something that is obviously false so that the fact check can say "false" whilst actually the underlying fact in question is not at all false. Even when those special interest groups are right, google is still useless because it will give you such a slanted view of the territory you will be utterly clueless as to what other sides of the debate even exist as anything more than silly strawmen. Most questions in this class people would be better served by just petitioning Blackrock and similar directly and asking them what they should think.

For commercial stuff it's almost as bad, I find myself having to figure out the underlying financial realities of the industry that produces x, then getting a summary of the market space by volume and associated data, then speculating on stuff that might exist within that market space that might be nice in light of whatever flaws afflict the market space in question, and maybe if I get lucky I'll find something through the reams and reams of valueless SEO optimised pop-up spewing complete and utter bullshit desperately attempting to capitalise on my assumed stupidity with their cookie cutter a-b tested "sales pitches". Most of the time I end up just going to alibaba or similar, finding vendors shipping actual large units with decent reviews, and then working backwards from there to what I'm looking for.

Watching google fall from something amazing to probably-worse-than-microsoft-all-things-considered tier was quite the eye opener.

I guess another major barrier for higher quality search is the deep web (discord, fb, private forums, etc.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com