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Comment by mountainriver | Hacker News Reader

The “google search sucks” rhetoric is getting a bit old. It works really really well and is free. I rarely ever have issues with it.

I think it’s just getting trendy to dog on

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No it is far far far less useful than it was a few years ago, I routinely now have to use a couple different search engines to find solutions to technical problems because google tends to weight sources it thinks I should be using for and not the sources I would like.

For example one software platform I use all the time has community forum that is almost useless because every post to the forum is simply met with "open a ticket with support" with no actual resolution, these post flood the google search results, however other search engines bubble up blogs, other forums, reddit, or other sources not just the set of sites over and over again.

Rhetoric aside completely, I can say with all honesty Google doesn't serve me as well as it did in 2014.

"google search sucks" message might lack finesse, but I think it conveys something real--like, a search engine completely optimized to the user using state-of-the-art algorithms, etc. does not exist, perhaps because Google hangs out around "good enough" and would kill anything on the way up.

google "sucks" because ads. It might have other problems, but when you can buy your competitor name as a keyword ad and on mobile you need to scroll 1+1/2 screens to get to maybe the 1st organic result and the ad is barely different from the organic, you end up with a sucky search engine, no matter the algorithm.

The competitor website is not a slightly suboptimal result for the query: it's literally the wrong result if I'm not adding "alternative" to the search query. I'm sorry.

Only on HN. Virtually none of the "problems" described on HN at the intersection of tech and society are seen as problems out in the real world.

Oh, they are all the time, but they are posted here 5 to 10 years before we see them crop up in the world outside of here.

"DRM bad" was common here long before the days people were figuring out that getting their blue ray player working with their TV was going to be a pain in the ass.

Just wait and a few more years and it will be mainstream that Google actually sucks.

I know quite a few highly-non-technical people who have been talking about how Google's results are frequently omitting words from their queries for a few years now.

Thx I laughed. But nobody thought BlackBerry phone sucked except Jobs and his team that's why Apple is multi-trillion dollar company today. The same thing can be said for Gates, Page, Zuckerberg and other computer tech people who rejected conformism and status quo. This phenomena is called Innovator's Dilemma.

I disagree. There is bound to be more than a non-tech person that notices that Google has gone downhill, and is confused because it _feels_ like they were getting better results 10 years ago, but has no way and knowledge to confirm that. Regular people were using Google during its golden age in the 2000s already.

Its only even really trendy here on HN. This place is getting less and less useful over time.

I agree.

People have forgotten that Google searches for tech stuff 10 years ago used to exclusively returns results from sites like Experts Exchange with solutions behind paywalls. I'm glad Google did something about that. And, of course, thankful that sites like Stack Overflow came along.

I don’t know what people are expecting of Google. I use it like the Yellow Pages was thirty years ago. I use it to find answers to interesting but ultimately inconsequential questions, like “when is Joe Biden’s birthday?” I crank computer error messages into it.

Google was never good for much else. Generating good content is expensive, so most of it is not on the free Web. Never has been. People are expecting it to provide buying advice, or intelligent counsel for their problems, or wisdom from experts. Google was never good for that.

The last part of what you wrote isn’t what a lot of people are saying. At all. I don’t want any of that. I didn’t see many comments wanting that. Most want proper filtering and other older previously functioning features like more scopes and respecting plus sign, quotes, and so on.

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