Hacker News Reader

Comment by gverrilla | Hacker News Reader

Google is like an abusive partner: it may be gifting you something nice, but in the end we all know he's doing it only to soften you and hurt you later. It started like a beautiful love story about knowledge and freedom, but now Google arrives drunk and hits us with a keyboard every night.

View on HN

> Google is like an abusive partner: it may be gifting you something nice, but in the end we all know he's doing it only to soften you and hurt you later.

Wasn't this something nice just a normal, granted thing at the start of this relationship?

I'm not using their services for few years now but I remember the search engine working well with quotes in the past - before they started bubbling people in personalized results.

Google seems to periodically disregard pretty much everything they said they supported in terms of search options. Whenever I try something else to actually get the results I want (or remove the ones I don't) they throw up a captcha and treat me like I'm some criminal hacker warning me that my IP address has been logged.

Sadly, even duckduckgo can't seem to figure out what the '-' operator means anymore.

Here I was hoping that by now we'd have a decent search engine with full regex support, but instead I'm longing for features we already had 20 years ago.

full regex support sounds incredible, but is probably pretty damn hard to do now with the scale to which the internet has grown.

You're probably right, but our servers have greater capacity and capabilities than ever and in a lot of ways, the web is a whole lot smaller than it used to be. Most people have a handful of sites they regularly visit and they only occasionally stray outside the confines of social media. Reddit alone caused the death of countless forums and online communities. Most of the search results we see today are just useless spam. Once you strip out the ads, the massive amounts of JS and the CSS the text you're left with should be easily compressible and quick to parse. The actual content people care about is more centralized and standardized than it's ever been. That has to count for something.

Google does provide regex search of the Chrome codebase:

https://source.chromium.org/chromium

For example, if you are interested in knowing how people typically tag raw strings in c++:

https://source.chromium.org/search?q=r%5C%22%5Cw%2B%5C(&sq=&...

Disclosure: I work at Google.

I've also found DDG ignore quotes often too.

What you mean by minus operator? If one that exclude word from search results, you're wrong https://imgur.com/a/mOYUGsG

Yup. Those work as intended with DDG:

    hacker news -site:ycombinator.com
    office -microsoft
    picard -"star trek"
    japanese fish and rice -sushi

heh, not only was: 'office -microsoft' filled with microsoft links but when i tried 'office -microsoft -site:microsoft.com' all I got was a blank page!

I'll give them some credit though, using duckduckgo.com I only got a page full of Microsoft that shouldn't have been there. It looks like it's https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ that has the blank page problem

Are you talking about duckduckgo? I tried `office -microsoft` just now and got the expected results: tv series, tv series podcast, government sites, bunch of businesses named Office. Nothing about Microsoft Office.

Huh, it's showing Microsoft stuff for me:

https://i.imgur.com/jrNw5LX.png

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=office+-microsoft&t=h_&ia=web

Interesting. I clicked your second link and I still got the results respecting the negative operator I mentioned in my post above.

Edit: To confirm, `office` alone returns a page full of Microsoft results.

If anyone from DuckDuckGo is lurking by any chance, I'd love to hear what makes it different.

I have these same results. Maybe there's an active A/B test where one bucket has a working search engine.

Yeah. For a site that claims to help people escape the filter bubble this seems like evidence that they don't. Maybe it's your location, or your typical searches that are giving you better results, but duckduckgo fails that test for me every time.

I'm sorry but that behaviour is very, very flaky in Duckduckgo and breaks for me regularly.

Filtering retailers out of search results in Duckduckgo can be very difficult because of it.

An trivial example that springs to mind recently was trying to search for information on the manufacturer of Hycosan Extra eye drops.

The results are swamped by ecommerce sites with no actual information on them. Adding terms like "-pharmacist" or "-retailer" actually boosts sites with pharmacist in their URL to the top of the results.

I sometimes have the same issue searching for programming topics where the results are swamped by Microsoft related tech. That would be fine if that's what I was searching for but when it's not it's a real pain in the arse. Using "-microsoft" or some other exclusion just boosts the incorrect results from Microsoft's own site even further.

Sometimes Duckduckgo fix this behaviour but it seems to break randomly for me.

For real. My first thought on seeing the headline was to click through and find out how they were ruining it. Probably most of my queries have quotes in them, just to try and enforce some sanity on the results I get.

Instead this appears to be restoring functionality that was lost. I swear Google used to actually do what this blog post says Google will now do, and I’m not sure when it disappeared, just that I stopped looking at the text blurbs since what they show usually isn’t what I got. Maybe that will change now with this backpedaled change?

At least they’re not ruining it.

i get your point but this is really pretty dramatic.

it’s a website. not everything needs to be found, let alone searched for

"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. […]. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page

Great quote (given the context) - gonna go give this a read now, thanks.

Almost everything posted on this site is blown way out of proportion. Google is a tool you can use if you want. The vast majority of people think it works great. But from the comments that get posted here you'd think the government is sending police forces to bust down your door if you don't endure an hour of google waterboarding.

My increasing dissatisfaction with Google’s core product, what made it a company in the first place, it’s prime product, it’s raison d’être, Internet search, is because it now seems to fixate on the most generic terms in my query and returns answers for a question it assumes I have - rather than just being a powerful keyword search like it was two decades ago.

You can still use something while lamenting that the product is not as good as it used to be.

Early google represented "the good guys" against the bully Microsoft.

Back then, they created Google Talk which rivaled MSN. Android started as a "open source mobile Linux" which rivaled Windows Phone.

People trusted Google as the good guys open source powered company and, when it got big enough, it screwed everyone over.

And that disappointment and outrage is still there

> when it got big enough, it screwed everyone over

How did it screw everyone over? Almost all my non tech friends adore most Google products.

You may feel screwed over, meanwhile a billion people happily chug away on Google, GMail, and YouTube.

Inferior products can still be popular, how surprising.

Seriously though, the only actually valuable thing Google has at this point is its market share.

Given it's an inferior product, weird how nobody's come and made something better and eaten Google's lunch, isn't it?

Network effect; can’t really compete until the current monopoly is solved. Also it’s disputable whether a business model based on invading peoples privacy should be legal.

What does Google have a monopoly over?

(Hint: nothing)

Every market it's still in, from search to mail. Google can't compete on markets it doesn't already have monopoly; see... well, see the vast majority of its products.

Ok they broke Google Talk however they actually made Linux mainstream, something no one else managed on this level before.

lol what ? I'd give Google a lot of credit for a lot of stuff, including all their Linux contribution to the kernel.

But stating "Google made Linux mainstream" ? I can't see how ? I'd wager orgs like Ubuntu had a lot more todo with making "Linux mainstream".

Linux is now a majority of active devices on any website statistic.

It's not unusual to have more Android users on any given day than windows, Mac and Linux together.

How is that not mainstream?

But I can’t search for things I know exist and very much want to find. I could previously do this with the same search syntax, really hoping this announcement means I can again.

And if that seems dramatic, in the intervening period do you want to know what Google served me for very specific search terms? Malicious content and very little else.

that sounds frustrating but it’s not the same as being with an abusive partner

Consider that the analogy is intended to illustrate the mechanisms at play, and not the import.

A bad analogy is a bad analogy. If you want to illustrate the mechanism at play, come up with an analogy that fits the situation.

I'd agree that it's an overall failed analogy because people here are being distracted by the intensity signal, but I still see it as a good analogy for the purposes of illustrating the mechanism.

I’m sensitive to the distinction you’re making, I have had abusive partners. One of whom is a routine and often daily reminder of things I’d like to leave behind but haven’t yet been able to. I didn’t take the figurative way the other comment was phrased to mean literally that. Because you’re right, it’s not the same.

If you don't like him then go to your other friends! What, you lost contact long ago? Do they even exist anymore? Too bad. Sounds like we're stuck together for a long long time.

You've clearly never been in an abusive relationship. At best it's a bad faux-dramatic attempt at humor that trivializes what abuse actually means.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com