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Comment by erklik | Hacker News Reader

Down in Sydney. Intermittent errors when searching.

How am I supposed to work? Also, I don't remember when Google Search was last down. Either google has great uptime, or I have terrible memory.

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Bing works pretty well most of the time. I switched my personal primary search engine to bing around the beginning of this year after noticing a marked degradation of Google search quality.

In fact, anecdotally, Bing is markedly better at narrow search results (quoted phrases, excluding or including specific words, etc).

Google on the other hand is significantly better at what I’d call fuzzy searches, where you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for but have some vague idea (some esoteric spelling, or that type of apple that has unique properties but you can’t remember the name of, etc.)

I've had to search stuff in bing because for some reason google had only the shitty mirror sites for github issues/stackoverflow/whatever indexed. I could literally do a quote search and not get the original source.

I feel like I need to read the manual for specific Google searches. Sometimes, it seems to drop an important search term and not give a suggestion link to include it. +term doesn’t help sometimes. It seems like +”term” usually does.

It seems overfitted to delivering results with mass appeal. Perhaps I’ll try bing the next time I get that tingling feeling google will throw out the search terms intended to narrow down what I want to find.

My guess is, storing the whole index is expensive.

So they just look at popular (or profitable) queries.

They retired the + when Google+ used it to mark accounts or something. To require a term be verbatim in the result pages, just put it in “quotes”. The - however still works, afaik.

Using bing is just coding on hard mode.

My memory suffers more outages than Google Search for sure!

Hi! My name is Sam.

I'm assuming you mean Tom? https://youtu.be/iN_BDcKhtWk?t=32

Try Duckduckgo? Indeed, I don't remember when Google search was down last time either.

DDG is mostly (but not all) Bing (context, yegg is the founder of DDG): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31492631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31490994

DDG is great, but as the other commenter said, it uses Bing mostly as its underlying search engine, which might not get you the results you're looking for (it's better at some things than Google, worse at others). For privacy though, DDG is great so I use it as my first-line search and then go to Google if I really need to.

Go over to the dark side http://Yandex.com . It's the only thing that's decent that doesn't rely on Google or Bing.

Only if you want to read Russian propaganda.

Probably depends what you are searching for. Some sql or Go topic should be fine. Info in NATO probably not. Then again, there are topics that are full of propaganda on Google too, sadly.

Google simply shows you what it thinks you want to see, as long as nobody (with money) complains. Yandex shows you what the Russian state wants you to see. And they aren't even subtle.

Do you have an example? A simple search of information around the Russia-Ukraine conflict has Yandex actively suggesting I search for the "Russian-Ukraine war" (despite references to a war being illegal in Russia) and the first result is a Russian wikipedia article that seems, if anything, pro-Ukraine.

Looking up "Putin election" delivers me several prominent articles saying Russia's most recent election was fraudulent.

I'm guessing it is different if you are actually based in mainland Russia and using Yandex, but it does not seem so tilted as you are suggesting for Western, english users.

Interesting, I never used Yandex tbh. I thought it was under indirect state control, like vk and others. Will try to use it more often to see what results it has.

They are. Their news section only has media that is state approved. They probably don't even have much of a choice, if they don't want to be shut down...

I'm in Germany. I simply searched for "Ukraine" and set the result language to "German". The first two results are from "Russia Today" and "News-Front", both well known for skewing facts or outright lying. "News-Front" for example reports that Putin is supposedly very popular in Germany and Austria. This isn't true at all. The only people who are worshiping him are the far-right and far-left. They are not the majority.

Searching for "Deutschland" results in "deutschland.de" which is ok but then, once again, followed by "News-Front" and "anti-spiegel", some crappy Wordpress conspiracy blog. I also took the liberty to search for "Proteste in Deutschland" (protests in Germany), and low and behold: First 3 results: Wikipedia, "Russia Today" and "Report24". The last one yet another propaganda website run by "Querdenker" (our version of Qanon-style Antivaxx nutjobs).

Searching for "Ukraine Krieg" (Ukraine war) once again leads to RT and News-Front.

"Energiewende" is also a quite popular word in Germany. What does yandex say to this? Again, first 2 results are ok. Third result? That shitty Querdenker page "Report24" again. 5th result is Russia Today. And somewhere at the end i even spot "Reitschuster", a known right-extremist blog.

There is no way in hell, that these websites are so well optimized, that they outperform every single outlet in existence, for pretty much every keyword i can think of just now. Especially not some shitty Wordpress page (Report24) that was clicked together in mere days and online for just a single year.

Searching for these keywords in the localized version of Google and even Bing gives wildly different results. There is no sign that any outlets are preferred. Sometimes i see right-leaning sources on the top of the first page, sometimes it's left-leaning, other times it's some trash tabloid like the "BILD".

So either their search algorithm is complete and utter trash, or they are actively boosting pro-russian websites and mix them up with a few established news outlets, to make them seem more trustworthy. Since their "news" section is also only allowed to show state-approved media, my guess wouldn't be very far off.

interesting. I see what you mean when I just search "Ukraine" on Yandex in English, with both RT & Sputnik featuring prominently.

Multi-word searches seem less prone to this. What happens if you search "Putin election" in German? Do you get articles critiquing the election or still praiseworthy articles?

"Putin wahl": First result is a marketplace in Russian. Everything else on the first page seems to be German + 1 Austrian, and they're quite critical, of course. RT and the other Russian propaganda pages only show up at page 5, but none of them mention the election.

I do get several captcha requests from the website now. Might be coincidence, because i'm on a different computer now. It does get annoying, though. Like, really annoying. Clicking 1 or 2 pages leads to yet another captcha.

Google too seems to ideologically clean up certain search results.

Not really. They may filter some stuff, if it is outright illegal and has caused enough outrage or someone complains about copyright. And if you have an account there, they'll try and give you results you most likely want to read. Which opens up the risk to end up in an echo chamber.

> How am I supposed to work?

Whatever happened to the man pages, y'know.

Am I the only person who primarily reads man pages on the web?

You can work without being tracked and profiled here: https://duckduckgo.com/

DDG censors too much.

What do they censor besides Russian wartime propaganda?

What relevant, important stuff is it censoring? Hate speech and Russian disinformation campaigns?

And Google doesn't? What?

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