Is Google getting worse? Why critics say ads, spam sites are killing search | Hacker News Reader

Is Google getting worse? Why critics say ads, spam sites are killing search

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80 pointspaulpauper57 comments

Yes. Most of my searches fail. No matter how I formulate my queries, Google shows me mostly unrelated results, and seems to ignore a big part of the internet.

For "is it just me?" searches, I manually search Twitter and Reddit.

For best product or service searches, I have simply given up. I only get Nepali restaurant recommendations from a Brit with a blog who spent 3 days there. Product recommendations are pure affiliate spam. Good luck finding critical reviews of anything.

For programming searches, I click the same few websites, and heavily filter the results with uBlacklist. In the end, it's usually stackoverflow and a few self-hosted programming blogs. For some reason w3schools keeps outranking MDN.

Software problem searches ("how to do X in Android") just lead to generic troubleshooting websites that sell software or malware.

I have an ad blocker of course. I was shocked to see what Google results look like without one. My website isn't the first result like I thought, but hidden below half a dozen ads.

I'm just tired of modern tech. It's just broken recommendation engines and coercive UIs.

I always choose w3schools over MDN because:

* w3school's examples are no-nonsense and much easier to understand, with simple working examples. MDN's pages typically read more like academic references.

* w3schools typically choose compatibility over the most "modern" way to write something, and compatibility matters a lot to me. MDN basically ignores most browsers that are not in the dominant majority.

* w3schools pages are simple and load faster and are less gimmicky. MDN has weird markup with multiple scrollable areas on the same page, which is completely inaccessible to me.

I don't even have to disagree, it is irrelevant since the search results are personalized. How many thousands of times do I have to click MDN for the algo to organize it to the top?

In my experience, it never happens.

I know it's supposed to in theory, but in reality I think the weight of personalization is very small most of the time.

Where I do occasionally see the effects of this type of personalization is programming vs. non-programming content.

It's academic

Regarding your mention of product searches, I feel the need to point out “consumer reports”. They don’t review everything, but they’ve never let me down with what they have reviewed. They have an objective process that’s motivated by you $25.00 per year subscription. It’s neat how they’ll go out of their way to develop innovative tests for random items (3d printing parts to make the test possible, etc.).

I have my own algorithm for parsing amazon results for everything else, and it halfway works. For the big ticket items, and some random stuff everybody needs, consumer reports is good. Any time that I can afford the number one item from a category, it’s never let me down.

> Product recommendations are pure affiliate spam. Good luck finding critical reviews of anything.

As YouTubers and modern influencers start acquiring enough capital to do what Linus Tech Tips is doing, the old web only review sites that rely search based traffic are dead IMO.

The personal reputations of celebrity level influencers are the new trusted brands. If some of them get a foothold and don’t screw it up there’s an insane opportunity to oust major legacy brands from some markets. Everyone has sold out their brands for short term profits and we all know it.

Is Linus a place for trustworthy reviews? The Youtubers I know are Marques Brownlee, Mrwhosetheboss, Unbox Therapy, and they basically fawn over anything and are completely in the brands' pockets (access journalism). I see the same in the smart home gadgets space and cruise holidays space.

> Is Linus a place for trustworthy reviews?

They’ve shown off tidbits of objective tools and processes they’re going to use for testing. For example, they’re building a robot arm for keyboard testing.

And yeah, I agree about the soft reviewers. Most of them will gush about overpriced lifestyle brands. It’s weird.

For product reviews, I just use YouTube now. At least there I can be sure that the reviewer has actually used the product since its right there in the video.

Have you considered using a paid search engine? It is a miracle what alignment of incentives can do for search quality.

I would pay good money for one if it works well.

Have you tried Kagi search?

Shopping in particular seems iffy for me. I used to use Google shopping to find deals, but increasingly the results are full of scams. I bought a baratta encore grinder new for what looked like MSRP with free shipping off a site highly ranked in Google shopping. It never arrived, I had to dispute the charge with my credit card company, and the site disappeared a couple of months later.

Now if I search "nvidia 4090" on shopping, the top organic result is a card at "Orvamini" that claims to still be in stock at MSRP.[0] I don't believe it after clicking around the site, they have all kinds of high end electronics that are sold out everywhere, at or below MSRP and I have never heard of the brand. For example, they could easily sell this card for over $2k, or 50% more than the below-msrp price they have currently listed, on eBay or stockx.[1]

[0] https://www.google.com/shopping/product/5873870201295230510?...

[1] https://orvamini.com/product/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-founder...

I know people who have been scammed by middleman ads. Search to buy flowers in a specific area and there’s a good chance the top ad will be a middleman that will take your order and flip it to a local business. You’ll think you’re buying a fancy (expensive) flower arrangement, but the middleman will order something small (and cheap) on your behalf.

You overpay while the recipient of the flowers gets something mediocre at best.

The exact thing happened to my mother while trying to send flowers for a relative’s funeral. She paid something close to $200, the local shop got a small order, and some grifter got a bunch of easy money for gaming the system.

But hey! As long as Google gets their cut for the ad / referral the collateral damage of grifting seniors is just smart business, right?

Hotel booking results in Google Maps are almost all scams. They don't care because they use it to force the hotel to pay for a sponsored ranking in the booking listings to be up high.

Any query that is even somewhat related to legal matters gives me pages and pages of law offices with very low quality almost identical content.

I was looking for traffic fatality statistics trying to compare taxis vs Uber vs average drivers and all I get are lawyers offering their services.

Great SEO work, terrible search experience.

Legal content is highly monetized.

I have had trouble finding similar content. Often these are buried in PDF reports by state agencies. There are some federal resources out there depending on what you need. But those are often hard to navigate too.

For something like what you want you may have to compile the date separately to compare it.

But yes, attorney SEO is a huge business

Can you share the actual query you used?

What used to be useful intelligent search results with some ads sprinkled around has been transformed into ads with a few poisoned search results sprinkled around.

Yes I do believe that’s worse.

100%

There's so much junk nowadays that verbatim search with key phrases is the only way to get a decent signal to noise ratio.

90 percent of my Google search now has “Reddit” appended. Otherwise the result utterly useless especially on mobile phone where there’s no Adblock

Perfect, now just create a site like reddit, remove people, insert Wikipedia, and you got something everyone will value, but pay nothing for.

I think you just hit the jackpot

Brave supports addblocking on both android and iOS. Firefox does at least on Android.

Unfortunately, Brave's search results are less impressive and often chock full of politics and cryptocurrencies. Google just makes you work for it more amidst the irrelevant results.

I think he was talking about brave as a browsers not the search engine.

I switched to DDG a few years back, but whenever I accidentally search via Google, every result feels like an ad. Not sure how anyone actually uses it anymore.

I've converted most of my coworkers away from Google and they've all mentioned how much different results are on DDG, Bing or even Alta, and how much better the results are. Bye Google!

I've switched to kagi.com, a paid search service. It started out kind of slow but ok results, but it has only improved over time. I like the programming specific filter. It's location based results are better than Google or DDG, which is great when I'm shopping for stuff as what is available here is pretty limited.

No ads, user friendly features, able to talk to support - we want these things then we have to pay for them, and I'm happy to do so.

Searching for answers to basic programming problems has started to yield a bunch of autogenerated sites that are literally the content ripped directly from stackoverflow.. except with a load of ads injected.

That is super annoying. When trying to find answers for programming stuff, the first one is usually stackoverflow and next 5 pages this autogenerated bullshit.

Not to make this personal but too me this deterioration started when Giannandrea (circa 2016?) was put in charge of Search at Google and they let the AI/ML engineers run loose on what was a technically sound product.

The disappointing thing is that the current product is probably a better fit for 90% of non technical users and will likely make google more money, it just has become useless as a technical query crawler.

Personally I use ddg at home and Kagi for technical work. The only Google search product I still use is 'Google Shopping' as a great proxy to find local shops with online delivery.

> Personally I use ddg at home and Kagi for technical work

Why Kagi? What does it do better

Sure, here is my short list:

- It's the right business model, I am paying! Which means _I_ am the customer, both in terms of support and feature requests. I mean good luck getting answers in goog 'Groups'. Also it means I support Kagi's operational costs so no ads.

- It actually respects bolean operators which is something Google had perfected and has been silently ignoring for the past 6 years or so. The 'Lenses' and 'Filters' are also a good addition in Kagi to narrow results further

- For my technical queries it does not overvalue 'freshness' which has become a google search obsession. I am not looking for the latest news about Taylor Swift I am looking for a deep crawl on anything related to my very specific technical query. I don't care if it's 15 years old or 2 weeks old.

- Pretty much anything UX related is configurable, so any annoyance is easily removed. It pains me to say it but in 2022 I now have to explicitly opt-in, in order for apps to show me a full URL. (But then again perhaps I am just showing my age).

Depending on the topic and search query it at least has become harder to find information written by actual human beings, and not some garbage sites 100% created and designed for SEO. These sites typically contain lots of generated (or at least mindlessly typed) filler text. Sometimes they have some information inbetween this gibberish, sometimes they completely look like they came out of a markov chain generator.

Because of this it is often necessary to append something like "reddit", "forum", "wiki", or "news" to my search, lest I only encounter SEO trash.

I believe I can estimate with confidence that Bing and DuckDuckGo are nowadays better than Google during half of my searches. And that was certainly not the case 2 years ago.

> These sites typically contain lots of generated (or at least mindlessly typed) filler text.

They’ll also optimize for “high value” keywords even though the content doesn’t match and that’s exacerbated even more by Google doing a terrible job of picking synonyms. A good example is reboot vs reset. I literally can’t even find instructions to force reboot a phone anymore.

I still think google has the best results, but I'm not surprised that the new york post is trying to sow distrust in google as a company. IMO google results are still better than bing results

But also: I use an alternative frontend[1] that I host locally. Very fast, you get google-tier latency and google-tier results without google-tier bloat. Would highly recommend it to anyone who likes the results but doesn't like the company.

[1] https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search

> better than bing results

What a ringing endorsement. Lol.

Jokes aside, that linked project looks very cool. Thanks!

"Hey, maybe this is the year Google starts to improve!" /s

Web search plays a relatively important role in everyday life today. Personally I'm averse to using products or services, even if they are currently 'okay', once I see they are on the downward trajectory.

> "Hey, maybe this is the year Google starts to improve!" /s

Sure, may have been wrong in the past, but 2023 will definitely be the year of:

    - improved google search
    - linux on the desktop
    - mac gaming
    - ps5 availability at msrp
    - post-pandemic recovery
    - fiber to the home
    - quantum computing
    - explainable ML/AI systems
    - non-scammy crypto
    - distributed internet
    - a web that doesn't suck
    - secure and reliable computing
    - better netflix programs and selection
    - ???

> fiber to the home

This one is becoming real for me this year.

I've had fiber at home since 2007.

Lucky! For most people it doesn't seem to be the "year of ftth" just yet.

Did they launch Duke Nukem Forever yet?

Around ten years ago. It was bad.

hey, the holoduke was amusing

though that was about it

Google Search has become so bad that I have even changed my search habits: If it is a topic, I use the Wikipedia app to search for it, if I want opinions, then I go on Reddit.

But I have to say Google Lens has gotten superb at searching in real life.

Web is broken because search should be considered an infrastructure layer feature.

P.D.: Let's see how much time takes Google to offer a non-free search option using the economic recession excuse.

Yes Google is getting worse, but I'd argue it's not entirely due to ads, and not entirely Google's fault.

I think people need to understand that Google was invented to solve a problem, and that particular problem, is the problem of finding information you need. In the early days of the internet, there was fewer information stored on the internet, so this problem was simpler back then.

However, information has grown dramatically over the years, and is still increasing every day. Basically, now Google's search engine model doesn't really work all that great anymore when compared to its early days, simply because the problem has outgrown Google in scale.

Think about it... as more and more information gets generated and stored on the internet, finding the information you exactly are looking for using 3-5 words typed into a search engine at some point just ceases to become probable or even possible. So search engines have to predict what you want based upon the limited information you give it (and does this using others things such as how often something is visited, search patterns, trends, and/or related ads + promotions), and users end up perceiving it as a crummy search.

Sadly giving a search engine too many words can stop it from even searching, probably because (if you're a developer) you'd understand that could cause a scan or result in a very time and computer/resource intensive search. So it doesn't even bother searching and tells you it couldn't find any information.

You know what would make the problem easier?

Not indexing obvious shit.

Their problem is trying to automate everything. If I have to deal with obvious shit leaning on X vs Y style queries, and I have to deal with it for a year or more, it's because they're bad, not because the scale has outgrown them.

Getting? It is already there, I think I would have better luck in Ask Jeaves and Altavista than what Google gives me.

Google is a mess. But do we have an alternative? Microsoft is letting Bing die slowly, Yandex is pushing lots of results in Russian, Baidu is of no use if you don't know Mandarin, DuckDuckGo and Startpage are using Google and Bing under the hood.

I remember pre Google times when both Yahoo and Altavista yielded decent results.

Excuse the self-promotion but we have an independent crawler-index and so are one of very few genuine alternatives: https://www.mojeek.com/

Yes. Recent example was searching some old card mechanic wrapped in spooky tale.

Resorted to searching a Subreddit.

"Brands" are killing the search for me. All I get is tangentially relevant, numerous results from the same big sites or brands, whatever I search.

What's even worse is this problem is not bound to Google. Almost all search engines delivering more and more unrelated results as time passes by.

A rare exception to Betteridge's law of headlines.

Google (google.com) provides a very poor experience for anyone looking for web search results that aren't 1) ads or Google properties (above the fold) or 2) spammy SEO garbage (below the fold.)

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