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Comment by isaacfrond | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, 'google has gotten so bad', it is just a meme.

It is just not true.

Use any of the competing search engines for even a day and you'll come running back to Google. Believe me, I tried it. I really wanted to switch to Bing or the Duck, but they just don't compare. If the search results of Google are not to your liking it is because search is hard. Also login, if you are a super user, Google will catch on to this as well.

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No it's not a meme but it's important to split this as a bi-modal thing.

For keyword based search (thinking index and crawlers e.g. 'motorized+camera+focus -autofocus') Google has objectively gotten worse since about 2016 (my personal theory is that it was when Giannandrea headed Search and started allowing ML to be used in the search team).

Search for the general population that is familiar with Natural Language queries i.e. 'what is that film where the guy keeps living the same day over and over?' That type of search is probably improved and is likely making Google a lot of money, which is why the keyword based search is degradating.

Also I think currently Search is putting too much enphasis on 'freshness' for technical queries. Most of the time I am looking for what is prior art on a particular topic, it is absolutely fine to show me a blog posted in 2004 by some geek in Slovakia.

The noise you hear online is that most technical people kind of rely on keyword and bolean operators to find what they are looking for and so are suffering the most from the business shift in Search.

Also not affilliated but definitely supportive... I wholeheartedly agree with other commenters, Kagi kicks ass in technical queries.

I think the key is appending the word 'reddit' at the end of every search. Come to think of it, this feels like the precursor to ChatGPT since ChatGPT often feels like it responds with a Reddit comment that has been awarded and voted to the top anyway.

Right, but the value in "site:reddit.com" is the human nature of the content: we trust that a human wrote the Reddit comment in good faith, and we trust that it was upvoted by people who are knowledgeable in that area of expertise. I fear we are losing that important element with ChatGPT; or worse, it will create a feedback loop where Reddit comments are "enhanced" with ChatGPT snippets and fed back into the system, and we're back at square one trying to find a way to cut through the noise.

Adding site:reddit.com to searches improves the chances you'll get a result that is not totally wrong or spam because reddit has a built-in moderation system (upvotes/downvotes). The community also has little tolerance for SEO clone and other junk sites.

It's not perfect -- there are definitely gamed topics and bullshitters -- but it's light years better than default Google. I don't think I've ever seen a clone of StackOverflow appear on an upvoted reddit post or comment while I see those sites every day on Google.

I agree with you on the risks of that feedback loop. I'm hopeful that humans will still be around to moderate information on forums.

> Use any of the competing search engines for even a day and you'll come running back to Google.

I haven't. I switched to ddg years ago and I haven't gone back since. I basically forgot that google search exists and that people still use it.

Since we’re sharing anecdata, here’s mine: Kagi delivers better results than Google for my daily programming-related queries and I haven’t looked back since switching 6 months ago.

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