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Comment by massysett | Hacker News Reader

I see this sort of comment a lot, and I honestly don't know what it's talking about. What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering?

It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge.

I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yahoo!? Back in that era, if I were looking for something as simple as the University of Michigan, I clicked and drilled down through a Yahoo directory. The obvious search query would have been useless. Google changed all that.

I view Google as the yellow pages. It works well for that. Is it an oracle of knowledge? Of course not. How could I possibly expect to find knowledge on a place where there is no reward for making it available? People producing knowledge don't work for free.

I've tried ChatGPT and it's no better. It serves up stuff that is flat-out wrong.

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Things that i *know* were parts of the internet, that I could find via google 5-10 years ago are no longer possible to find. I get single page search results sometimes, with not even the capability to keep browsing 'more' pages to see things that may be tangentially related. Google has just decided to not show them at all. Remember when the bottom of the page was "Goooooooooooooooogle" and you could click each "o" to go to that page? Haven't seen that in a while, right?

> Remember when the bottom of the page was "Goooooooooooooooogle" and you could click each "o" to go to that page? Haven't seen that in a while, right?

That’s still a thing, although it seems they’re A/B testing its removal. I just opened a private tab (as I always do) and got a boring "More results" button, but I tried another browser (also with a private tab) and got the classic pagination.

Absolutely this. Google has gotten notably worse in just the last two years.

Today:

* Any term that might be related to a commercial product? That product comes first and frequently only.

* Search for two terms? It will first give it's prefer result for each separately - usually commercial products (ha). And then might give them together.

* Quoted terms are often taken as vague suggestions. Negative sign is often useless, etc.

Google has gotten notably worse in the last few months. I keep getting the feeling it is serving results for a query similar to what I entered, but more popular. It drowns out any results that actually might answer my questions.

One of the worst innovations they've introduced is returning results for things you did not search for. At this point, potentially anything is a valid search result for any search query.

god, the quoted text suggestion thing is really the nail in the coffin. Used to feel like a wizard showing people how to get exact search results, now... well, that's why we're having this discussion

What makes you think these origins still exist? Google is not going to direct you to a page that can't be reached, even if we assume that your memory is accurate and the page existed 10 years ago.

I just checked and sure enough, the clickable Goooooooooogle is still there at the bottom of search results, with ten clickable "o"s.

weird, i must be a/b'd out of that because i just get "more results" endless scrolling, and have for all of recent memory

> Haven't seen that in a while, right?

It's still there right now.

I've been having to use Bing to find things. BING.

The point of google was to RANK content on the web, and surface the BEST content to the top. In that regard it has failed, and the expectation is for them to correct the problem and return to delivering good content first.

It's not that the content doesn't exist or isn't indexed, its that its been drowned out by noise. Sifting through noise better was the entire reason google took off from more standard crawlers. It now returns results worse than crawlers from the previous era.

> It now returns results worse than crawlers from the previous era.

That is an absurd exaggeration.

Spam masquerading as the answer to my question is WORSE than off topic returns, because it is a trick vs being something I can easily disregard.

Before the results would just not match what I was looking for. Now they do match what I was looking for, except some AI procedurally generated the content to show up when I searched those terms, with no regard for the accuracy of what the page says.

Then ChatGPT won’t satisfy you either.

It depends on how state works.

If I say "show me the best winter gloves, and only from sites that you can verify actually product tested" and it follows the instruction (ignoring sites that just have a list of popular search results aggregated) then it is better. If it doesn't do what I want, I expect to be able to follow up and teach it.

I expect the chat style stateful search to take instruction for what type of sites I want results from. "Return me a list of websites with recipes for Bolognese that do not have a long story above the recipe. Build a table with the top five results normalized for portion size, comparing and contrasting the ingredients. Highlight unique ingredients in bold."

Not really everyone's familiar with the example of cooking recipes being breakfast with the author's life story in order to improve their position in Google rankings, but it's far more prevalent than just recipes. Today I tried to look up something about a feature in a particular piece of reasonably popular desktop software. The top hit that wasn't an advert was several years out of date. The second hit was clearly artificially inflated to long form journalism to try and get me to read a thousand words where 10 would do. Duck duck go linked me to some actual recent results, just like I would have expected with the crawlers of the previous era

In the mid 2000s, I could find my answer easily in the top 5 hits.

In the present day, I cannot find my answer on the first page. If I click on the top hits the page is a deluge of useless blogg fluff which takes me more time to find what I am looking for.

More often than not have to add reddit, forum, stackoverflow, etc to find what I am looking for because online communities provide more concise answers.

This is why googles utility has collapsed.

The SEO fiasco means that the index to the Yellow Pages is all wrong. You want to find the Chinese embassy, instead you find Vietnamese takeaway businesses.

In the last 2-3 months search quality for me has absolutely crashed and is barely usable.

OK, I searched "chinese embassy" and the top link is "Embassy of the People's Republic of China" at http://us.china-embassy.gov.cn.

I'm willing to accept that maybe you are exaggerating to make a point. Maybe you have a better example that is actually illustrative?

I think that google search's quality decay is a real thing, it takes some real effort to get proper results that aren't SEO'd garbage.

For example, just the other day I was searching for one string that I knew was part of a common code repository. To my surprise google couldn't find anything at all. Yandex on the other hand found the repository immediately and linked to github.

Other common issue with google is the difficulty of finding stuff like forum posts related to the search query. Sure, you could append "reddit" to the query, but there are still plenty of traditional forum sites and some of them have decades worth of discussion. I Never see those sites pop up on a typical google search unless I specifically look for them. Again, with yandex, my experience is much better, it is not uncommon to see posts from forums to be on the first page of results.

For one, when I search a recipe, I want less than a 30 page document. I've wanted this for 20 years, and so has everybody else.

The personal backstory and other "fluff" is actually really useful when selecting a recipe. I was laid up with covid/rebound while traveling over the holidays and lived off Hainanese Chicken Rice delivery. Now I want to make it at home and search for a recipe.

#1 result is a long article with culinary history, detailed instructions, many pictures, and a credited author originally from Shanghai.

#2 result is a simple recipe listing from Buzzfeed. Written by a young white guy from Minnesota who worked as a producer. No fluff, no pictures, no backstory. Doubtful the author ever made the recipe at all. You could grab a recipe database and generate thousands of these pages.

I've been burned by #2 too many times disregard the fluff. It shows their investment in the content.

I feel your pain and switched to high quality, physical cookbooks instead. Recipes on the web are generally garbage unless they come from an author that you’ve already vetted.

I want a button: "never show me content from this domain again".

Follow up: Make a profile out of this. Ah, people who don't want to ever see content from quora or something, do like this other content. Let's rank that higher for those people. Easy opt out, by checking "ignore search profile" checkbox or logout.

Often when looking for an answer I just need to confirm what I already know, or look up something I forgot. Google offers me a bunch of sponsored links first and then sites with the best SEO, which will smother me with all kinds of unrelated crap that I do not want and will never need. I'm even running an extension that removes a ton of blacklisted sites from the search results.

ChatGPT usually gives me the answer that I'm looking for and nothing else. Sometimes it does add extra info, which often teaches me about something that I wasn't aware of at all.

But the greatest benefit is I can ask it to clarify anything I don't understand. I don't need to go on a completely new Google quest, or jump through hoops to register on some site and hope a random internet person will ordain to help me out. I can just ask, in the same conversation, and immediately get clarification.

Many people underestimate the incredible learning opportunities a well trained language model provides. It doesn't matter that it hallucinates or lies. Whatever it claims is usually easy to validate. What matters is the speed with which you can find uncluttered new leads or answers.

> What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering?

Relevant search results that aren't just marketing sites or the big websites.

> It can only index stuff that's on the Web.

And much of it isn't really exposed by Google search.

> I view Google as the yellow pages. It works well for that

It used to. For me, it stopped working well for that a few years ago and has been getting steadily worse ever since.

A start would be to rank official php/python/etc docs higher than clickbait sites like geeks4geeks

Amen to this

> What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering?

Not optimize for "most documents indexed" but "highest quality of results". One of them encourages adding spam to their index, the other encourages removing spam from their index.

There are giant teams of people at Google whose only job is trying to define things like "spam" and "seo abuse" more precisely in more diverse contexts. There are equally large armies of people outside of it trying to outwit the first group and find more and more elaborate loopholes and workarounds.

HN is constantly pushing this notion that "spam" is some well-defined, solvable problem, so obviously Google wants it. That narrative just doesn't make sense from any angle. The notion that more click bait improves Google's bottom line is absurd

This discussion is pretty sad and frustrating for me. I think your conclusion (“Google has no motive to encourage spam content that rises to the top using SEO tricks”) is about as convincing as it gets, but it’s completely drowned out by a very vague sense that google is a big company and therefor it’s making search worse on purpose. No amount of well-worded HN posts are gonna sway people, imo…

Luckily HN posters don’t exactly represent a meaningful portion of the population.

Have you looked at Youtube comments recently? It's a mess. There's no organization, half of the replies are censored but are still being counted, so you have plenty of "1 Reply" links but nothing shows up when you toggle. Half of the top level comments are completely useless comments that are only posted to help the creator "beat the algorithm", every successful creator now has a call to action to write a comment.

I see two options: a) Google can't do any better than that, b) Google has a reason to keep it in the current state (I'll put "Google doesn't know because nobody at Google has used Youtube in the last 5 years" and similar options under "a").

a) sounds ridiculous, b) sounds conspiratorial. What are the other options?

And again, I'm not saying they are making search worse on purpose (no "from now on our core mission is to make search suck"). I'm saying they aren't optimizing for SERP quality. They seem to care about index size (maybe it's an internal KPI? would certainly explain their aggressive guessing at additional URLs that you might have on their page but don't link to, don't add in sitemaps etc, and their stubbornness in keeping results from the index even if they've been 301ed or 410ed ages ago (they do get downranked after a while though)), but I assume that they mostly care about paid ad clicks, and if something increases ad clicks while the result quality decreases, they'll do it.

It could very well be that none at Google understands the search engine code anymore due to their high attrition. So it has been surface patched for X years making the problem worse.

Their giant teams are an organizational failure then.

Product reviews alone, whether it is enterprise software or sports clothing should be something that they can easily comb through by hand, as humans, and uprank sites that are putting out more than affiliate link assemblies.

Why wouldn’t they do this, if it’s scalable and profitable? Is your theory just “incompetence”? I can’t prove that’s wrong, but I feel the simpler answer is more convincing; that handing off page rank to an army of minimum wage call center workers (for every country & language in the world…) wouldn’t be more effective than the existing algorithms at filtering out spam.

Some form of paralysis. They dont have a single leader who has taken responsibility for it and corrected it. CEO/SVP has too many pots on the stove.

Im legitimately asking, who is responsible for Search at Google? Prabhakar Raghavan is SVP, Search, Assistant & Ads, and I click under him, he has 8 product groups reporting to him, and none of the people are responsible for Search. Yossi Matias is responsible for Search Engineering.

https://theorg.com/org/google

It may at first come off as a laughable answer, but Google Search has been in a directionless spiral since Marissa Mayer left. Her Yahoo tenure was not well received, but at Google she cared about the end quality of the product. Her title was Search Products and User Experience. Notice how we have gone from User Experience to Search Engineering, forgetting about the people who actually use the product.

Absolutely: the challenge is that any signal that you use to identify "good websites" from "bad websites" will be adversarially optimized by incredibly motivated people.

You are dealing with a moving target that has a huge financial incentive. It's a very difficult problem.

I don't agree. You start whitelisting good content manually. If babygearlab is the best result for baby gear, you start hardcoding it. If seriouseats is the best result for recipes, you hard code it. If someone better comes along, they get moved up the priority list.

You figure out a way to crowdsource certain decisions and establish who you can trust. Ask them questions with right and wrong answers. You start to tackle it one product category at a time. Instead of pagerank, which was a web of who linked to who" you start figuring which voters you have who consistently turn in good feedback.

This is some form of metamoderation that slashdot tried to implement.

If you are going to be a tastemaker, stop hiding behind "the algorithm" having some mind of its own that cant be controlled.

What's the reason for these giant teams of presumable well-paid experts and geniuses to not define "a clone of SO with some of the answers juggled around between questions" as spam?

> The notion that more click bait improves Google's bottom line is absurd

If you don't find what you're looking for on the first try, you'll need to try again, and see more ads. What else are you going to do, go elsewhere, visit a library, ask the town elders or give up on looking for things you want to know? You don't have a choice, you know it, they know it.

I find it equally plausible that Youtube's search sucks badly because they don't care what you're looking for, they want you to watch videos that they predict will lead to the maximum time spent on the site, again so you watch more ads. What other explanation is there that the world's leading search engine has the search of one of their flagship products run at 1999 quality? Presumably they have giant teams of people working on that too?

Here’s an example for you.

I want you to start a blank slate C (or C++) project. Ask Google how to write heapify, push_heap, and pop_heap in C. Ask ChatGPT the same.

I did this a few weeks ago. I literally could not find the answer on Google. ChatGPT gave me actual C code that I definitely did not trust but did verify.

Google results for questions like that are genuinely awful. It’s full of shitty tutorial websites that are full of ads and either don’t have the answer I need or don’t have it in a convenient form.

> What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering?

I mean what you just listed.

Google won the search war because of PageRank eliminating lots of spam, and then something like 15 years of staying ahead of SEO spam and providing useful search.

Lately it seems like they've given up on the arms race and let the SEO spam win, but it isn't clear why.

And Google didn't produce high quality search for free, they used ads and sold the eyeballs they won.

Search before Google was bad. e.g. I could easily ignore 80% of the results on the first page, but at least it was all actual content.

Then, with Google, it got better and almost all results were relevant.

But we’ve been regressing over the years, and now we’re at the point where 80% of all results are both irrelevant and simply SSO spam.

I find it really hard to believe Google has some of the smartest people in the world on search and they cannot identify this.

> Back in that era, if I were looking for something as simple as the University of Michigan, I clicked and drilled down through a Yahoo directory.

Google didn't innovate that much except to provide a clutter-free interface and slightly better search. Prior to that, I used Webcrawler and then HotBot. A search like what you described would have easily returned useful results.

People who respond like you have are either being willfully obtuse about how awful search has gotten or honestly do not remember how it was 5-10 years ago. As others have mentioned, SEO has all but made search useless for anything outside a narrow window of need. I used to be able to do "deep dives" into the dusty corners of the internet to find things using google and now it's about useless for that.

And I've /recently/ hunted for something obscure, couldn't find it, managed to find an old bookmark to it, the server was still online and the content I wanted was still there. And no amount of crafting of a google search would bring it up. And the server in question didn't contain copyrighted material which would have resulted in a takedown block or anything like that.

It's frustrating how /bad/ Google has gotten for anything other than fairly basic, high level "searching".

Google doesn't return a lot of stuff that is on the web, that is found by Yandex and Bing. It is unwilling to serve up long-tail results from its index, probably because they're so scared of accidentally serving up "misinformation" and they heavily penalize non-https sites.

And yet for some reason they're all too eager to serve up sites scraping stackoverflow.

What is actually the fraction of human knowledge available on the web? How does the trajectory look like? What is the fraction for knowledge produced the last 5 years?

>>> I view Google as the yellow pages

So do I. I can't tell you the last time I even held yellow pages in my hands.

I also challenge people’s memory of it being so much better. Was it really? Or just different?

It was mostly better.

The competition for many kinds of search terms is causing a race to the bottom. E.g. tech docs, lyrics, recipes, reviews.

That’s why Kago has a lense for “non-spammy recipe searches” — there’s just so much noise on popular, easily copyable material.

You don’t get the best site by popular vote like PageRank was known for, you get the one that generates the most ad revenue.

It was an honest attempt on the crawlers' part and it was a more level playing field. If you didn't find what you wanted on lycos, you could look on Yahoo or Alta Vista or WebCrawler or something instead. For a time there were meta Search engines that allowed you to search other search engine amalgamated results.

Yeah, you had your choice of several awful results and everyone couldn’t shut up about how good Google was when it was available. If people mean “Google used to be better” I’m willing to entertain the idea, but you’re out of your mind if you miss using Altavista and Dogpile.

You're comparing Google how it was then. Not how it is now

With Google right now I find what I am looking for almost all of the time. I can’t say that about the golden oldies you’re praising.

People don't use Google to search the web. They use Google to find answers.

Just search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe" and show me a single result that isn't a complete trash website. A significant number are nothing more than ad farms that just load infinite ads in IFRAMEs and similar stuff like that.

It's buried near the bottom of the page, but here's your huckleberry: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-best-chocolate-chip...

Lots of trash out there but Serious Eats is good quality.

that site has over six thousand words and maybe 20 screen heights worths of scrolling before you reach the recipie. Its incredible, like some kind of work of art parodying recipie websites

I use BBC good food, almost always straight to the point

Yes, because he's explaining all the different aspects of a "perfect" cookie and giving you options to dial in your personal version. He did 100 tests and 1,536 cookies for the article.

I get not everyone is a foodie that cares about the details and wants to tweak it, but I appreciate them.

Im not opposed to that, just put the recipie first

Cue 7 paragraphs about how when they were on vacation in Ibiza they sought ought the most authentic local chefs and took inspiration from all of them to develop this never-before-seen recipe.

These two are at the very top of the page. They both are chocolate chip cookie recipes. One has instructional videos. I really don't understand what is wrong with these.

https://www.verybestbaking.com/toll-house/recipes/original-n...

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/best-chocolate-chip-...

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