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Comment by adoxyz | Hacker News Reader

From personal experience, Google search on a desktop w/ Adblock is great. And especially when you know what you're searching for, the experience is usually great.

On mobile or without adblock though or when trying to do discovery of something new, you really have to sift through pretty much the first 5-7 results as they're all sponsored, ads, or terrible SEO spam.

But it is a hard problem to solve, and no other search engine is better in that regard imo.

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I'm old enough to remember when the first 5-7 results were the ONLY ones you actually wanted to click on.

Same. I remember actually using “I’m feeling lucky” but now would only do that for some ironic chuckles.

ublock won't help with SEO spam - it doesn't filter out native search results, just the ads. So it isn't really SEO spam, it's adword spam.

It can filter out native search results as well, as long as you tell it what to filter out. It's of course a bit limited since you have to know beforehand what you don't want to see, but it works great if you're looking to, for example, filter out specific websites.

It can, but I don't know of any default filters that would do such a thing, and that is besides the point. It certainly doesn't have enough time to classify a particular entry as SEO spam without doing RPC to an external service, IMO.

This is a really good point and something I didn't quite think through.

Problem is now you get ~6 ad links for many queries (given some ads have 'secondary links' in them).

This now means even on a 4k monitor I only see 3 actual SEO results. It's much worse on mobile.

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