Ask HN: As a tech person, do you feel Google gives you better results? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: As a tech person, do you feel Google gives you better results?

1 pointfdeage5 comments

I have read a lot of (well-deserved IMO) hate about Google's ever shittier SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) in the past few years. I noticed the same effect myself: the ads filling the viewport entirely, and becoming more and more indistinguishable from organic links.

However I noticed a new trend in the past few weeks. My results to technical queries got... actually quite good (like, 2010-good).

I just typed "Elixir date sigil", and got:

- 0 ads,

- 10 perfectly related pages about how Elixir (the programming language) handles dates.

Same for a lot of other queries. I have to say, it felt very good, like seeing an good friend again after having lost sight of him for years.

Have you experienced the same? Do you think Google might be afraid of losing its technical users to competition, and finally provide good results again?

Edit: formatting

None of the search engines give good results for technical queries. Every answer you get that isn't a not-quite-right ad is either a Q&A site with a very old, narrow answer, or a "newbie friendly" tech blog whose answer is kind of wrong, but also copied from somewhere. All the newbie friendly tech blogs are copies of each other or an original that's maybe more technical but also gone or buried.

Depends on the query I guess. My first results were:

- elixir-lang.org (the official Elixir website),

- elixirschool.com (high-quality Elixir content),

- til.hashrocket.com (also high-quality Elixir content IMO),

- hexdocs.pm (the official documentation of elixir modules/packages),

- graffino.com (relevant TIL page about the date sigil),

- a GitHub issue page about a very close sigil in Elixir.

My point was: do you think Google switches to some "high-quality" mode when it detects that you are a technical user?

No. The answers it gives for Raspberry Pi, Golang, and electronics all follow the pattern I outline above.

A few weeks ago, I tried to Google for any analysis of the shape of hot air balloons. Same pattern.

How about the ads, though? Did you see as many as usual?

As a technical user, I run Firefox with NoScript and uBlock installed. I also run DNSMasq with a large number of ad domains set to 127.0.0.1.

So I don't know. This setup isn't 100% effective against ads, but I also block Google analytics and Google tags. Now that I think about it, Google may not be able to identify me as a technical user.

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