Hacker News Reader

Comment by alex-moon | Hacker News Reader

I feel a bit out of the loop here. Google's search engine results have only ever been getting progressively better over time from my perspective......?

View on HN

Really? I’ve been unable to find quality results for quite a few years now. It’s always results from Quora, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube and other giants.

In addition to that, I’ve been seeing legit scam websites rank in the first page since a year or so, and that’s not something I’ve come across only a few times.

Unfortunately that is the internet now. The results and pages you are getting are poor because people stopped publishing websites. Now most of the internet forums and self curated pages are gone and information is in those silos

That’s.. so sad. I think you are right.

As much as I don’t want to accept this, it seems like it’s the new reality.

However, isn't this also the consequence of various SEO tricks? A website such as YouTube can do SEO way more efficiently than someone who produces their content manually. If you have billion pages of content, you can easily make billion pages link at whatever you want... perhaps the things where the users most often click the ads, or whatever.

Basically:

Google: "good pages are those that have lots of links pointing towards them".

YouTube: "let's make all our pages link to the 'why quantum mechanics proves Trump wrong' viral video, people seem unable to resist clicking on it when they see it among the search results".

Random guy on internet: "I wonder what quantum mechanics is... let's ask Google..."

Since you're new..here's a tip Do one pushup every time there's a "How I degoogled my life" post on the front page Do one pushup every time there's a "Google is too big and should be broken up" post on the front page Do one pushup every time there's a "Google is dying" post on the front page

You'll be jacked in no time

I don't know, I disagree, that hasn't been my experience.

Several years ago, the first result for web topics was almost always MDN. These days it's usually one of those SEO programming content farms for beginners.

The other thing that annoys me to no end is that Google's own language settings don't work. I live in Japan, but I don't want Japanese programming search results. I have told Google to only return English language results, but it ignores that most of the time. The only way to force it to use English is that sometimes it asks if you want English results only, but you can't force it to do that to begin with.

I wish I could tell it I always want English language wikipedia results first regardless of which language I search in. I'm tired of my top result being a poorly translated version of the English wikipedia page I actually want.

Yep, that's also very frustrating. And if I wanted results in Japanese I'd type in Japanese, so it's not particularly hard for them to guess intent here.

It really depends on the domain. The biggest problem I've noticed is they don't seem able to filter out those shitty auto-generated spam sites for comparisons or top 10 lists. So if you're searching for "X vs Y" or "best X in 2023" you'll get absolute dross.

For other kinds of queries it still works pretty well IMO.

> The biggest problem I've noticed is they don't seem able to filter out those shitty auto-generated spam sites for comparisons or top 10 lists

That boggles my mind as well. Google already knows which media are actually relevant as a source. For example, if I want good reviews for electronics products, I'd go for Heise and Golem, for everything else Stiftung Warentest. Google could easily compile a list of reputable media for each country and prioritize these, but they don't - I suspect because they enjoy all that sweet sweet ad money coming in from blogspam sites and less-reputable media.

Google is already showing big brands in most cases: https://detailed.com/google-control/

Yahoo Directories was this exact idea, and it worked well, until Google's PageRank blew it away.

You still gotta do actual information analytics on the data.

That does not match my experience or the general zeitgeist here on HN. IMO search quality has been declining due to increased invasiveness of ads and the wrong incentives for the company from the perspective of users.

Welcome to HN. This is the one undisputed fact that 99% of us can agree on. Arrogant Google hasn't done anything of note for decades and search in particular is a dying shell of itself. I remember the good old days when it could find everything for me and my wife still loved me. Now I get a bunch of Pinterest links on the front page

I had to check your profile based on this comment -- looks like you're new and the HN hivemind hasn't assimilated you yet. Don't worry, you'll be in the loop soon enough if you stick around. However, be mindful that echo chambers are usually intolerant of facts (and sometimes, surprisingly, knowledge in general...this place can be a good jumping off point if you know how to do your own research, though).

I need to add reddit to all queries to get good results.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com