Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

The other thing I don't understand is the idea that Search is somehow becoming less accurate over time.

Google tracks analytics on the quality of its search results, simply by observing which results users click on, how long it takes them, or whether they don't click on anything at all.

The idea that Search is somehow worsening doesn't make any sense.

What has maybe happened is that Search has improved for the population as whole, but gotten worse for certain subsets of users -- but still a net gain overall. Or alternatively, that the web itself has changed -- that Search is doing better than ever, but some users just don't like what the web offers in response. (E.g. nobody writes straight-up recipes without tons of intro anymore -- but that's also so they have tons of space to insert ads, it's not about SEO. It's nothing to do with Google.)

View on HN

I'll echo this: search, in a purist sense, has definitely improved (just looking back to the mid 90's through to now).

The "search experience" however, has degraded since the mid 2010s, for me at least. I'm in a constant battle to filter through advertising and bad content that is "optimized" for the algorithm to find the information I need. The constant need to monetize the technology more and more has certainly reduced it's usefulness en-masse.

But I don't think chatbots or alternatives (beyond curated indexes) will solve this problem - as you say the web itself has morphed around ways to optimize one search engine's ranking algorithm.

> The idea that Search is somehow worsening doesn't make any sense.

Search is worsening. We've all seen it with our own eyes. I don't care how much analytics Google is gathering, that's irrelevant.

Just take on example: try googling for the release date of an upcoming video game or movie which you know for a fact hasn't had an announced date. Then view the top 5-10 results and let me know if you consider them to be of a high quality.

I just searched for "Elder Scrolls 6 release date" and "GTA VI release date", and the results seem decent. Web pages including words like "prediction" in the title, and the summaries in the search results mention that the predictions are based on things like earnings reports and legal filings.

I did the same search and if you consider these to be decent quality results we should just agree to disagree because we value information differently.

I'm curious what you're expecting to be returned here. How can there be "quality" results when the information you're searching for doesn't exist?

I would expect results from reputable publications and not gpt filled click farms. I expect content that is information dense instead of padded and packed with keywords. I expect results that don't have a pointlessly huge number of redundant headers and subheaders that only exist for SEO purposes. I expect a huge bias towards original sources or sites that directly link original sources. And if I'm searching for information that doesn't exist I expect it to be clear right on the results page that this is the case.

Who exactly is it you're expecting to produce a high quality information dense web page to say Elder Scrolls hasn't been released so that google can rank it higher?

Are you arguing every information void should be filled? If things are not there, there should be no results. Not spam or other inaccurate stuff that doesn't help anyone.

I don't care if there's no results. I would rather have just the words "there is no release date" than 15 different chatgpt generated click farms.

> release date of an upcoming video game or movie which you know for a fact hasn't had an announced date.

What do you get? Speculation? If so … I mean what did you expect? No one knows the answer so neither would Google.

Is it your belief that in the case of asking a question without a clear answer that the quality of the result isn't relevant? Or that all results are of equally high quality? Do you think that the results on the Google SERP are of the highest quality when you ask these questions?

Google isn’t answering your question. That’s not its job.

Its job is to find websites talking about what you entered as your query. If all people are doing is speculating … that’s all Google will return.

If straight up keyword matching was enough then Google would never have overtaken Alta Vista. Ranking useful high quality information higher is the entire point.

It’s still keyword-based. They just weight the appearance of the keyword in the documents now.

No it isn't. Literally Google's entire initial innovation was a ranking algorithm based on inbound links, weighted by the authority of the linking party. At this point I'm bowing out because you don't even know the basics of the thing you're arguing about.

> that Search is doing better than ever, but some users just don't like what the web offers in response.

The reason that I don't think it's this is because often there are sites that offer exactly what I'm looking for. Google doesn't surface them in my results, but other engines do.

> The idea that Search is somehow worsening doesn't make any sense.

What analytics are you thinking of that would show search is somehow MORE accurate? Because if it's just searches and click throughs and traffic and revenue...

More people with internet = more people searching for stuff. More mobile phones = more people searching for stuff out in the world. Worse results = user goes back to google and does ANOTHER search and search revenue just doubled again. Huzzah bonuses and vacations to Disneyland all around this year!

I think by any measure, growth and clicks and revenue are going to go up no matter what they do so I'm not sure exactly what metric you'd be tracking to see whether Google search results are actually qualitatively better? Short of the site going down entirely, there's probably nothing they can do to slow growth. But nowhere in that compounding money farm is the quality of results relevant.

> The other thing I don't understand is the idea that Search is somehow becoming less accurate over time.

The search is probably fine, but it's relegated to the bottom half of the page. It could also get worse if Google isn't able to keep up with the SEO and scammers. Personally I feel like Google has lost interest in providing a good search experience, they still have, what, 90% of the market. There's zero incentive to ensure it's a good experience and they can keep milking the advertisers.

Meanwhile the competitors have been forced to do better and especially Bing has. Any search engine that rely on Bing has become really good in the past five years. That might also be part of it, those of us who went to Bing, DuckDuckGo or other search engines for other reasons have learned to use those and when we then go back to Google it's worse, because we haven't used it for ten years.

But you're probably right, the search bit is fine, it finds the same results as Bing, so it's down to presentation and Google used to be the best and now they are the worst.

This echoes my experience as well. I switched to DDG some years back, in part because I could always compare with Google easily by appending !g. I still use !g (perhaps 1 in 50 searches), usually when I'm willing to trade worse presentation and degraded privacy for better long-tail results.

Try Kagi Search if you're willing to pay for a better search experience!

I've been using it for over a year, 100% of the time, and love it. Great results and awesome functionality like weighting certain sites, AI summarization, etc.

I don't work for Kagi, I just seriously love it.

There is too much effort put into serving the advertisers. Searches that I want to make, to find things for me, are corrupted in order to deliver ads.

Yes, and Amazon has improved the shopping experience as they have gained these insights as well. As someone who went away from the world for 5 years so wasn't in the pot as it slowly started to boil, Google and Amazon are both significantly worse and less user friendly than they used to be.

Just look at Google Assistant. It has gotten significantly worse the last two years. Strangely, the only time it asks me for feedback is when it happens to work. Shouldn't be hard for it to detect when it craps out I talk frustrated at it, but they don't seem interested in getting feedback at that point. Ah, but it happens to turn one light on once (versus the 20 something went wrong times), prompt for feedback on that specific one time it worked.

You’re hiding huge swaths of unforeseen consequences.

Do you honestly think that when Google is presented with an improvement in search results that would reduce its revenue that they choose the improvement?

The majority of users may not understand the are looking at a low quality result. Clicking through to canned SEO websites that fill the front page for many queries is enough for them to get what they want.

Enough of course until someone shows them better results and then they will switch search engines just as we switched from altavista to google all those years back.

…then search is no longer fit for the valuable segments of the population, unless you measure "value" strictly by numbers of eyeballs without ad blockers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com