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Comment by simbolit | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder why computer-literate people still use Google Search. Basically for all search queries I can imagine, DuckDuckGo or Yandex consistently give much better results.

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It’s so frustratingly bad. I “-“ a search term and it’s in the title of the first dozen results nonetheless. DDG is slightly better (they say “-“ creates fewer results with the term, not none) and it’s only one in the top 3 say. Say you want to do -order but have switch or rearrange in your search. You’re just SOL on Google. It thinks these terms are interchangeable, related enough, so it overrides -order completely.

I think you’re right. I became computer illiterate by using Google.

Try using the Verbatim option in the Tools menu.

You can also set your default search URL in your browser to use Verbatim. Result quality can still be a bit underwhelming, but searching without Verbatim feels like going back to the 1990s.

Wow I just tried Yandex and it seems to be superior to Google in every query. That is amazing. I'll daily drive it for sometime and see how it is.

The only problem is I seem to hit CAPTCHA challenges very frequently.

Yandex image search/visual search is also pretty good.

Does that put you on any lists?

(Local ISP seems to know a lot of what folks look at even when using https and an encrypted bittorrent client.)

if you live in a country where ISP or government puts you on a list for visiting a russian search engine, consider switching countries.

Easier said than done.

A lot of their products are very solid. We have, at home, Yandex Music which is way cheaper than Spotify (and is quite different) and Alice, which is their Alexa equivalent. If you speak Russian, its quite good :)

In general, while I was visiting Russia last year and the year before, Yandex Taxi (like Uber) impressed me quite a lot, too.

And they have the best time series db today ClickHouse!

Russian engineering is next level. Just look at Telegram. The thing works flawlessly with billions of messages everyday and Slack struggles with some basic chat.

Duckduckgo is terrible for most of my search queries, it seems to suffer from the same SEO spam problems Google does. Yandex can't be trusted because of its Russian affiliations, which is quite sad because Yandex is quite good.

I've started using Bing Chat for search queries thst only produce spam results and while Bing lies and misleads in its direct answers, the links it provides to support its statements are usually quite good.

Kagi?

I use both Google and DDG (and also Brave search, depending on the browser/machine) and Google is usually better for me.

I flip between DuckDuckGo and Google because sometimes Google actually does have the results that I'm looking for when I'm submitting normie queries.

I’ve been using Kagi for a year or so and love it.

Google wins hands-down for local results, but I use Maps a lot to find restaurants so it might be just me.

Same for me. I use Google only to find local results, DDG for the rest.

Brave search has been decent too, it has a special section adding reddit/forum results which is pretty helpful.

It's now my fulltime search engine. It's really good.

I use other engines exclusively. The only time I have to switch back to Google is when I want to look for places where I can "purchase" a thing. It's very telling to me that that's the thing still keeping me on Google because it's so good.

One thing I'll recommend to everyone: Just set your default search to anything but Google. It takes a few months but your brain, internal search result filter and your overall search behaviour adjust. Google is like an addictive drug in some sense.

When I see people searching with Google or Bing I cringe. I have a computer-illiterate engineer friend who's default search engine is Yahoo - only because some program defaulted it to that and that's where he stays. Sheesh. There's a lot of them out there to be prayed upon unfortunately.

Yes, indeed, or Tailcat (now search.brave.com), or Bing...

Does anyone remember Beaucoup? It was a metasearch that aggregated the results of the top, largely manually indexed search engines at the time.

It's been years since I last thought to look, but here's a list of current search engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

Amazing to see Dogpile still around! Search feels like an oddly under-remarked-upon topic on HN because it's always within the context of a few big names (or else massively criticized by Googists - saw a lot of sneering responses to Neeva and Brave search...).

Is there a way to get English results with Yandex when using a ddg !ya hashbang?

Also add in Phind, ChatGPT.

Can the person who downvoted this tell me why? I want to learn.

We're discouraged from discussing downvotes, but I have seen a lot of totally innocuous comments get greyed out lately. I'm suspicious that some are deliberately abusing the feature. I wouldn't worry about it.

FWIW, I've noticed an uptick of that, too. Not sure what to make of it.

There's been an influx of users since the Reddit snafu, I think they're just settling in. Might just be my perception, but I've seen the tone of the average comment shift a bit.

I didn't make that connection until you mentioned it, but it makes sense. I bet you're right.

Because there are a large cohort of Googlers and Xooglers here who are resolutely in denial that their golden goose is not dying, and they insist it is in fact fine. Whereas nearly any knowledge worker using Google daily for the past decade can attest to it's rapid decline in quality.

Even spouses of Googlers suffer from this malady occasionally. I have a close friend who has a wife working for Google as a tech writer, and every time the subject of Google's decline in search quality comes up he passionately defends them as light years ahead of the competition, untouchable, always on the edge of innovation, etc.

I really don't get where it comes from, it's just a company - not a religion!

Funny, I see the problem in the opposite direction.

Google results seem perfectly fine to me, and I know they have metrics that track how well it performs. And it's their golden goose, so it doesn't make any business sense that they wouldn't maintain its quality.

The "religion" seems, to me, to be people who keep insisting its results are getting worse. And I don't get it, because I just don't see it at all in my own experience. As far as I can tell, it's just anti-Google bias or something.

This thread has someone else asking for actual examples of where Google gives bad results and other search engines are great. And once again, nobody seems to be able to provide any. If Google really were declining, you'd think people would have put together objective evidence around it, because it'd be a heck of a news story.

There are a lot of queries where it insists that the results come from common websites like Reddit or major media outlets. Smaller websites don't show up even if they have more relevant content.

There others where the results are all SEO content marketing spam.

The thing it rarely seems capable of doing now is showing legitimate non-spam content from smaller websites.

It also used to be possible when you were looking for a specific web page you've already seen, to type in a bunch of terms that you know are on that page and then it comes right up because it's the one page with all of those terms together. That doesn't seem to work anymore.

How can you collect evidence when you don't save all your searches and search results offline?

You'd think google could run it's classic algorithm to show it hasn't changed...

Lots of things that don't make a great deal of business sense still nevertheless occur in large corporations. Frequently. I'm not sure that's a useful metric by which to judge a situation.

I personally didn't reply to that other poster, simply because their tone suggested (to me) that they were more looking for an argument than a civil debate. Yours is very different, and thank you for that. This is something I'd genuinely like to bottom out, because from my perspective there's been a noticeable, ongoing decline in the quality of search results from Google.

So, challenge accepted. Here's an example for you, and it's not even that subjective: Run a Google search that includes a minus term and tell me how effective the search results are in regards to obeying that instruction. That was a feature I used on a daily basis until Google made it completely non-functional.

If you want an example that doesn't rely on specific features, trying searching for "<thing you might want to buy> review". Enjoy the avalanche of low-quality SEO and link spam you're about to receive.

Also consider the fact that many searches you perform on Google are already offered with a "reddit" suffix, because so many people can only find the information they're looking for by appending that term to their search. Google by itself just cannot find what you want any more.

If that's not enough for you and you want specific examples, that's certainly possible. I was searching for a solution to a programming related problem on Google just a few days ago, and came up empty-handed after 20+ frustrating minutes of it including "related" search terms that weren't relevant. Reconstructing that search wouldn't be terribly difficult, if there were an indication the effort was worthwhile. In the end I went to ChatGPT and got my answer, including a fully-functional example, in less than 30 seconds. An experience that is becoming more and more the norm as time goes on.

First of all, thanks for writing all that. I appreciate it, and so I'd like to respond.

> Run a Google search that includes a minus term and tell me how effective the search results are in regards to obeying that instruction.

Sure. I search for the movie I watched last night -- "How the West Was Won" (without quotes) -- and nearly all of the results are for the 1962 movie, as it should be. I search for "How the West Was Won -1962" and all the results are for the 1977 TV series, plus a Led Zeppelin album. Works great -- I use the minus operator all the time.

> trying searching for "<thing you might want to buy> review". Enjoy the avalanche of low-quality SEO and link spam you're about to receive.

I just typed in "dehumidifier review" and the first three results are from Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, and Good Housekeeping. Down the page includes more trustworthy sources like Tom's Guide and The Spruce. This is exactly what I want the results to be. I trust those a lot more than some random blogger of YouTuber, for instance.

> Also consider the fact that many searches you perform on Google are already offered with a "reddit" suffix, because so many people can only find the information they're looking for by appending that term to their search

Which is fantastic for me. I'll often find really valuable opinions in a single Reddit thread that provide a different perspective from Wirecutter, for instance. This isn't a failure of Google -- it's a testament to Reddit's success. (Indeed, Wirecutter and Reddit are often the first two things I want to read when researching a product -- but Reddit is more of a second pass.)

> I was searching for a solution to a programming related problem on Google just a few days ago

I definitely agree that finding incredibly specific solutions to technical problems can sometimes be hit-or-miss, but that's not a problem with Google at all, that's a problem with the entire concept of keyword search. But to my eyes, Google hasn't gotten worse over a couple of decades, it's gotten better. And I think it's noteworthy that your solution was ChatGPT, as opposed to a different search engine. That's exactly the kind of thing I turn to ChatGPT for as well. But again, I don't interpret it as Google having gotten worse, just as a new tool that's even better for certain types of tasks.

You got downvoted because your comment is pretentious.

The nuance is difficult, but basically it's because you said "computer-literate". Your comment makes the suggestion that anyone who is computer-literate ought to be using Yandex/DDG, and if they are still using Google, then they are stupid.

A better comment would be "I've been using Yandex/DDG lately and the results are much better than Google!". That's just your experience or opinion - not judging other people or suggesting that they are stupid.

Thank you.

I wrote the comment initially without it, then thought about how many people don't even know there are alternative search engines, and added "computer-literate" to make clear I am not talking about normies, but people here on HN.

I can now see how my comment can be read as pretentious.

I downvoted because of what others responded. To put it another way, in keeping with the perceived tone of your post "Basically for all search queries I can imagine", maybe your imagination sucks?

(not attacking you personally, just doing this for illustration)

k, thx for the downvotes :D

Because it is not true. I have never found a page that was on duck duck go but not google, but the reverse occurs daily.

I haven't noticed any decrease in the ease to find what I'm looking for when using Google over decades, I always find what I need on the first page if not the first result.

Every time someone brings that up, I ask for an example of something they are looking for, and their search query, and every single time I either don't get an answer, or get an answer that shows Google has absolutely no problem at all.

So, give me an example.

Cmon now. Try to get a result for "UFC stream free" on Google. Now try that on Yandex. Live sports streaming is just one subject you can easily see Google actively censoring the organic results the web would give you if your search engine was information agnostic. Now try to search for anything politically related on Google that is not center-left/coastal US/mainstream power forces aligned, and you will stop believing in any result the corporate american search engines approve you to see.

I think the person you're responding to meant search quality, whether you're getting relevant results for a combination of programming terms for example.

Not in terms of filtering illegal content. That's a separate issue that has nothing to do with quality.

And what the heck are you talking about with center-left? You can search for literally anything on Fox News and Google will find it for you. There's no evidence whatsoever of Google results trying to show political bias.

Indeed, to the contrary -- isn't the whole criticism of YouTube is that is sends people down rabbit holes of right-wing and conspiracy recommendations? How do you explain that?

> Not in terms of filtering illegal content. That's a separate issue that has nothing to do with quality.

Au contraire, it's extremely common for measures designed to suppress illegal or disfavored content to have a high false positive rate and disappear from the results the very thing you're looking for even though it isn't illegal.

> isn't the whole criticism of YouTube is that is sends people down rabbit holes of right-wing and conspiracy recommendations? How do you explain that?

Google search and YouTube recommendations are different things entirely.

> You can search for literally anything on Fox News and Google will find it for you. There's no evidence whatsoever of Google results trying to show political bias.

It has a heavy mainstream bias. Fox News is right-leaning but it's the mainstream media. See if you can get it to organically surface anything from a libertarian or communist perspective, for example.

So your use case for Google is illegal content and terrorist manifestos, and you complain it doesn't show them? Ok buddy.

Why are you hostile to someone having a different use case than you?

> See if you can get it to organically surface anything from a libertarian or communist perspective, for example.

Just put in the search terms and it will give those things to you. It's not hard.

But obviously, for broad queries, Google is serving up the popular results most people click on. That's not Google's bias, that's just the bias of what most people are looking for. But you can find whatever you want with the right libertarian or communist search terms. Google's not hiding political viewpoints. Again, especially as evidenced by the fact that YouTube will start recommending that stuff to you if you like it.

> Just put in the search terms and it will give those things to you. It's not hard.

Have you actually tried this? A search for "communist news" returns primarily pages about communism from major outlets like AP and CBS. Somewhat amusingly one of the results is the South China Morning Post, which is based out of Hong Kong and blocked in mainland China.

For "libertarian news" it at least gives Reason and Cato (which are fairly major outlets) but then proceeds with all the mainstream media outlets. No hint of anybody's blog or social media account anywhere.

> But obviously, for broad queries, Google is serving up the popular results most people click on. That's not Google's bias, that's just the bias of what most people are looking for.

It feels like the problem is that all the results are the same. Even if you search for some more specific subset of the news, all the results will just be the pages for that topic on each of the major media outlets who are all writing the same stories. Whereas better results might be e.g. the first three results are major media outlets but then it starts giving alternative outlets with varying perspectives.

Nobody is looking at the search results page and finding the coverage from CNN, BBC, MSNBC and CBS inadequate but finally finding satisfaction with NBC. These results are redundant with each other, or might be better served as an info box with a list of major outlets and a "more" button instead of constituting the entirety of the search results to the exclusion of anything else.

Essentially the problem is that it makes the search engine useless for discovery because the only things it will give you are the things everybody already knows about.

> Have you actually tried this? A search for "communist news" returns primarily pages about communism from major outlets like AP and CBS.

Trying this now. The second result is "People's World – Continuing the Daily Worker – Founded 1924", and the fourth is "Communist Party USA – cpusa.org".

Doesn't seem like Google's trying to censor anything authentically communist to me. But it is giving a wide range of results, from actually communist-written material, to mainstream news coverage of communism.

Seems to be working great.

Yes absolutely. If your only argument is that Google won't show you hitmen for hire when you search for hitmen for hire, maybe you don't have an argument.

Disliking an argument does not invalidate it. Using emotion to override logic is not a useful thing to invoke.

I'd be happy to bet your supposed "news" you're in effect cherry-picking (by looking for) will be on some [insertgenericnewspaper].com url.

These tend to be Russian misinformation websites promoted on Facebook and targeting unsuspecting gullible/old folk.

Are you saying you haven't seen Google return results that don't contain your search terms, or if they do contain the terms they're only in metadata (og tags and the like)? I know verbatim mode is supposed to help with this but afaict there isn't a way to enable it permanently, making it awkward to use (especially on the mobile site).

I've found Google search results to be poor these days but I don't keep a list of the searches that fail, so I don't have anything to share with you.

> you haven't seen Google return results that don't contain your search terms

Oh they absolutely do, and thank goodness. What turns out to be the most useful page often contains a synonym instead, which an exact query would have missed.

But I've never seen Google return results that don't have anything to do with my search terms at all. Is that a problem you've had? Do you have an example query?

The only bad searches I get are when a word/term has multiple meanings and the more popular one crowds out what I'm actually looking for... but then I just add terms to narrow it down and it fixes it.

I don't have an example query ready for you. I'll often see the problem when I include error messages, media titles, or model numbers in my searches, none of which have synonyms. Google will arbitrarily ignore at least one term, often silently.

I don't take issue with spellcheck or even synonym suggestions, FWIW. It's that the results which include/are relevant to specifically requested terms appear below results that don't/aren't, sometimes way below. It hasn't always been this way but I can't pinpoint when results started getting worse.

But that's easy to fix by putting in quotes. And Google will often highlight next to a search result "doesn't include <search term>", which you can click and Google will add the quotes for you.

If you put all terms in quotes, Google generally won't ignore anything. It will tell you it couldn't find any results though, quite frequently.

Sure, there are workarounds for the problem, some of which work reliably. In the grand scheme they're not even onerous, just annoying.

I'm saying that I always find what I look for in the first page of Google, that's it.

I don't care about having the right words in the right place if the results have what I'm searching for.

But again, no example provided.

Presidential candidate websites

Only ones in the first two pages (or more) are Biden's campaign website (of course) and Marianne Wilson's website. No RFK Jr, no Vivek Ramaswamy, not even Trump's.

Either it is egregious incompetence, or it's deliberate.

No search engine seems to respond very well to the query "presidential candidate websites" (without the quotes), by your criterion. As an experiment, I tried it with a few of them from a private tab on my phone, looking at the first 5 pages of results.

Yandex.com (page length 10) doesn't link to any candidate websites.

DDG (page lengths 10, 20, 50, 50, 50) links to Joe Biden (page 1), Nikki Haley (page 2), RFK Jr. (page 2), Chris Christie (page 3), Marianne Williamson (page 3), Ron DeSantis (page 3), and Perry Johnson (page 4). It's missing Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mike Pence.

Bing (page lengths 10, 14, 14, 14, 14) links to Joe Biden (page 1), Nikki Haley (page 2), Chris Christie (page 2), Marianne Williamson (page 3), RFK Jr. (page 3), and Ron DeSantis (page 3). It's missing Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mike Pence.

Brave Search (page length 19) links to Joe Biden (page 1), Marianne Williamson (page 1), and Cornel West (page 3). It's missing RFK Jr., as well as all Republican candidates.

Yahoo (page length 10) links to Nikki Haley (page 2), Chris Christie (page 2), RFK Jr. (page 4), and Ron DeSantis (page 4). It's missing Joe Biden, Marianne Williamson, Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mike Pence.

Google (page length 10) links to Joe Biden (page 1), Marianne Williamson (page 1), Ron DeSantis (page 4), and Mike Pence (page 5). It's missing RFK Jr., Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, and Chris Christie.

None of these search engines link to more than two candidate websites within the first 20 results, nor do they link to Trump's or Ramaswamy's websites, so Google is far from alone in that regard. (I haven't been able to test with Kagi Search to see if it is any different.)

Perhaps search engines are simply bound to see such a query as asking more for the concept of candidate websites in general, than for topical examples in particular.

Thanks, upvoting for the extensive research!

Kagi, location set to United States:

Page 1: Biden, Williamson and link to an article Google hides campaign sites of Trump, RFK Jr. and other Republican candidates

Page 2: Biden again, Pence

No further pages. 5th result contains an article that claims to be linking all presidental candidate websites, but it's a Medium, hidden behind sign-up. I haven't find any result with a comprehensive list of the websites of interest. Kagi does aggregate results from Google and Yandex, so this is probably not too surprising.

On Kagi (International) I got these results on the first page:

First result: Joe Biden

Further down: Bernie Sanders, Marianne Williamsson, Hillary Clinton

Further down: Article: "Google hides campaign sites of Trump, RFK Jr. and other Republican candidates"

Further down: Ron DeSantis

Between these results there are several links with lists of all candidates.

Did it give you a result leading directly to their canonical campaign website? I can see Sanders and Clinton with international, but can't see DeSantis nor any other Republican candidate (not even Pence).

I can definitelly see pages with lists of candidates, but I couldn't find a single one that would also link their websites and thus satisfy the query, at least indirectly.

The results seem to change as we speak. I no longer have any republican candidates on the first page of search results, but the links in the results are to the canonical campaign sites.

Google is a search engine, not an AI.

Thanks for confirming that you are in the second bucket and just don't know how to use it.

Interesting query. Whilst it may be debatable what the ordering should be, there is a somewhat small set of objective correct results that should make the first page.

I sometimes search for stuff I've published on my own blog. For some reason, Google often doesn't deliver, but e.g. Duck Duck Go does. Example query:

hitachi mb-h2 data recorder repair

Expected result: pages from [my nickname].com.

Yeah I wouldn't want a website that's half in Japanese to show up on my English Google either, seems like it's working as intended.

You don't want technical information that would solve your problem if the words on the page which include it are not in English?

Blanchard Typology.

If you use Google for that query you won't find much of anything. Using Yandex you find all sorts of articles and information. The topic is considered transphobic so it is blocked on Google.

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