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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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