Hacker News Reader

Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't just that the internet has become more SEO-oriented and encumbered with low-value clickbait websites -- it's also that Google doesn't listen to instructions the way it used to.

Google started slipping when it began assuming that it knows better than you do. For instance, when the exact search operator (" ") stopped working.

I'd take the Google of 2014 over the Google of 2023 without thinking twice, and I think that I'm not alone in this.

View on HN

My most recent complaint is the disappearance of the pagination numbers.

Since I know the top results are mostly useless spams on some searches, I used to go to page 4 or 5 to find the actual results. Now to achieve the same result I have to click and scroll 5 times.

Agree. Also their results are often biased and I sometimes find myself going to Yandex.

I think Frank Zappa would chortle with irony that a Russian search engine returns his discographies uncensored in the here and now versus an American one.

All search engines are inherently biased, since they perform a ranking task (which is a value judgement). They all encode (possibly uncessfully) the values of their creator. This is why having multiple search engines is important, as diversity in search options is the closes you'll get to objectivity.

(said the independent search engine creator with the same air of righteousness as when Plato argued philosophers should be kings)

Yes but they’re also politically biased. Not to mention, the enormous amount of web content that is effectively banned from seArch engine results due to low prestige

Congrats you are one step from re-inventing DogPile. Add AI and blockchain to pull in a ton of VC money.

Absolutely. i so often do a search and it presumes to think it knows what i want rather than giving me what I ask for, sometimes even when I'm being quite specific. I will say it does a great job for programming stuff but a lousy job whenever I'm researching economics topics.

Even programming stuff it does a lousy job. I use R a lot. I plot with the base graphics package because it works fine. Finding R information that does not involve the tidyverse library is so damn difficult on google search. Its bests to just go straight to the documentation since stackoverflow and other sites are pretty worthless with pretty much all answers requiring ggplot or dpylr even if they can be implemented with zero dependencies with the base tooling.

Same situation with python honestly. No I don’t want to use pandas, if I wanted better data wrangling I’d just wrangle in base R then import the wrangled data into python if need be instead of adding another dependency to my python code. Apparently this makes me a heretic based on google search results.

Verbatim search still exists.

https://www.google.com/advanced_search

Do you use it often? It doesn't work the way it used to. I can't count the number of times I've searched for a technical term -- in quotes -- and got results back for a subtly (sometimes not so subtly) different term.

you have an example of this? using quotes is not the same as going to advanced search and saying use exact word or phrase. silly, yes I know.

Quotes is different than verbatim mode. Compare:

[verbatim mode] https://www.google.com/search?q=unexpected+newline+in+compos...

[quotes] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22unexpected+newline+in+com...

The top two results are the same, but besides that verbatim mode seems way better to me.

I don't even bother with quotes anymore. When I'm searching for something technical from the normal interface, I'm almost always going to Tools -> All results dropdown -> Verbatim.

I see that I can specifically ask for results that are in the Flash .swf format. Very convenient.

More of the web is also behind paywalls or is on platforms like tiktok, instagram, twitter, etc. Less to scrape and index.

>For instance, when the exact search operator (" ") stopped working.

It still works.

It works, but it does something different than it used to. It used to only include results that actually contained the exact phrase you put within quotes. That is no longer the case.

Now you just check "verbatim search" in the tools menu.

Works exactly how quotes used to.

It works the same and it never only contained the exact phrase as Google ignores punctuation.

This is not my experience. I search for exact phrases the same way I always have. Three to result does not contain the word I emphasized. This never happened before a few years ago. Now it happens daily.

Are you sure the page doesn't contain it? It is not a simple as just visiting the page and searching for the thing you quoted as there may be punctuation between words or the text may be in the alt text of an image or somewhere else that is not obvious.

I am quite sure. The kinds of words in question would not even really make sense for "SEO gaming" to come into play. Typically, it presents with trying to match a word vs a phrase(I don't ever try to match phrases). I try matching smaller and smaller fragments of the word and still... nothing. I remember this working back when it was common for pages on gray websites to stuff giant blobs of text with juicy keywords out of view with janky html. Yet, somehow those pages were ranked very low and results were good. There is a clear degradation in quality.

Actually, it has happened with results that include hacker news discussions. I scrape through and expand EVERY comment on a 6 month old post and still find no partial or exact matches for my search keyword. It is very clear to me that Google has switched behavior. It used to flex on how awesome it was to bring you to an esoteric corner of the internet matching your exact query. Now, it tries to converge your queries into what it thinks you want(not what you asked for) and funnel you into large websites at the expense of utility.

It will substitute similar things, such as the word ubuntu for debian.

Which can be incredibly frustrating if you know the problem well enough to need a different answer.

This is a good point. I searched for "rename" today and the top result switched it to "name" instead. The TOP result completely changed the query. Infuriating.

I also love when my search is narrow enough that Google instead starts to return more generic pages for totally different programming languages instead of the smaller result set that matches exactly. It is very easy to observe as you explore a topic. At some point, you got a wall where any increase in search specificity seems to yield worse results than queries that helped you get to that point.

Yeah; that's a good point. Google's desire to provide popular/well known information sources is outweighing the ability for people to be specific. It's infuriating to be ignored as a user. Hence using verbatim constantly, which feels like a checkbox for "stop failing me".

Which... Why isn't Google learning that some users are constantly seeking out verbatim for results they'll click on and adjusting their search results to be more verbatim?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com