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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

I experience that when I try to google for technical problems I'm having at work, but otherwise searches still go pretty well for me.

I just had to google a bunch of races that I wanted to run. The top result was always the event's own web site.

When I google some news, relevant news articles always come up.

The last search I did was for how to display a ket vector in LaTeX. The top result was the StackExchange article with the right answer.

From what I see, certain domains seem to be targeted for exploitation. Programming questions seem to be high up on the list. I wonder if that skews HN readers' perceptions.

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Google search to retrieve specific factual information is pretty good.

Google search to retrieve anything opinion related has been horrible and infested with blogspam for years (hence people searching Reddit to get that kind of info).

Google search to retrieve product marketing pages is pretty good. Specific factual information searches lead to product marketing pages. Opinion searches lead to product marketing pages.

Google is a giant adware tool that’s been taken over by adware SEO sites. The example given - find the product marketing pages for some races - falls directly in its sweet spot. If you venture outside it’ll do its best to get you back into the product marketing sweet spot, and the SEO companies of the world take care of the rest.

Search is a lost cause.

Really? I've been finding it doesn't even find stuff it used to in certain documentation (I'm talking like things it found maybe a year ago), "searching in quotes for this stuff", things that other search engines (bing, kagi) are indexing just fine - And since I've switched to using these engines more when I'm searching things for programming work, it's definitely been a lot more helpful than google which often just seems to be missing a ton now

I suppose it never occurs to me to search for opinions. I'm not even sure how I'd got about it, even if search weren't broken. Blogspam is what I'd expect to see.

I'm more likely to start at a place that aggregates reviews and try to hallucinate which ones were written by people who know what they're talking about. That usually seems to work.

I imagine that somewhere out there is a person who bought the product and reviewed it on their blog or made some enthusiastic social media post about it, and that's what you'd want to locate were it not for the spam. But I don't expect any search engine to be able to find it for me.

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