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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had said the house looked like it was melting, so she typed in "melting house", I think. Not that that's genius or quirky or anything, but I would never dream of typing in something I was thinking "informally", and her approach is more like "whatever whackadoo thing I'm thinking, probably other people think just like me" and she finds anything I ask her about. (I've pretested that query, and turns out that there are melting houses all over the world, just gotta look in your neighborhood)

so to the point here, I lament that Google doesn't work any more, but she doesn't, she thinks it works great. Now if I can just get her to stop finding restaurant recommendations on TikTok...

View on HN

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works.

The google we grew up with was a tool that allowed you to precisely retrieve authoritative writings related to a subject, but today's google is a lot more like ChatGPT than that.

It all comes back to that "marginal user" blog post

Indeed, I've had to force myself to start searching in full sentences much more as the results from the old method of keyword searching have steadily deteriorated.

You mean, like how we interact with ChatGPT? ;-)

Google does not work. I can show you with a simple example with a few keywords together that does not find the specific resource.

I just give an example in another HN thread on a different context [1].

I am open for a 30' session showing a lot more examples.

Regarding less experienced people searching for information, try looking for health data and see what is in the top.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37961449

> It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want

You could not have chose a more affirming counterpoint of an example.

I think you just proved the parent post’s point.

Seems like we live in parallel worlds but I will show you how I am right except you can really proof I am wrong:

At Google, they recommend to go to https://www.google.com/advanced_search so you can write all the keywords you want. In this case I searched for: kvt reverse exploit [1] you can quickly see that google search results are inaccurate and it shows first my HN post because it was very recent. Also the recent article where it is also mentioned and added after I post it here in HN [2] and the following results doesn't end in some correct previous post. I then try again [3] with a more precise search adding kconsole and only found three results without all the keywords while the advanced search says explicitly that all these keywords should be there.

Am I missing something?

[1] https://www.google.com/search?as_q=kvt+reverse+exploit&as_ep...

[2] https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security

[3] https://www.google.com/search?as_q=kvt+reverse+exploit+kcons...

Yes, you're missing the point of the poster above you. He's saying that the kind of technical searches you are trying to do are irrelevant to 99.99% of internet users and Google is optimized to give superficial but relevant-looking results to those kinds of people. For that metric Google does "work well"

So it's not that Google doesn't work, it's that you're using the wrong tool for your use case. If you want highly technical content or precise keyword search you shouldn't use Google. It's like you're going on Tinder to find a marriage partner.

When was the change? These pages were indexed by Google years ago, Google removed them obviously, and the search worked fine in the past.

You are saying one day you use your mobile phone for calling and the next day the device only work for calling 0800-*?

It's not yesterday, it was 20 years ago when Google excelled at exact keyword matches. It has been a constant evolution away from that.

I hate the new Google as much as others, but if you don't adapt your search habits for 20 years when the whole ecosystem around you has been obviously changing, that's kind of on you. Just use another search engine that fits your use case. Personally I use Kagi and I haven't touched Google for the last year at all.

Does Kagi support queries like site, inurl, intitle, etc or have some similar capabilities?

Yes.

Yep, it's time to give up on Google... Both the search engine and the company. Kagi Fastmail Rsync.net

These are worth paying for.

seconding fastmail - i was grandfathered at $5 a year for years, i pay $15 now i think - and i am probably going to pay for kagi (or ilk). I run nextcloud, after trying other things like syncthing and owncloud - as well as owning a synology i would never put on the public internet.

Quoting as ` kvt “reverse exploit” ` gets me only a few results on Google, period. That’s true even telling it to include ones omitted as redundant. They’re all either your HN comments or blogs mirroring them. The original doesn’t appear.

That tells me that the main problem may simply be that the BugTraq post on seclists.org isn’t indexed by Google at all.

While that’d be annoying, I think it’d more likely be a specific configuration or robots.txt issue with that site than being a general issue with how searches are performed.

FWIW, the same query in Kagi found the original as the second result, just under a blog mirror of your 10/20 comment and above the comment itself. Since Kagi sources from Bing (along with Google) results, that reinforces the theory that it’s an issue specific to Google’s crawl.

Contrary to your other replies, I do think your style of query continues to work well on Google (where indexed of course)—-and so do full sentences.

I honestly think the issues when there are problems finding things usually come more down to 25-plus years of searchable internet history accreting a lot of clutter (especially in spaces like tech where old info ages out but never gets deleted), along with cynical SEO from low value sites deliberately skewing results for as long as the site remains indexed.

Neither is a Google problem, and the recency bias you observed is arguably the best way to combat both. Ads and site promotion are another story, and the reason I’m on Kagi, but I don’t think that hits tech as hard as consumer spaces.

You literally just proved the point. You just don't know how to search on the modern google

Please read my reply...

If you call "working" showing me an endless stream of blogs of some dude, an automatically translated russian clone of stackoverflow, a completely unrelated stackoverflow question, above the actual official documentation that it should be showing me… sure then it works.

I bet more people are looking for blogs than docs.

My suspicion is that blogs have ads and documentation doesn't, and that's why the results are like this.

Totally agree! My point is that they both probably contain the same answer and I bet that's all most people care about. I think most of us here have strong preferences for picking the "most appropriate" source, but frankly, I suspect we're weird.

In my experience, blogs are mostly young students trying to build an online presence or something similar, and contain bad advice and wrongness.

If I wanted the docs, I would get the docs. The blogs are useful because the documentation is largely unhelpful due to being overly simplicity or extremely nondescript. The blogs are where it's at because you can see how someone else used that thing

That's too generalized and IME not even true for say, Python docs, or regexes, or Gnu tools, or HTML. Most bootcamp/academy/coder-type blogs/copycats are aimed at giving only a tiny fraction of the information, but with examples (sometimes only very simple ones that cover only the most basic use-cases, and no links or mention of the other missing 90% of information (e.g.: "to read more about regexes, see ...").

"site:docs.python.org/3/ term" gets much better results. (You have to add the site: qualifier, due to SEO it's no longer just enough to say "Python docs". Hence "If I wanted the docs, I would get the docs." is not as trivial to do as you suggest. Things actually went beyond annoying to downright dangerous when searches for "Python 3.10 <topic>" were drowned out by older e.g. (3.6-3.8) version SEO stuff, instead of the latest Python docs.)

Queries like "awk by example" or "egrep by example" or "jq by example" seem to hit the sweetspot between completeness and working example: they give you third-party non-commercial unaffiliated expert bloggers not stuffed with upsell links to a bootcamp. Just pure information sites.

Having mentioned all this, now I've probably inadvertently cursed those sites...

To me what this shows is that it's really painful to try and use an "intelligent" algorithm for "content mediation" as if it were an actual search engine. Anything that spectacularly fails the "exact substring match" use-case is well on the way to becoming a content-mediator, and potentially as bad a content-moderator/thought-police/etc.

Unfortunately even before anyone started talking about "semantic web" or whatever, substring-match was declining in utility due to spam, so a substring-matcher was only as useful as it's ranking algorithm. So some cleverness in ranking is necessary, but when ranking becomes too clever, or irrelevant due to the arms race with spam, it's an almost inevitable slide from necessary rankers to mediators.

Since all the search/spam arms race is pretty much played out with giants like twitter/google anyway at this point, it is kind of hard to understand why we can't get and keep a separate and truly basic internet search engine that just works. I don't have a handy example, but in my experience even DDG & friends seem to routinely fail the "exact substring match" test for unusual phrases that I know I read verbatim last week.

What I (and I think others) really want is just substring-match tool plus a very minimal amount of extra cleverness for basic stuff like spelling variations, some fuzzing for dates/digits, directly adjacent stuff according to a simple thesaurus. Not my area of expertise, but I would guess that there's a combination of problems that prevent this tool from existing.

a) Other search companies are all trying to do fancy-but-fuzzy "semantic distance" searches to emulate Google

b) It's still true in 2023 that just keeping an up to date index is a super hard problem no matter how many crawlers are in your army

c) Despite bots everywhere, the deeper web in social-media is just too login-walled for the rule-abiding crawlers to deal with

d) There's just no money in do-what-i-say-not-what-i-mean search tools

DDG seems unusually susceptible to highly ranking AI-generated overly verbose garbage. I can't recreate the same issue with google or bing, so I am not sure where it pulls it from. I can find those same results in google, it's just they are on the 2nd or 3rd page.

I've never really found docs particularly useful. Usually, I just want a few simple examples to get the gist of how something works and docs tend to be very bad job of that. Meanwhile, the W3Schools SEO spam HN disdains tends to good job of that.

These days I use ChatGPT though.

Eh, I've had the opposite experience. If you search for anything slightly obscure in a language like Java, you'll get dozens of spam sites aimed at beginners that answer a much more basic question than the one you asked. That's because Java searches cater to a large population of people who can barely code.

Java is particularly rough because there are several populations of Java users (students, Android developers, enterprise developers, among others) and their coding standards are universes apart.

That and it's been around so long that the language and it's standards have been through so many iterations

> These days I use ChatGPT though.

I usually get non-working code snippets that pass the wrong parameters.

uBlocklist removes a lot of the crud, thankfully

I think perhaps the problem was that when you were growing up, the Internet had a much higher percentage of authoritative writings related to a subject, and today's Internet looks a lot more like ChatGPT-generated drivel. Google's results might has changed, but I suspect less so than the Internet as a whole. Older Internet content was weird, and often wrong, but it wasn't an endless expanse of nothingness camouflaged to resemble human content.

While this is true, Google itself is in large part responsible for the internet turning into this wasteland. Most of that garbage content is produced in the name of SEO.

I think Google Search "works" in the same way local newspapers "worked": they provide easy access to what most people want to know in their daily life, including gossip, the weather, the popular events and discussion topics ("melting houses")

If you're a German living in Morocco trying to understand Quebec's immigration policies in the original text you'll be fighting the search engine at every turn.

This feels like a good take. I’ve recently been trying to find more information on caveats of Section 179 of the US tax code, and at almost every turn the consensus is to go to a professional(which is what I should do), but for some nagging off hand questions, I was hoping to find some meaningful discourse on it.

Exactly. Google search is not a knowledge finder for power users, it's a content finder for normal people. The fact that it was good at finding knowledge for 10 years or so is entirely incidental to the goals of modern Google.

Noticed this as well. I've gotten so frustrated with poor results for things I need, I've been using "Verbatim" mode to force Google to stop interpreting my terms. This was a pain, so ended up installing an extension that forces verbatim on every search.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/oc...

Recently, I searched "(-)-BPAP" -- with the quotes -- looking for the chemical benzofuranylpropylaminopentane, which is typically referred to as (-)-BPAP. EVERY result was for a BiPAP ventilator.

So I tried verbatim. It still didn't work.

Verbatim + quotation marks. Still nothing.

I guess New Google Search simply doesn't recognize the "(-)-" part of the search term. But this is characteristic of its recent performance. I can't even count the number of times Google disregarded part of my search term and gave me an inane result.

Per the grandparent comment: "Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works."

Searching "BPAP chemical", "BPAP chemistry", etc. seems to work fine.

> Google Search simply doesn't recognize the "(-)-" part of the search term.

AFAIK, Google search has always ignored parentheses and most punctuation symbols (other than ones that are special to it, like +require_term -exclude_term "...")

https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/71287971/does-go...

> The trick is that Google actually works great.

This would be true if we could exclude commercial results. SEO is absolutely destroying search quality.

I disagree, but it depends on your definition of "working well". Yes, Google works better for my mom these days if you measure whether she is happy with the results she gets. However, the results she gets are mostly misinformation or spam. She just doesn't realize that's the case and is happy with the results regardless.

Measuring whether or not results are relevant to the query is the wrong metric to use. You don't want highly relevant misinformation. You want good information.

Yeah, gone are the days when you could enter a range of 16-digit numbers that started with "4", filetype:xls, and it would return a bunch of Excel spreadsheets from businesses that were storing credit card numbers in plaintext cells.

sighs wistfully

> Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works.

uhh....

We have google bard and chatgpt. We should have old google too.

Kagi? Personally, I use mostly ChatGPT, but if I wasn't using that I'd be using Kagi or something like it.

You use mostly ChatGPT for finding information? When I use it I still double check it's output with a google or duckduckgo search, if I don't something I know is outright wrong.

No, Google results are trash. Here are three examples from this week:

- I Googled "speed work running", wanting some workout suggestions. I visited four or five results that either didn't have concrete suggestions, were poorly written, or overly verbose. I ended my search with little faith that I was getting good advice. I typed the same thing into ChatGPT and got a suggestion of 6 different workouts that all seemed coherent.

- I asked Google Home "How do I make overnight oats". It replied, "I found a result for [...], should I read it?" then "The first ingredient is Nutella". That's it, that's all it said. I tried the same search on the web, and every result Google result was spam that was 20 paragraphs of inane blog content with a recipe tacked on the end. Again, ChatGPT then gave me a sane, baseline, recipe.

- I searched Google for "how much caffeine is in coffee". It gave me a calculator that said, "40 mg" and then a suggestion an alternative search for "Q: How much caffeine is in an average cup of coffee? A: between 80 to 100 milligrams". It turns out the calculator was normalizing the caffeine content to caffeine per 100mg of coffee.

I'm using Google exactly how their product is training me to use it, but the failure modes are all consistent. Google's AI features has not real understanding of the world, so their instant answers are frequently nonsensical. And Google clearly can't filter out SEO garbage.

Even if they could filter out SEO garbage, Google's early success killed the golden goose. 99% of web publishers are publishing content for Google, not for their readers and web publishing has become a cynically commercial affair. Individual publishers have by and large moved on from the web to other creator-focused platforms. So, the quality and experience of web content is absolute rubbish. Results are filled with cookie banners, ads, signup prompts, verbose SEO filler, poor writing, lack of authority, etc.

You are using it right however your bias is evident on the results. A 20-something will just scroll through the blog content to get to the recipe at the end. No huss, no fuss. In fact, they’ll open multiple tabs of search results to compare recipes in the time it takes you to gawk at the fact that you have to scroll to the end. Where is the recipe? Why is there a video? Table of contents? No, a 20-something will just flick their screen wildly until they are at the bottom, and scroll up. Give me the results and backtrack to where I’m at. This I think is a result of their upbringing and everyone’s focus on results rather than process. So you may believe you are doing everything correct but you are just going through the motions. The web today is different than it was even 5 years ago.

I wish I could search like I used to but we are where we are.

Uh, I do that and I’m 37. But I don’t scroll, I click the button that says "recipe" that’s on pretty much every recipe site.

IMO this is mainly about being used to the state of recipe sites on the internet, and has nothing to do with searching.

The state of recipe sites is 100% driven by Google. Those sites add the fluff because that is what Google rewards. The actual recipe quality doesn't matter. If I use my example, the page contains:

* Bio of the author - Google SEO rewards content written by "real humans", so this is there to appease the bot.

* Giant images of overnight oats - This helps the page rank highly on Google Image Search.

* Fluffy paragraphs - "The beauty of overnight oats is that you can make them as simple or creative as you’d like. The base recipe is delicious, and filling all on its own. But if you’d like to spruce it up, you can add a variety of toppings and mix-ins, including fresh fruit, nuts, seeds, spices, jams, and more". Is that supposed to be text written for other humans? Google rewards original content, which means recipe sites need to include massive paragraphs of filler to appear like an authoritative source.

* Ads - Gotta make the money.

* More fluff "Here’s a few reasons why you should to whip up this recipe today…" - Again, this is not text written for humans.

* Repeat the fluff, pictures and ads approximately 5 times.

* Common questions "Do you have to use yogurt?" - Trying to appeal to Google Instant Answer searches.

* Recipe - Finally!

* Recipe rating - This allows the site to put a star rating and review count on Google, again, for SEO

So, 95% of the content and functionality of that page is an attempt to convince Google into sending traffic, or ads generating revenue, rather than serving the end user.

Content on the web has dramatically changed from 20 years ago because publishers are creating content for a broken machine and not for other humans. This negative feedback loop is hurting the web, and not just Google. This leaves the door open for upstarts like ChatGPT or TikTok to gain mindshare.

100% agree that all the fluff is for the machines and not humans. The web has been broken this way since 2014. The feedback loop is real.

Sorry, I might not have been precise enough, I did not mean to say that this is not because of Google, only that knowing how to use recipe sites is very distinct from knowing how to google, you even encounter those sites no matter what SE you use (I haven’t used Google in years).

This is more on copyright law than Google.

> Recipes can be protected under copyright law if they are accompanied by “substantial literary expression."

https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte...

So the fluff is both an attempt at that substantial literary expression, and a way to differentiate this version of the recipe from 1000 other versions of the _exact_ recipe because the recipe itself is not unqiue or copyrightable! Without it, recipe's would be penalized by the duplicate content penalty Google applies.

I think this is more about ads then copyright. All these recipe blogs I've seen still follow with an uncopyrightable list of ingredients and simple directions. The recipe still isn't worthy of copyright, even if the content accompanying it is. Sure, the author may be working on something they are passionate about, but the site itself is all about the ad revenue.

The fact that young people have gotten used to inefficiencies and have gotten good at partially working around them does not mean the inefficiencies aren't there.

This often works the opposite generational direction: when a young person has a flat tire they often call a road service and wait two hours, while the old guy would install the spare himself in less than 8 minutes. But either way, flat tires are inefficiencies that are best eliminated.

Looks like what you're saying is that the results are garbage but people who don't know it could be better are fine with it, because they learned it's how the world works and can't be otherwise. While the ones who are cursed with the knowledge that it can be are left to complain.

I learned a trick recently. If you want "copyright-challenged" results, or exact results, try Yandex. It's a worse search engine and, therefore, better at matching exact text.

>A 20-something will just scroll through the blog content to get to the recipe at the end. No huss, no fuss. In fact, they’ll open multiple tabs of search results to compare recipes in the time it takes you to gawk at the fact that you have to scroll to the end. Where is the recipe? Why is there a video? Table of contents? No, a 20-something will just flick their screen wildly until they are at the bottom, and scroll up

I'm over 40 and do that (and the fuzzy stuff / open questions in the top comment).

In fact, most 20-somethings are much worse than this - some studies even pin them as worse with most computing use that is not about social media apps.

This is pure victim blaming.

If that's your take, it says more about you. We are ALL victims, to something. Sometimes it's our own fault (IP4), sometimes it's not (adtech). Next time, if you feel like a comment is negative or gas lighting or victim blaming or cancel-culture-worthy, you should state your reasons why you feel this way. Instead of stating your opinion as fact. No matter how right you think you are, there are always other perspectives (Israel/Palestine).

While reading your Google examples, I don’t think I could parse out what you were intending as a human. Perhaps different keywords would work better?

For example, “speed work running”, were you looking to improve sprinting? (I’m not a runner, so it almost reads to me like “working fast while on a treadmill”). Reading the rest of your example, maybe “sprint workouts” would give better results?

(40+yr old guy here, Google had always worked for me, as many people had described it working for 20yr olds. Finding the right, specific enough set of keywords had always been my “trick”. Little did I realize I subconsciously generate embeddings like a LLM to Google search)

"Speed work" is a class of running drills. The term is very common in running. I'll let ChatGPT explain. This was its response was given the same prompt, when I specifically asked it to give me options it's answer was more specific:

Speed work in running is a type of training that focuses on improving your running speed and anaerobic fitness. It involves various structured workouts and drills designed to increase your stride turnover and overall pace. Speed work is essential for athletes who want to enhance their performance in races or simply become faster runners.

Common forms of speed work in running include:

Interval Training: Interval workouts involve alternating between periods of high-intensity running (fast) and rest or recovery jogging. For example, you might run fast for 1 minute and then jog or walk for 1-2 minutes to recover. This process is repeated multiple times.

Fartlek Training: Fartlek, which means "speed play" in Swedish, is an unstructured form of speed work. During a fartlek run, you mix bursts of faster running with slower paces or jogging. You can do this based on how you feel or choose landmarks as your guide.

Hill Repeats: Running uphill at a high intensity is an excellent way to build strength and speed. Hill repeat workouts involve running up a hill at a fast pace and then jogging or walking back down to recover. This is repeated for a set number of repetitions.

Tempo Runs: Tempo runs are sustained efforts at a "comfortably hard" pace, typically just below your anaerobic threshold. This helps improve your lactate threshold and race pace.

Track Workouts: These are structured speed sessions done on a running track. Common track workouts include 400-meter repeats, 800-meter repeats, and 1,600-meter repeats, where you run at a fast, consistent pace and take rest intervals between each repetition.

Strides: Strides are short, fast runs of about 100 meters that help improve running form and leg turnover. They are typically done at the end of an easy run.

It's essential to incorporate speed work into your training regimen gradually to avoid overuse injuries and adapt to the increased intensity. Make sure to warm up properly and cool down after each speed workout. Consult with a coach or experienced runner to create a personalized training plan that suits your goals and fitness level. Additionally, listen to your body and allow for sufficient recovery between speed sessions to prevent overtraining.

If you search "speed work running drills" on Google, you get relevant results. It kind of sounds like you are cherry picking the "bad prompts" you sent to Google and comparing them to good prompts sent to GPT-4.

They specifically said that they used the same prompt. If I feed the exact string "speed work running" into ChatGPT 3.5 I get back essentially the same results that OP includes.

Bad prompts for google can have exactly the same words as good prompts for ChatGPT. The original commenter probably uses both of them at least 10 times a day, so it's not unreasonable to assume that they will run into those examples.

I would typically assume that a three word prompt like that is better for Google than it is for ChatGPT. Google is supposed to be good at keyword search, and ChatGPT is designed for longer prompts.

That means that your prior assumptions about Google are wrong. Google does a substantial amount of "semantic understanding" before doing a search. It is no longer a keyword matching tool - that stopped being the case a long time ago.

Also, ChatGPT is usually really bad with long prompts when I use it, and is often kind of close when I give it a short prompt. I assume part of this effect is psychological though, where you expect the short prompt to have worse results.

Mid-30s here, everyone in the shop at work uses me for Google because I still know how to use it effectively. Speaking with lots of people in person and via chats/forums has gradually made me come to realize how refined my search abilities are, relatively speaking. I think it's a combination of factors, like you mentioned "finding the right, specific enough set of keywords" is intuitive for us, but a lot of people just type in questions like it's Ask Jeeves from decades ago. Another major factor is one of grammar and vocabulary, because Google will fuzz your search string. In my experience, its "thesaurus" will rarely add more technical or specific words, so including them in your search will often give you actual technical data from a given field. Of course, this only helps if you have the proper lexicon to begin with, which was my main use case for Reddit before it went to shit. Hobbyist or technical subreddits were great for drilling down and winnowing out the specific name of something I was trying to find more information about. Now it's just more SEO LLM-generated nonsense trying to sell me crap I don't need. The other "secret sauce" I use when Googling is search operators, but we actually learned about those in elementary school (before Google existed!).

FWIW, my human brain did not understand your first query, in the second you conflate voice search with Google, and re the last, if I try it, it shows me a dropdown to select what I meant…

(Generally just confused by how ppl always claim it’s trash or it got worse but there never is a solid benchmark)

if they could filter out SEO garbage

I think the problem with Google is that 'garbage' is highly subjective, and what you think is awful is actually highly engaging for a lot of users. Google has massive amounts of data about what results users click on, how much time they spend on a website, how much scrolling they do, etc. To technical people we see that as SEO 'trapping' people to push engagement rankings up, but the reality is that it's just engagement. People could leave a site of they wanted to, but they don't. They scroll through those 20 paragraphs of recipe back story. That data means Google are finding accurate results.

If anything this shows that Google's results personalization isn't taking your engagement into account. A problem that will get worse as more people block analytics.

The problem with "SEO garbage" is that SEO is highly adaptive - whatever change Google does, SEO will almost immediately find a way to adapt and stay relevant. There is just too much money to be made for those involved.

No the problem is that Google did what they really, really promised never to do: to optimize for financial gain, keep people on the Google site, clicking on ads instead of telling them what they want to know. Like one of those 10-episode Netflix documentaries.

Precisely. The main problem with google is that it's extremely hard to align yourself with the goals of humans with human needs, so they have to look at proxy metrics to rank sites before anyone actually hits them. Their current proxy metric appears to be that there is a lot of human-sounding text on the page, and so people optimizing for that are going to put a lot of text on the page, factual accuracy be damned. In the naughts, their metric used to be that many sites linked to yours, and so people optimized that by creating webrings.

- I searched Google for "how much caffeine is in coffee". It gave me a calculator that said, "40 mg" ... It turns out the calculator was normalizing the caffeine content to caffeine per 100mg of coffee."

Man, you have strong coffee. :-(

you can't copyright a recipe itself, so in order to copyright the content on a website with recipes, you have to do that "My mother used to make this on dreary winter days, and we'd sit by the fire ..."

Now, i was told this, repeatedly, over and over. It's probably false, but if it is false, cite the decision that precedented this.

I’m sorry but are you trying to speak for all highly educated and technical people?

Because as far as I know, I’m both and I find Google just as good as ever, if not much better.

The only place I see people complaining about Google is Hacker News and certain parts of Reddit and by no means are the opinions on these sites anywhere near universally shared by most people.

And by all means, I think calling yourself highly educated but not being able to adapt slightly when a tool isn’t working right a little rich…

there's no reason a person can't be educated and inflexible. in fact the two often go hand in hand. also, I'm not sure you're using "by all means" correctly

Google is shit. It finds the 1 percent of the most commonly searched pages, and totally ignores the 99 percent long tail.

They should drop the charade and do a directory listing instead, like the "portal" pages of yore.

Counterpoint (NSFW):

No results: "vector plus phallophile" / "vector plus phallophile reviews" / "vector plus phallophilereviews" / "phallophilereviews.com vector plus"

vs.

Correct results: "site:phallophilereviews.com vector plus"

Yes, I have SafeSearch turned OFF. This is happening to pretty much anything that's remotely NSFW on both google.com and amazon.com -- it's getting completely impossible to search for perfectly legal things that are NSFW.

Google does this so people will execute more queries, stay longer on the search results, and see more ads. It's classic monopoly exploitation of abusing a captured user for increased profit.

They're perfectly capable of making things better, it's just more profitable if they don't.

>It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want

I don't think so. I've been using the "full sentence questions" and fuzzy questions since forever, and very seldom use "site:" and other such more formal constraints you mention.

Despite that Google results have been getting worse for the past 5 years at least.

> It works better than before

for some definition of better that is not "the results are more relevant than before"

What are your sources for this?

It doesn't work like ChatGPT at all.

I don't think it's a question of levels of formality in your search terms, I think whether you find Google useful depends on what topics you typically search for.

Google is fine for memes, news, and the other things that normal people regularly look for on the internet. Where it really breaks down is where it used to shine—finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics. Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap for finding any content with a target audience smaller than a few million people, and while stripping out advanced search operators may smooth the path for the 80th percentile of searches, it cripples the remaining 20 percent.

If your assistant stays firmly within the 80% that work, then yeah, Google is better than ever. But they made the 80% work seamlessly by giving up entirely on the 20% that people on forums like this really cared about.

> Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap

I know people say it still doesn't work, but I find adding quotes completely effective for me when I need the precise keyword. Not sure what I'm doing differently.

It works some of the time for me, but there are frequently cases where I put the word in quotes and Google just pretends I didn't.

It can be really egregious, too: I've searched for `foo` and had it say `Showing results for bar. Search for "foo" instead?` Then I follow the link that it provided and it still is searching for `bar` with the same prompt to refine the search, even though the double quotes are clearly still present.

I can concur. Just yesterday I was searching for something specific and thought I was sleep deprived or just generally losing awareness because I could swear I typed a very specific name in, only for it to show up in Google's search results (not the search bar) missing the last letter with no "Did you mean ---?" or "Searching for ---. Look only for |||?". I tried it again, and it did the same thing. I switched from Google to Google Image Search and watched it in real time delete that last letter from the search bar where I'd typed the term in. I went to show an acquaintance immediately after, only for the behaviour not to repeat itself. It made me feel like I was going crazy.

This is the best analysis I've seen in this thread.

3 months ago, I needed to figure out how to get the UK government to tell a multinational's pension service managers that I am not subject to taxation on a 35 year old pension plan because I am a US tax resident. It involves first getting the US government to certify my residency to the UK. If that's not niche, I don't know what is.

Google was excellent, the process took me about 2-3 hours to get everything clear in my head, the documents went off in the mail, and the certification has been issued in the UK.

So yeah, I don't know what your experience is, but it's not mine.

I think a really perverse form of the Pareto principle has been working against us since at least the Eternal September. But I get it, I’m never the target audience for anything and everything I like is always discontinued. I wouldn’t have it any other way, as the alternative is quite scary.

That "finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics" needs to actually exist on the Web and not on the dark Web; that is, linked from somewhere so a search engine can crawl it.

That is generally no longer true, due to human nature and the rise of walled platforms and/or non-Web platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Medium, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. Most content is either private, or public as part of an offhand comment/discussion thread. Actual public pages with high quality content are near extinct.

In the few cases where it may be true, the results are sorted for the common denominator, especially since most people who would be looking for such niche information have disabled personalization, so Google can only assume that you are an average person who wants common denominator results.

That's the thing.

All the people I feel are "using Google wrong" and are just "fluking the right results by accident "... They're actually using it more efficiently than I am! Same with almost everything mobile. I like the control and certainty and size and detail of desktop computing and my ergonomic keyboard and 32" monitors. I cannot understand how people are using wonky apps and Imprecise directions and half-understood usage... And getting many things faster and easier than I would :)

I had an enlightment moment last night. I usd to run a photography studio so am pretty handy around a digital camera. I was setting up my phone's main camera with long shutter and trying to steady it to take a photo of a Halloween costume in the dark... When my friend just turned the phone to selfie camera, it automatically used it's screen as 6" flash, and he got a better photo faster and with less thought and kerfuffle. Was he "using it wrong", with lower res camera and single point direct flash (big no no!) and just not thinking it through at all? Maybe? No... He got a great result quickly and efficiently, I'm just stuck in stone age :-).

(There are still times and areas where understanding the how and why is useful. But in many mundane daily tasks I'll get beat by people who don't bother :)

> He got a great result quickly and efficiently, I'm just stuck in stone age :-).

Knowing how to use a camera is not being stuck in the stone age. His photo was good because the phone automatically had a longer shutter time, did post processing HDR and did light light edits.

If you both set up RAW images on your phone, and put it on lightroom, yours will be editable into a perfect photo, his will be a mess of flash and AI generated artifacts by the phone to make it "just work".

Having things that "just work" is great for everyday tasks, but power users and technical people should still have their tools to do things right. Apple allows for RAW image and videofootage while still having many settings by default for most people. Spotify used to have a ton of cool audiophile options in the settings now its like 3 options and they are all terrible. Google has gone that same way, instead of enabling both, they have cut off power users by focusing everything on "everyday use" which makes their product largely useless outside of some scenarios.

The revolution devoured its children:

In the early years, technically inclined individuals / power users were the early adopters of the Internet and Google and thus arguably a high percentage of users. So it adapted to that user demographic.

The early demographic (as is so often the case) enabled the revolution, and it became mainstream. And the early demographic is left behind.

Google (with all of it's measuring, automation and various generations of algorithmic and machine accelerated learning evolved from being optimized for early adopters to being optimized for the mainstream.

Maybe some of these links will help? ;-)

https://www.google.com/search?q=learn+to+talk+like+a+teenage...

A lot of HNers are pretty out of touch with how the vast majority of people use the internet.

A lot of HNers are pretty out of touch.

The majority is often totally wrong and disinformed so being out of touch doesn't have to be a bad thing at all.

A lot of HNers are pretty

Oh, you!

HN is now Reddit, circa 2012.

ah, the old "everything is a reddit clone-a-roo", hold my beer, I'm going in!

Is it wrong to want to be even further out of touch?

Well no, but you've only yourself to blame if you feel out of touch. Feel free to yell at them clouds.

> Feel free to yell at them clouds.

I do that every time I get my AWS invoice

No, it's the normies who are wrong.

Yes, they visit one of their three daily social networks, and Google is just a fancy way to type the URL. (A sad ncessity, because the OG address bar has no way of showing ads.)

We know.

I think Google still deserves a ton of credit. Online shopping is tricky, but information is incredibly easy to access, especially if you do know how to avoid clicking on Quora or WebMD style sites.

Google does a great job of shepherding you towards information and at the very least gives you additional context that you can use to corroborate or tune your search.

Information search works a lot better because it has no commercial value. Therefore no SEO attack

That's not correct. When programs such as Amazon Affiliates cut their commissions a few years ago, many SEOs pivoted to info content monetized by display ads. The $ per page view is less, but it was still wildly profitable, at least until the most recent Google update frenzy.

Odd, I find Quora and WebMD to have some of the more useful information out there.

Try searching for anything related to a recently released video game. Chat gpt spam has made it completely impossible. Even the reputable wikis are pushed down far enough to become very difficult to find.

This happened with the World of Warcraft subreddit. Any topic someone posted about, a gaming site was having ChatGPT (or whatever) write an article talking about how players were talking about X/Y/Z topic.

Well... the subreddit caught on, and started trolling the shit out of the site by making up fake things "fans were excited about."

https://www.engadget.com/redditors-troll-an-ai-content-farm-...

A related Internet malady that has cropped up lately: two or three people on Reddit mention that their brand-ABC phone has been having trouble communicating with their brand-XYZ car, or something like that. One of them wonders if it could have something to do with a recent phone OS update. By the next day, anyone searching for "ABC bluetooth dropouts" will get deluged with SEO'ed links to content farms with headlines like "Outraged users on Reddit blame recent ABC update for bricking their phones," accompanied by made-up stories with links pointing back to the same subreddit with the same handful of content-free comments.

This is going to get so much worse...

And all the filler text...! When you search for something like "Cyberpunk O'Five location", you'll likely get a page that has the information, but instead of the answer "Reward for the Beat The Brat fight in Arroyo", you get a wall of text that likely starts with "Cyberpunk 2077 was released by CDR in 2022... The O'Five is one of the most powerful sniper rifles". The page will have the answer, but it will take substantial time to find it. It's awful.

I just tried your query, and I got the answer in the featured snippet at the top, and I didn't have to read any wall of text:

> "How to get: After beating Buck in the fight in Arroyo, along with fighting off all of his friends, you can find this weapon lying on some barrels by where you first spoke with him"

Unfortunately Search is a hard problem to solve, considering how much the internet has grown from 90s or early 2000s to now.

The problem I have is that I need a way to just get webpage results. I did a search on my phone for “what’s the best colossal sword in Elden ring?” just now and I got:

- full screen of those “intelligent” answers that is just naming swords from Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3.

- two SEO spam sites

- two decent results

- a full page of YouTube suggestions

- two more SEO pages

- a section of “people also searched for”

- four more YouTube videos

- another “people also searched for”

- a block for Reddit posts discussion this question (finally what I really kind of wanted, maybe I just stop using Google…)

- about 10+ more decent-looking websites.

Perhaps your assistant is just paid enough not to be annoyed by this garbage way of getting to the answer. And perhaps she doesn’t know what great really feels like. I wonder if there’s a generation of people who only know of the Internet as being this bazaar that’s absolutely glowing with neon ads like some blade runner undercity.

My results from the same query are related to yours but substantively different.

Top result: article from GameRant on the best colossal weapons (I have no idea what this means)

6 "intelligent" answers, the first of which when expanded lists the "Elden Ring: All 11 Colossal Swords, Ranked By Physical Strength"

Article from The Gamer called "Elden Ring: 14 Best Colossal Swords, Ranked"

4 YT videos

Reddit block

....

Hmm yes but that melting house is not something a SEO buyer would pay for.

The problem is Google monetizes search terms and thus show the highest bidders and not the most relevant results.

This manifests itself the most for things people want to sell (products or services)

Google predicts too much about local things, in that case it works extremely well in that example, it was in your neighborhood google biased the results to something local and that worked specifically for her and that scenario

This works for most people most of the time and is exactly what we’re finding frustrating

But knowing what you can still use it for is 90% of the battle, my latest common use case is just fact checking AI right now but my primary queries are all to sandboxed language models

>While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had said the house looked like it was melting, so she typed in "melting house", I think. Not that that's genius or quirky or anything, but I would never dream of typing in something I was thinking "informally", and her approach is more like "whatever whackadoo thing I'm thinking, probably other people think just like me" and she finds anything I ask her about.

I've been doing that "informal" since Google existed - surely it's quite common. You describe what you want in fuzzy terms, and add more qualifiers to narrow it down.

So, "melting house halloween" would be my first search, or rather "melting house halloween <city>". Similarly if I wanted to search for say Eugene Levy and didn't remember his name, I'd write something "comedian big eyebrows" (he's the second match after Groucho) or "big eyebrows american pie" (first match), and so on.

Out of curiosity, how would you search for that house?

I miss the days of "site:", "intitle:", etc.

I'm thinking when our carefully curated prompts, chain-of-thoughts, and what else will stop working on ChatGPT because they optimized it for the technically uneducated users.

We'll meet here again. Missing the days of "Let's think step-by-step". Ah, this one in particular seems to be already over!

> I miss the days of "site:", "intitle:", etc.

Those still work, don't they? I use site: all the time.

Yeah, "site:" still works. I use "site:reddit.com/r/edh $cardname" any time I want to research Magic the Gathering combos. It also works far better than the same search string in DDG/Brave/Bing.

There should be an inverse, "nosite:" selector, to avoid results from a site.

negation works with site operator

You can use -site: to negate it. Pretty neat

Yep, negation does work. Do -site: rather than site:

I’m in my 40s so Google wasn’t my first search engine but it’s definitely been what I’ve used the most. And I do think it has changed similar how to you describe it. But I see the change more as:

You used to go to Google and effectively be asking, “Google, find me information about X.” Today you’re implicitly asking, “Google, show me ads related to X.” You just kind of accept that what it shows you will be the thing that is most fine tuned to appear most related to X - and the most common reason to do that fine tuning in the first place is to deliver an ad.

So you gotta search in natural language like an ad, and hope that someone in that first page of results decided to SEO some particularly good content so they could get you there to look at more ads.

Maybe I'm reading too much in to it, but for me the poignant part is that she stopped engaging with you and reached for the phone, mid conversation. I've noticed this too. And before they even reach for their phone, it's as if you've lost them already, because they're thinking of searching and which app/keywords to use etc.

It's like their trust of the Internet is 100x higher than someone recounting something they've seen with their own eyes, and the value of knowing a bit of information or getting a dopamine hit is way way higher than having an engaging conversation with someone

DuckDuckGo also suffered from the SEO infection, but recently - the last week or so, perhaps - it has improved. SEO probably still controls it, but when I put in "-Amazon" it does not present Amazon findings - remarkable! I'm also seeing a significant number of "no result" results. It isn't perfect but it's much better than six months ago.

How would you have phrased that query?

unlike some of the houses that show up in that query, this house was not designed to appear melting, and I wasn't sure if it was even designed to look uneven, or had the foundation settled and they did nothing about it? So I was trying to explain the uneven wavy lines, rounded corners, and I was saying "it's almost as if it had melted", thinking "this is my personal interpretation, I'm just being descriptive"

so that's what I mean by "informal thinking" vs "explicit query"

it's also easy to explain this one case, but it is true in general, she just finds things much more quickly than I do, and when I ask her what was her query I'm always "why tf did you type that in?" If we used a formal language for search, I'd beat her, but she throws in a lot of extraneous terms that make me think either or both "you are overspecifying" or "you are ambiguating" with those extra terms, but she gets answers I don't get, I think because many other people are typing things in the way she does.

I had been trying to find it before I saw her, and since I knew the general neighborhood I was actually trying to "walk" around with streetview to find it, then I was wracking my brain for architectural terms I could use.

There is a difference here that you saw the house and she didn't and trusted your interpretation of it being melting which you didn't think to trust perhaps. You may not have considered that everyone else would also think it is melting, but as an outsider she was in a better position of judgment.

I think it comes from an attitude about a different era of the internet as well. When I was young, I would expect most of the information about say a particularly weird house comes from the website of the owner of the house, or maybe a blogger who is into local architecture, if its on the internet at all. In that context it makes sense to try to query with what you think the owner would self-describe as (so like find out what the proper name of the style is, then query with that). If you come from an era where most of the stuff on the internet is people talking about or sharing the minority of original content, it makes more sense to query using terms that the casual viewer of the house would use.

You’re old? Your other comments have you railing on “normies”. Not to mention your username…

Try Eater.

I always like to talk about how much I hate advertising but when I need a Thai restaurant Google Maps has my back.

But I'm also old and remember that the yellow pages used to bring in billions of revenue. Have things really changed on a fundamental level?

Is that "advertising" though? Google Maps is an index: you enter a query, like "Thai restaurant near $location", and it shows you Thai restaurants in that location. Then, you can look at some of those restaurants' listings and see photos (usually uploaded by customers, but some from the business), pictures of menus (same), opening hours, a link to their website, etc.

I don't see how any of that qualifies as "advertising"; it's just a business directory. It certainly isn't "unsolicited advertising". The same goes for the old Yellow Pages: it was a business directory (though it had ads too). Businesses had to pay to be listed in it, but that's the cost of doing business: if people can't find you, you're not going to make any money.

I think when people say they hate advertising, what they really mean is unsolicited ads. If you're looking for a particular business, why wouldn't you want some info about them, or about the choices available?

When i'm in my car, the only thing i use google maps for is "yellow pages" - get me the phone number, and about 20% of the time, the hours of operation.

In fact, when i am at home, and i need a phone number, i go to google maps. But i do use the maps as maps when i am not in my car.

Username is fsckboy.

> I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc.

Checks out.

"fsck - check and repair a Linux file system" (https://linux.die.net/man/8/fsck) The -b -o -y must be undocumented flags.

I was going to be fsckboi but was afraid I'd lose half my audience

I’m aware. I thought it was funny.

I don't google as much, but I regular develop my random thoughts like that with ChatGPT. If I heard about your melting house, I'd try to generate it's picture with Dalle.

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