Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

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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...

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.

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.

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