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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried

I'm always amazed to see claims like this, given it's not how my world works at all. Picking some random popular favorites: searches for (verbatim) "Loki", "Hunger Games", "Oppenheimer", and "House of Usher" all return a wikipedia entry in at worst the second spot (generally behind IMDB, though Oppenheimer and Usher showed the real man and the short story ahead of the films, not unsurprisingly).

I mean, sure, there are glitches with all products and nothing is beyond criticism. But "Google buries Wikipedia results" is just beyond weird. It really seems like HN is starting to develop an "alternative facts" syndrome, where the echo chamber starts driving collective memory.

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I had the same problem. Less with missing Wikipedia results, but I was definitely getting the first page stuffed with crappy SEO results and ads. I switched to DDG a few months ago and I'm finding the experience much, much better. I tried switching a few years ago and found DDG's search wasn't as good. But since then either DDG has got better or Google has got worse. I actually suspect the latter.

OK, but this is the "alternative facts" thing at work. Grandparent claimed something frankly ridiculous, you say you had the "same problem", then you redefine the problem to be, well... not the same thing at all? I mean, of course there are "SEO" pages in search results, that's literally what "Search Engine Optimization" means.

And it's impossible to know what you mean by it without specifics: are you complaining that a top search result is a useless page of advertisement and AI-generated text (which would be bad), or just that e.g. "tutorialspoint.com"[1] or whatever is above Stack Overflow on some search (hardly a disaster).

Maybe you have some examples we could try?

[1] Or some other vaguely low quality but still legitimate site.

I gave this a go. I typed google.com into my browser. First thing: oh yeah, that's right, because I use a VPN google puts me through captchas before letting me search (and I'm currently logged-in to Google on my gmail ID, so it definitely knows who I am, which is even more annoying). One annoying captcha session later, I can search. (and ofc Google wants to know my location, despite knowing my address as part of my Google ID).

I tried "El Dorado" because I happened to have that boardgame on a shelf in front of me. Actually the results were pretty good - wikipedia, national geographic, IMDB, no ads. But yeah, not something there's going to be many ads on, so let's try something more adworthy.

So I switched to an Incognito window (many, many captchas) and tried "erectile dysfunction". Whole bunch of decent results, no ads until the bottom half of the page (and then it was solid ads of course).

I've got to say I was pleasantly surprised - it's not nearly as swamped with ads and shitty SEO as I remember. But that's the thing, isn't it? I only switched to DDG a few months ago because I was so fed up with Google's responses (and the endless captchas). I didn't dream that ;) But yeah, you're correct - the first page of Google isn't all ads and SEO crap. HN must be hallucinating that.

> I only switched to DDG a few months ago because I was so fed up with Google's responses (and the endless captchas). I didn't dream that

Well, that's the thing... maybe you did? I mean, clearly from context you live in a world awash in the kind of rhetoric we're seeing in this topic, with hyperbolic claims about the Descent of Google into Vice and Decay everywhere. And... it's easy to fit stuff into a frame if that's how you're already thinking. One bad result or one unexpected pop up ad can sway a *lot* of opinion even if it's an outlier.

Thus: "alternative facts". In the real world search results are boring and generally high quality because that's the way they've been for 20+ years (I mean, come one: it's a mature product in a mature market, you really expect it to change much?). But here on HN testimony like that gets voted down below the hyperbolic negativity, so what you read are the outliers.

HN, to wit, has become the Fox News of tech.

I don’t like the “you’re remembering it wrong” defence

Google doesn’t publish a search quality report, or publicly index their results for the same queries over time, so you can’t objectively compare whether the quality has changed or not. Plus, the Google search signals and the product itself are constantly changing day to day and there’s no way to see those changes.

So if Google went through a spell of bad results, or their algorithm entered a degenerate state, or SEO figured out how to break through their algorithmic walls, or even their algorithm deemed you interested in something you aren’t, then “you’re remembering it wrong” because it’s fixed today, but at the time it really was worse.

I do agree though, people remember bad experiences far more than positive ones, there’s a definite bias in the human psyche there. But also, anecdotally, I’ve never been so annoyed with Google results as I have lately. I know I’m not alone, my low-tech wife even complains that Google has become useless for so many things. True or not, it’s a bad omen for Google because it’s very hard to rebuild a reputation.

One of the most annoying things about Google the last few years has been searching reviews, and they’ve just added a widget to combine product reviews which is nice to see, so they do seem like they’re working on these issues.

It's not a defense, just a postulate. I'll grant that sometimes search results are bad, that seems eminently plausible. But you'll likewise grant that echo chamber logic tends strongly to "create facts" by elevating outliers into assumed priors, right?

I'm just saying that right now HN has become an echo chamber of this kind of logic, with people writing and voting more for the visceral rush of anger against a shared enemy and not "truth", so much. Hence, the Fox News of tech.

That’s fair, and I agree.

I can see how you got there from where you started, but I'm not sure it's accurate ;)

HN is useful but like all new sources and social media sites, it's not the unbiased pure stream of news and educated opinion that we'd like. Humans are weird.

Started using startpage.com for google results without the ads and its pretty good.

The movie example is an exaggeration (in my opinion). I find that mostly Google Search has issues with related ideas (Microsoft Project Silica) where there is not a direct article, yet a reference. Ex: [1]

There is also what I would call a phase delay. Google has a really bad issue with SEO, takes forever to get rid of it, but by the time you can check, its mostly resolved.

Finally. What you see as an end user is only partially Google. A lot of the page is farmed out to Real-Time Bidding (RTB) networks based on your user tracking. So its often difficult to correlate if someone else's user profile delivers wildly different experience. [2] You might get spammed by SEO and near constant TEMU ads, and others might get nothing.

Finally. Finally. 'Cause its spec.' I expect there are client side or man-in-the-middle viruses that mess with search results.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

[2] https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Europes-hidde...

Some of the queries you gave me weren't so bad!

I specifically searched just now something I searched recently, "Scott Pilgrim Takes Off".

I naturally blocked ads, but it shows "Cast", "People also ask", the official Netflix result (good), "Trailers and Clips", "Reviews", "Episodes", "Top Stories" with some gossip, and then Wikipedia and IMDB.

However this is also not so bad! I will make sure to document all my problematic Googling experiences.

You can argue that those things are "noise that my brain should block" or that "they're actually useful", and that's entirely true. But Google is no longer returning the results I used to expect from it, and that's a fact. Maybe I'm not the target audience anymore? Well, that's not a big deal, there are other products. But my point still stands. Sorry but not sorry: Apple's Spotlight is still better for this and needs zero scrolling to take me to Wikipedia.

It depends on how heavily targeted the terms are. The two big objectively user-hostile lines I was watching and have seen crossed:

1. Removed the yellow background that easily distinguished ads.

2. Zero organic results above the fold.

Obviously #2 doesn't happen every day on every query, but I saw it during the crypto craze and I have seen it during the AI craze.

Try finding out if Walmart is closed tomorrow. Google results are all SEO spam even though Walmart themselves tweeted about it.

Did you try this? First hits are Walmart locations with hours. Followed by "People also ask" where the first item (with a correct answer) is "Will Walmart be open on Thanksgiving near me?". Followed by proper search results where the top two hits are, indeed, the two nearest Walmarts to me. How exactly would you improve that? Is there a better site to put at the top?

In Google's defence:

Twitter shouldn't be considered a proper source anymore. It's closed without an account and the access is severely limited. You can't see follow-up messages, questions, or whole threads.

Also I don't have Walmart here but it does show opening hours from Google Maps which is often better than official websites.

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