Ask HN: Google Search is completely unusable. How do you work around it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Google Search is completely unusable. How do you work around it?

29 pointsterabytest32 comments

Over the last few years, Google search has lost its practical usefulness for technical or niche queries. I don’t understand how it got this bad.

Even the most basic search for a problem only returns results that share an out-of-context word with the query. When using quotes around an important keyword to force it into the results, Google still ignores that request silently, only for me to find out when I use Cmd+F on the page and see the word isn’t there.

It feels like Google is gaslighting me, as if I'm the first person to have the particular problem I’m researching, even though I’m sure documents about it exist on the internet.

Is it just me? What are you doing about this? Is Google salvageable in any way? What do you use now?

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What are some queries that you're having trouble with?

Whenever I see these complaints raised (and it's posted here at least weekly), the OP never includes any examples, just wide brushstrokes.

If the double quoted "exact phrase" functionality of Google were to have recently been broken, I can assure you wouldn't be the first to notice :)

I noticed the "site:" keyword was not working on mobile, but was on desktop a few months ago [0]. I think it's been restored to me. I wonder if they were a/b testing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34616647

I've seen complaints about Google search but haven't experienced the problems, and I use Google search fairly often. For example I just searched for "how to reduce an array in golang" and got a page of relevant results, with no ads or junk links. Sometimes I will see sponsored links and junk sites like Quora or TripAdvisor for more vague search terms, but writing a more specific search usually gets what I want.

I use Google search logged in to my Google account and I have eliminated third-party cookies, browser fingerprinting, and targeted ads as much as I can with the OS/browser (iPadOS/Safari) settings and Google's privacy and advertising settings.

Do you have specific examples?

I would say any topic that isn't covered by stack overflow tends to start bleeding badly. Now that GitHub has prevented searching source I am having less success searching for error messages, as I used to be able to extract the static string and land in source. For go specifically how many times are you landing on search results that aren't gotour, stack overflow, and go docs? If stack overflow was not so gracefully indexable things would fall apart pretty quick and in lots of areas it does.

I would say searching for businesses outside major metro areas has gotten increasingly bad. I had a situation in the last few months that a business would only appear when they were open (barbershop) but if they were off that day they were not even on page 3.

Finding materials suppliers local to you has been a nightmare, I've been resorting to Yahoo-grade business directories to actually find businesses. These are places where Google has them on their maps but they never return in search unless I force my location to be away from home. Historically I never had to do this kind of manipulation.

I am having better luck driving around or hand scrolling around maps to find places then I am with search at times. It feels like after the first ten results Google completely gives up. E.g. I look for lumber yards and I get 20 ace hardwares and maybe two of them are actually lumber yards, but it completely misses some local sawmills that are specialized and amazing

I am whiffing Chinese restaurant near this town, state. I know the place is there but I cant remember the name, I can find it manually on the map.

I have a vague understanding of how Google search works, so I set my expectations accordingly. I probably don't want to get dumped into source code when looking up error messages, I want to find posts by other people who got the same error and see how they fixed it. I don't expect small businesses to have web sites or SEO or to do anything to promote their business online, so I'm not surprised when a local sawmill or barbershop or mom 'n' pop restaurant doesn't show up -- how would Google know about such places if they don't have web sites, reviews, incoming links?

I have seen plenty of ads and SEO abuse and had to wade through W3Schools and TutorialPoint junk links looking up programming questions. I know how to focus my search on specific domains and how to exclude domains when I need to drill down.

The examples you give seem like holes in Google's index that have probably always been that way, not a new shortcoming, though I don't know for sure because I haven't keept close track. I've started to use DDG more often because Google started using "AI" for search, and I have no interest in that, I usually know what I want to find and don't need LLMs auto-completing and hallucinating results for me.

I have been using ChatGPT or http://kagi.com.

Google only for shopping or things related to my local city, which is very small.

Kagi is great, note it's not free. They use Google's AI to provide reasons why :) https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html#...

DuckDuckGo is a a good, (free) alternative as well

I was never satisfied with ddg's results and often fell back to google. With kagi's results i have only ever tried solving the questions with ai, never with google search.

How long ago was that? I’ve started ddg a year and I don’t see how can one go back to google.

I see this question/complaint posed on HN almost weekly at this point, but I cannot relate.

Has Google’s UX gotten worse as it has elevated more and more paid ads over the years? Yes. But, not being able to find “even the most basic” things with Google is not an issue I encounter.

Do a random search on Google. Now count the number of each of the following on the first page:

- Ads / sponsored links

- blogspam

- organic results

Now try to remember what it looked like 10 years ago. The rot is real.

I use DDG instead of Google Search. My current strategy is keywords and notes. I don’t do much question like searches. Instead, I treat it like a library. Whatever I want to know, I try to find the exact terms for it and a set of terms to restrict it down. If I don’t succeed after a few tries, the resources may as well not exist.

Another thing is I tend to read more primary materials like books and docs. I have a bookmarks file for any interesting links I encounter.

This will probably get a lot of hate, but for most of my questions where I'm looking for a simple answer on something, I just use ChatGPT. Gives me the answer much more hassle-free than a search engine would.

I’m the same except replace ChatGPT with Perplexity.ai which has 3 improvements:

1. Includes recent web search in context 2. Includes footnotes with sources 3. Has a much better voice recognition that improves accuracy from context of your question

Bonus: Perplexity.ai is smarter than raw chatGPT IMO, even though it sometimes uses chatGPT for input.

Example: Ask both LLMs - How many Rs in “strawberry” ChatGPT says 2 (wrong), Perplexity and Gemini say 3 (right)

There's one surprising way I still find a lot of great material on Google, which works especially for niche research topics, is to view Image results. I click on any interesting image in the results and then I check the site it's from. Many times I've found super interesting stuff that would not appear in the first pages of text results.

DDG has been, for several years, consistently more useful to me than Google has been since the middle of the last decade.

I switched to DuckDuckGo years ago, then upgraded to Kagi when it became available. Search results are snappy, relevant, and customizable.

For technical questions, Kagi’s Code Research Assistant is my first stop. It combines web search and AI summaries. While it says “code” on the tin, and does generate useful code snippets, I get a ton of value from it on super user issues and library/tool research too.

The answer is to STOP using Google Search which has become increasingly user hostile over the years.

The sad truth is that Google Search 2024 can’t even compete with Google Search of 10 years ago.

The problems:

1. First page of search results is entirely made up of Ads and blogspam

2. Impossible to do specific searches now that Google ignores Boolean instructions

3. Google Search is spyware, posing as a free service, sucking up your PII to profile and target you

Solutions:

1. Use another search engine. The competitors have become surprisingly good. I use search.brave.com but DuckDuckGo and even Bing are better than Google now.

2. Use an LLM instead. I use Perplexity.ai for 95% of searches now. It combines an LLM summary with search results and includes footnotes to sources. The best part is that voice input is 10x better than raw ChatGPT and Google as it auto-corrects using context from your query. Other LLM search engines also work but Perplexity.ai have nailed the experience IMO.

Look for the “Search tools” dropdown menu. Change “All results” to “Verbatim” mode: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/google-verbatim

Reminds me of searching in confluence: search for 2 words and get results where only 1 is present.

I no longer use Google search, and I use DDG instead. But not always satisfied with the results.

I also search with keywords and not full sentences, else I ask an LLM.

Confluence basically defaults to OR when doing multi-term search (there’s more to it than that, but that’s the basic gist.) Use quotes around exact terms, or put AND between words you want in the same result.

I virtually never use Google Search. DuckDuckGo, or searches on various social networks (fediverse / Threads) plus a handful of aggregator sites depending on what I'm using, handle that need. DDG's results are slowly getting worse as well, but that's because of the massive deluge of slop and content farms out there. They can only mitigate that so much…

The only way I am able to use it is with an ad blocker on a browser. I can't use Google on mobile any longer.

Append "&udm=14"[1] to all your Google searches to minimize all the cruft the company has dumped into Search recently.

[1] https://udm14.com/

If I’m searching something for research I use Google scholar.

If I’m searching for shopping or pop culture type stuff ordinary Google is fine

If I want information that requires a deeper dig then DDG is a good place to start.

I pay for Kagi.com

I use startpage.com and the results are fine

I solve 90% if my questions with Poe.

Kagi

I now create all the knowledge I need from the first principles that I learned before Google Search went bad.

allintext:

> feels like Google is gaslighting me

when someone wants to believe something, facts will not hesitate to arise from the misty waters

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