I can still search things, i get results but, they're an ordered list of popular places the engine is directing me to. Some kind of filtering is occurring on nearly every search i make that's making the results feel entirely useless.
Image search stopped working sometime ago and now it just runs an AI filter on whatever image you search for, tells you there's a man in the picture and gives up.
Youtube recommendations is always hundreds of videos i've watched already, with maybe 1-2 recommendations to new channels when i know there's millions of content creators out there struggling who it will never introduce me to. What happened to the rabbit holes of crazy youtube stuff you could go down?
This product is a shell of its old self, why did it stop working?
The level of sponsored results for some queries is way OTT, and obviously any kind of search like "best laptop 2024" is never going to give you good results (probably because they don't exist), but other than that I'm still pretty happy with Google Search.
Genuinely interested: have you tried to spend a few weeks on an alternative?
I decided to try DuckDuckGo a few years ago. Not because it was obviously better, but to see if I could get used to it. After a few weeks, I had completely stopped falling back to Google when not finding what I wanted. I stayed on DDG for a couple years. Then same thing with Kagi: I just decided to try. It's been 1.5-2 years now and I'm disappointed when I can't use Kagi (which has my customizations, like some websites I ignore and some that I pin).
I guess my point is that it's not necessarily that you have to try something else when Google is unbearable. Maybe you can try something else and then realize (or not) that Google was not better.
I try to use OpenStreetMap as much as I can (I have a deGoogled smartphone and OpenStreetMap works well enough) but it is true that Google Maps is better (at the cost of privacy of course).
But in terms of search... I can't remember of a time where I tried Google because I couldn't find with Kagi and ended up finding something with Google. On the contrary with the Kagi lenses it's often a lot easier to get specific results.
1. Search Google for "ukrainian who shot his commanding officer" without quotes
2. Google serves me nothing but MSM articles of Russian this or that. The word Russian wasn't even in my search string.
3. Add the Google operator MINUS SIGN Russia
4. Results:
a) Policeman feared Chris Kaba would kill, court told
b) Media: Russian Repeated Offender Kills Five More His ...
c) President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and First Lady Olena ...
d) Ukrainian Galician Army
e) Article from 2017 entitled Killed Defense Intelligence Officer Was "The First Donetsk Cyborg"
f) Shots fired at car carrying Ukrainian President Zelenskiy's ...
6. It comes up on Yandex immediately with the original query
And its first two results are for a dead site and a deleted article, so fine user-experience reasons to exclude?
And the google results have a link to a reddit story such accident on the first page
YouTube search is also completely useless now.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=path+of+exile+2...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ramen+restauran...
When I search these three things the first 5 results are exactly what I want.
What exactly are you searching of the time that it's "completely useless"? Genuine question.
Try searching for a particular video, one that is not super popular. What I want is a complete list of results that match my query. What I get is YouTube trying to recommend videos to me.
If you try to describe a non-popular video it just becomes a crapshoot on what to give you if there's no word/tag watching. You'd need some hint of the channel name or something. The volume of low viewership videos is incredibly high.
Can you give me a real example of something you've tried to do?
This is unfortunately not true. I have a little channel and there have been times when searching for the exact title of some of my videos did not return it in the results at all (searching with quotes or not). Cannot reproduce now because the search algorithm has now started liking me.
For example, searching for climbing comp videos and getting a completely unrelated video about some new tech gadget released within the last couple days from a random popular content creators makes no sense.
Clearly, it works for Google (content creators intentionally make click-baity thumbnails and titles because Google encourages it), but it's user hostile: it's designed to suck you into a vortex, which is not what the user was intending in the first place.
That said, all content platforms do this right now, so my intention isn't singling out Google. It's frustrating nonetheless.
Now that the JD Vance podcast is out, that’s the first result; then it’s all MSM. Wow.
If there are no sponsored links - the result is crap.
Google is good at searching, they just have no incentive to show you results.
“ to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” was a nice mission while it lasted
Yes. However, I found that https://scholar.google.com still works perfectly well. It feels just as the old Google without all the crap they've been adding in the last years.
I can’t imagine the cost this would have on scientific producivity in the West.
Oddly their biggest strength is being irrelevant to the decision makers, if the bean counters noticed the few million they are losing on running Scholar there will be ads + Gemini all over it.
right now, I download pdf and upload it to chatgpt to bounce ideas.
Even if you give it a paper directly I’d not believe it to be reliable. Maybe it could help search for papers, but that’s it.
First search (“products that do X”) got me a bunch of those comparisons sites, none of them containing the one I was trying to find
Second search (“ycombinator startup that does X”) got me a page of spam, but at least I found the product name
Third search (company name) got me an ENTIRE PAGE of ads and SEO optimized pages before the actual link to the actual product
If I search "Mullica Hill tornado" on yt itself, I get nothing but useless 1 min local news clips. If I search the same term on Reddit, I get first person footage of the tornado passing over people's houses—hosted on Youtube! Tornado enthusiasts still occasionally dredge up "lost media" of events like the 2011 Alabama outbreak that have been on the site this entire time, but are effectively impossible to view via the algorithm, even with the precise date and location specified.
Image search isn't great either but it still often gives me something close and that usually satisfies my image searching needs.
I still find YouTube recommendations quite good for me, but there are occasional ones I've watched already. I still go down its fun (and educational!) rabbit holes all the time.
However when they don't, it's invariably to push some alt-right slop down my throat. Video is about a comedian? Suggestion "feminist woke takedown compilation". Video about news? Suggestion "$european_far_right_party's channel says gypsies are subhuman". Video about economics? Suggestion is Jordan Peterson ranting about something. And so on and so on. It's pretty tiring.
This may make it better for the non-tech folks who search for things in unclear language, and likely make it worse for those who search with precision (i.e. much of the HN crowd).
Most importantly, they make their money off ads, and it probably makes sense to optimize for the non-tech folks. The ones that don't run ad blockers and accidentally click the barely differentiable ads.
In short - I suspect they're just using new tech to make more money.
It doesn't feel magical, and it particularly doesn't feel like a gateway to new and interesting places on the internet, like it used to.
But I still make hundreds of searches on google every day, so obviously it is working.
And on rare occasions now when I do search on Google I feel so happy I switched to DDG. To an extent that it does feel to me that Google has indeed stopped working completely for me. And yes I’ve stopped their search history, recommendations etc on YouTube.
Part of the answer is here - https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Yes it is hard to find some stuff in internet because it is filled with generated affiliate spam and walled gardens, Has Google stopped working for me? Nope It seems still alive and kicking.
> Based on the elements you’ve described—eyes, a pineapple, a bucket of water, a house of cards, chess, and a time loop—it’s challenging to identify a single music video that encompasses all these features.
Even if I type in 2-3 lines worth of nearly-exact lyrics that show up on multiple lyrics websites, it'll give me completely unrelated songs that match several words at most.
On that note, if anyone needs a good browser-based song finder, the "Aha Music Identifier" extension is pretty good. It's a life saver when watching Twitch streams that don't list the currently-playing song.
On the other hand, chatgpt 4o-mini and 3.5 will just make up source material which is amusing but not very helpful.
The very earliest form of page rank used a form of ML.
What the parent is referring to is favoring annoying ad-filled garbage over an equally relevant but straightforward result.
The hidden variable is that ad-riddled spam sites also invest in SEO, which is why they rank higher. I am not aware of any evidence that Google is using number of Google ads as a ranking factor directly. But I would push back and say that “SEO” is something Google should be doing, not websites, and a properly optimized search engine would be penalizing obvious garbage.
The question that remains unanswered is how google can do so without compromising customer revenue.
Has google ever indexed all the lyrics and scenes in a video to allow for such a weird search to be successful?