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Comment by greenavocado | Hacker News Reader

Has google completely stopped working for anyone else?

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?

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For me it feels like Google is adding "buy" keyword to every search.

Part of the answer is here - https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Google search is completely broken IMO. I stopped using Google search years ago and every time I go back on the off chance that it's bigger index has something that DuckDuckGo couldn't find for me.

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.

Exact same experience, YouTube recommendations (in incognito without being logged in!) usually give me stuff related to the video in watching.

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.

Today I tried finding a rather popular product I used recently, which I had forgotten the name. I had to search THREE TIMES before finding 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

Yep, this aligns with my experience!

I see this argument in HN a lot, so I checked my search history (googled "search history") it seems I use it ~10-20 times a day, looked at individual searches e.g. last week, and except a few queries, I have found what I was looking at.

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.

> Has google completely stopped working for anyone else?

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.

God please don’t let them touch Google Scholar.

I can’t imagine the cost this would have on scientific producivity in the West.

Very small team, only still exists because they are a rounding error to the CFO on the balance sheet, but otherwise they could go at any time.

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.

on other hand i would love a Gemini finetuned on all papers or ability to refer to papers in my prompt when researching an idea.

right now, I download pdf and upload it to chatgpt to bounce ideas.

That sounds like a terrible idea to me not gonna lie

why

In my experience as a published academic author all the LLM will make up all kinds of plausible papers I “wrote” that don’t exist, academic positions I’ve never held, and the like.

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.

Are you familiar with NotebookLLM?

What is that about

Despite all the comments it still works pretty well for me. I feel like they've improved it a bit in the last year or so so you don't get way too much Quora and GitHub/Stackoverflow clones.

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.

> it still works pretty well for me

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.

That's not where I thought this was going. I tried using DDG and Kagi and went back to Google. Google had more relevant, fresher results than DDG, and Kagi didn't have the same integration with Google Maps and often a smaller set of results for very niche queries. Google is still basically the internet - the entire internet - though in many ways they do still fall short. But breadth of content indexing and information about local places, Google is still king.

> information about local places, Google is still king.

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.

Here's an easy test case on a topic which is HEAVILY modified by Google. There are many such cases Google distorts searches but the following query is purely for illustration of the problem because it is so obvious.

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 ...

5. Go to yandex.com and search the original query

6. It comes up on Yandex immediately with the original query

Where did you get the idea for that query in the first place?

One of my interests is war photography

This is such a bad example: the yandex results have 3,4 with "russian" in the title and in general the same "msm" article list

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

The only relevant result I get on Yandex is a website, which supposedly is a Russian propaganda outlet. Maybe that is why it is not showing up on Google, and isn't necessarily a distortion?

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/politnavigator-bias/

Yandex is indeed a Russian company. But do you really need to go to media bias fact check dot com—everyone's confirmed universal source of absolute truth, of course—to learn that?

I went there to check the result, not Yandex. Would you recommend any good alternatives to the media bias website I used?

You missed the mark here. He was talking about the Russian state propaganda site that the GP was trying to find on google: "PolitNavigator".

good "best laptop 2024" search results, absolutely exist, but they have to be heavily personalized towards user and i dont think we adjusted to such levels of in search (we have expectations of median/commonality there)

A good "best laptop 2024" query would be a conversation with a useful LLM

Yeah if you like wasting time.

Same for me. Google works awesome and I never felt it being bad, using it since the beginning.

I agree with everything you said. Google is completely useless for searching; now I just use it as a glorified website URL finder.

YouTube search is also completely useless now.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=door+bolt+not+c...

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.

There's a difference between searching for a topic and searching for an item. All of those are topic searches.

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.

I don't understand your use case. If I know the exact title of the video, it finds it. Everytime.

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?

Just try any search. A few results, and then google tries to recommend you completely unrelated, popular videos within your search results.

It finds that video, yes. But it also "finds" an unrelated pile of other videos that are not related at all.

Okay so it does work.

> If I know the exact title of the video, it finds it. Everytime.

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.

So it becomes "completely useless" when it gives you the correct answer but also recommends some other videos?

When the videos are completely unrelated to your search, but just happen to be new/popular videos, then yes it's useless. Surfacing relevant videos would make sense.

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.

Here's a good one I just saw because Joe Rogan complained about it. Search youtube for: trump podcast. You won't find the most important one. It's all MSM and useless clips of other interviews.

The top search result for me -- below German news snippets complaining about US politics -- is Joe Rogan Experience #2219 - Donald Trump on Youtube, presumably what you're looking for. It's also number 3, the same thing on Spotify.

Are you accessing YouTube from outside of the United States?

I think this case is a little different because it’s clearly censorship, not a search quality issue.

Now that the JD Vance podcast is out, that’s the first result; then it’s all MSM. Wow.

I guess people's perception becomes extremely skewed when they are disappointed with something. After this you give them examples and they swiftly move the goal post.

It feels like YouTube search doesn't even deserve to be called search anymore. If I'm lucky, I get 1–3 not-totally-irrelevant videos, a row of shorts, then a couple tangential videos, then a bunch more shorts, then "Explore More" or "Previously Watched" or "People Also Watched"... and shorts. It's pretty disgusting all around, because it totally does not seem like there is any intent to surface actually relevant videos.

I think calling it "completely stopped working" is a bit over the top.

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.

Back in the day, Google searches could lead you down unplanned paths, into niche forums or fascinating rabbit holes that felt organic and less commercial.

It works in the same sense that you try asking a stranger for directions and he wraps you into a fishing net and drags you to the nearest mall whose name resembles your question if shouted into a bucket.

Brilliant. You ought to write for a living if you don't already.

I switched to DDG couple of years ago without knowing what to expect. Once I got used to their UI there was no turning back.

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.

it seems google switched to some kind of semantic search instead of word based search. It doesn't search for what your words are, but instead what your words kindof sortof mean. Which means you always get 'average' results instead of precise results.

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.

People have been throwing up the, "You're just too technical," canard for years, and it's just not true. Google search does not find what anyone is looking for; it finds what it wants to sell, in a way that makes it more likely that a purchase will be made. Full stop.

This comment is just laughably wrong. I use google a hundred times a day, from programming stuff to news stuff. I have never felt like it wasn't finding what I was looking for.

n=1, very scientific methodology. How do you "feel" about homeopathy?

This is a 3 day old post. Are you just replying because you looked at my post history?

I'm replying because I look at my post history. :)

Google is extremely good if you search for a product they can advertise to you. I've recently wanted to buy lost sunglasses. Just selected them from the photo and google found exactly brand and model, with a link to the store.

If there are no sponsored links - the result is crap.

Google is good at searching, they just have no incentive to show you results.

> 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

Any specific search no longer yields relevant results.

Much like Google itself, Youtube has been trending towards ushering users to a minute collection of blessed official/popular sources, often news channels. Maybe it's in response to kvetching over ``disinformation?" Idunno, but it's absolutely infuriating for some of my interests.

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.

They do evil now

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