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Comment by magackame | Hacker News Reader

Google search is crap. It seems to be a sentiment among many HNers, but is it really that bad? I mostly use it for programming, so documentation/forums and it works out greatly. For some queries it even returns personal blogs (which people seem to bash google for not happening). Of course there are some queries that return purely AI blogspam, but reformatting the query with a bit more thought usually solves it. I wonder if that is a US thing? Do search results differ greatly based on the region?

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Is google search bad? Click here to find ten reasons why it is bad and 10 reasons why you should still use it.

Yes, it is that bad.

Website of Nike? Website of Starbucks? Likely position number one.

Every product, category etc., e.g. what rice cooker should I buy? Is diseased by link and affiliate spam. There is a reason why people put +reddit on search terms.

What kind of results does Kagi give for "What rice cooker should I buy?"? (Not asking you specifically, but if any Kagi user could compare.)

Copied verbatim from the AI generated summary:

To choose the best rice cooker, consider these factors:

Top Brands: Zojirushi is often considered the best brand, with Cuckoo and Tiger as close contenders. Aroma is considered a good budget brand 1. Types: Basic on/off rice cookers: These are good for simple white or brown rice cooking and are usually affordable and easy to use 2. Considerations: When buying a rice cooker, also consider noise levels, especially from beeping alerts and fan operation 3. Specific Recommendations: Yum Asia Panda Mini Advanced Fuzzy Logic Ceramic Rice Cooker is recommended for versatility 4. Yum Asia Bamboo rice cooker is considered the best overall 5. Russell Hobbs large rice cooker is a good budget option 5. For one to two people, you don't need a large rice cooker unless cost and space aren't a concern 6. Basic one-button models can be found for under $50, mid-range options around $100-$200, and high-end cookers for hundreds of dollars 6. References What is the best rice cooker brand ? : r/Cooking - Reddit www.reddit.com The Ultimate Rice Cooker Guide: How to Choose the Right One for Your Needs www.expertreviewsbestricecooker.com Best Rice Cooker UK | Posh Living Magazine posh.co.uk Best rice cookers for making perfectly fluffy grains - BBC Good Food www.bbcgoodfood.com The best rice cookers for gloriously fluffy grains at home www.theguardian.com Do You Really Need A Rice Cooker? (The Answer Is Yes.) - HuffPost www.huffpost.com

Just tried plain old Kagi search, it came up with cooks illustrated (good source, paid) and consumer reports (decent source, paid), which I was surprised by until I remembered that I had these “pinned”, which means Kagi increases their rank. Third on the page was a condensed roundup of 8 listicles, 2 of which seemed decent (food and wine and some random blogger).

With no pins, bon appetit (decent) and nbc news (would be fine if it wasn’t littered with ads) were the top results. For NBC news, Kagi also marked the result with a red shield, indicating that it has too many ads/trackers.

Which really goes to show that Kagi is great if you’re really willing to shell out for better content. Having the ability to mark sources as trusted, or indicate that I’ve paid for premium sources makes a completely different side of the web searchable.

Why do you think nbc news is fine as a result for rice cooker recommendations? That’s clearly SEO spam, which is why it’s littered with ads.

I just meant that I found this set of reviews to be informative and accurate. It had information that I couldn’t find online elsewhere which is really my main criteria. Generally I’ll skip anything from nbc because of the ads but in this case I read it to form an opinion and the article seemed alright.

If you enter a question into Kagi, by default, you get a 'Quick Answer' (https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/index.html#quick-...) on the top (an AI-generated text answer before the search result). In this case, it tells me which factors to consider and some that are considered to be the best depending on the use case (all sources the AI used for the answer are linked below the answer).

Then, the following two links appear as normal search results: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/best-rice-cookers and https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/review/best-rice-cookers (I don't know those websites, so I can't judge them).

Followed by Listicles (a short-form writing that uses a list as its thematic structure). All just one entrance, in this case, Best rice cooker 2024: Top tried and tested models for perfect results expertreviews.com 9 Best Rice Cookers | The Strategist - New York Magazine nymag.com The 8 Best Rice Cookers of 2025, Tested and Approved - The Spruce Eats thespruceeats.com 6 Best Rice Cookers 2025 Reviewed - Food Network foodnetwork.com Best rice cookers 2025, tested for perfect grains - The Independent independent.co.uk 29 Rice cooker meals ideas | rice cooker recipes, cooking recipes... de.pinterest.com 43 Crockpot ideas | cooking recipes, rice cooker recipes, cooker... de.pinterest.com

Followed by Quick Peek (questions with hidden answers that you can display).

Followed by normal search results again: ryukoch.com, reddit/r/Coooking, expertreviewsbestricecooker.com, tiktok, and then many more 'normal' websites.

This search reminded me that I have yet to configure my Kagi account to ignore tiktok.

Kagi Ultimate user here. Assuming you meant typing it into their search (and not e.g. Assistant), here's what I get on top of the result page:

Quick Answer

To choose the best rice cooker, consider these factors:

Capacity: Rice cookers range from small (1-2 cups) to large (6-8 cups or even 10-cup models) [1][2]. Keep in mind that one cup of uncooked rice yields about two cups cooked [2].

Budget: Basic one-button models can be found for under $50, mid-range options around $100-$200, and high-end cookers can cost more [3].

Features: Many rice cookers include a steaming insert [4]. Some have settings for different types of rice [5][1].

Brand Recommendations:

Zojirushi: Often considered the best brand, but pricier [6][7]. The Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzy 5.5-Cup Rice Cooker is considered best overall [8].

Cuckoo & Tiger: These are the next best brands after Zojirushi [6].

Aroma: Considered the best budget brand [6]. The Aroma ARC-914SBD Digital Rice Cooker is a good option [9].

Toshiba: The Toshiba Small Rice Cooker stands out for innovative features that cater to a variety of cooking needs [5].

References

[1] Five Best Rice Cookers In 2023. More than half of the... | Medium medium.com

[2] Which Rice Cooker Should You Buy? - HomeCookingTech.com www.homecookingtech.com

[3] Do You Really Need A Rice Cooker? (The Answer Is Yes.) - HuffPost www.huffpost.com

[4] The 8 Best Rice Cookers of 2025, Tested and Approved www.thespruceeats.com

[5] The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Perfect Rice Cooker | Medium medium.com

[6] What is the best rice cooker brand ? : r/Cooking - Reddit www.reddit.com

[7] What are actually good rice cookers? I feel like all the ... - Reddit www.reddit.com

[8] 6 Best Rice Cookers of 2025, Tested and Reviewed - Food Network www.foodnetwork.com

[9] 9 Best Rice Cookers | The Strategist - New York Magazine nymag.com

Beyond that are the actual search results. The top ones are the same as in References section of quick answer, but the order is different: [6] [7] [3] [5] [1] [8] [9] [4] [2].

It should be noted that individual search results on Kagi are likely to be skewed depending on the user because it gives you so many dials to score specific domains up or down. E.g. my setup gives a boost to Reddit while downscoring Quora and outright blocking Instagram and Pinterest.

"what rice cooker should I buy" returns a pretty in depth article on bonappetit.com and reddit as the top results, both recommending Zojirushi

Well first Zojirushi is unnecessarily expensive and difficult to clean. Only if you need its fancy options and like multiple varieties of rice would I recommend it. Reddit is no panacea to spam, these days.

But bonappetit.com is exactly an example of affiliate link spam. Even their budget option is awful.

Zojirushi being difficult to clean is kind of a wild take, unless most of their other rice makers are a wild departure from mine.

Yeah, never had any trouble cleaning any of my Zojirushi equipment.

Perhaps there's some new rice cooker with AI cleaning /s

Until then, my Zojirushi is very simple to clean.

What kind of answer are you expecting to get? Zojirushi is the answer you're going to get on the internet if you ask "what rice cooker should I buy" with no other qualifications because it's pretty universally agreed upon that it's the highest quality product.

My Zojirushi is the easiest to clean appliance I’ve ever owned. Just take the cooking bowl out and wash it with a damp cloth. Takes all of 30 seconds.

Yeah Zojirushi is absolutely the right answer so the contrarian take in this comment is actually not what I would want in search result.

There are other good rice cookers like Cuckoo, and cheaper options like Tiger or Tatung, or really budget options like Aroma, but you pretty much can’t go wrong with Zojirushi if you can afford it.

This is a case of HN cynicism and contrarianism working against oneself.

> Well first Zojirushi is unnecessarily expensive and difficult to clean

Expensive sure, but it's only difficult to clean if you're a double amputee.

This isn't quite what "bad search" means, but that search gives me a full page of ads, and I have to scroll down to even see the first actual result.

> Website of Nike? Website of Starbucks? Likely position number one.

...if you're blocking ads and/or they're paying big advertisement bucks.

But who is creating honest articles about which rice cookers you should buy?

BTW - the search you suggested gives you Reddit links first followed by other trusted sites trying to make an affiliate buck. There’s no spam on the first page.

I think part of the reason for this is that web site developers have got out of the habit of optimizing for search engines. I'm often surprised by how self-contained the requirements for a website are now, even among otherwise technically sophisticated clients. There'll be a beautiful site in React that absolutely sucks for SEO, but no-one will mind because a) it's unclear how big an audience there should be for the site, and b) the "all your hits come from search engines" was broken ten or more years ago by social network linking, so the question of how you get an audience seems much more arbitrary, and less connected to google.com.

This is actually why modern React sites focus on serverside rendering, at great additional complexity.

Googling "Is google search bad?" I get at the top

> Reddit · r/google Is Google Search getting worse? Latest research and ...

The whole "Click here to find ten reasons why it is bad" style I've only come across in HN comments attacking what may be a bit of a straw man?

I watched one of my friends who says Google is useless use Google one day.

If I were looking for a song, I would type in something like “song used at beginning of X movie indie rock”

He would type in “X songs.”

I basically find everything in Google in one search and it takes him several. I type in my thought straight whereas he seems to treat Google like a dumb keyword index.

Interesting, because keyword search works quite well for me, and I assumed it was natural-language searchers who are getting worse results.

Google used to be a "dumb keyword index" in the past. It worked better that way. You had some modicum of control over the matching process. For the past 10 years or so, Google turned more into "try to guess what a novice normie means", which removes user control (no more actually working verbatim search or logical operators...), and... well I failed to develop a mental model of how exactly it works. It's not a proper keyword search anymore, and it's not a proper DWIM system with true understanding of natural language like LLMs are. It's something... in between, inferior to both.

Actually, typing out "what a novice normie means" made me realize what is the probable reason Google turned out the way it is: optimizing for new users. However, a growing userbase means most users are new to Internet in general, and (with big enough growth) most queries are issued by people who are trying a search engine out for the first time, and have no clue how or why it works - and those queries are exactly the kind of queries Google is now good at, queries like example you provided.

With modern Google, if I’m searching for something that could either be a band or a song, I can put “band” and I will get only results for the band, even if the page doesn't include the word "band."

But if you insist on a dumb keyword search, Google still does that fine if you use quotation marks now in addition to the operator (e.g. +"band"). But I just tried +"band" with my band-vs-song example and all I got were worse results that excluded the artist's website because the artist didn't write the word "band" anywhere on the page -- as expected for a dumb keyword search.

There was no easy way to perform my band-vs-song search back then because Google didn’t understand context and the website doesn’t have the correct keywords. But modern Google knows context and I employ this fact regularly, allowing me to find stuff with modern Google like a magician compared to old Google or even Altavista.

Funny anecdote. I use to be afraid of searching for something in the city I lived in by putting the name of the city after it.

https://www.cityofcumming.net/

I mean, for those of us who used it since way before the '20s, it's not really a sentiment - it's a fact. You used to be able to type in 3 words and whatever error message your stack trace was showing, and the first 3 links returned were very likely a definitive source to solving your problem.Written by a human, and believe my word for it - it was much better back then than the crap you get out of torturing whatever your LLM of choice is. However the weird MBas took it over to and did exactly what you are describing - forced people to spend more time "engaging with the platform" (to increase the revenue). As you can see, they seem to have achieved this goal, and we all now spend time reformatting our queries as they wanted us to, and yes Google search is complete crap.

Eh, this said google is suffering from its own popularity.

Google in the past was written by a human because that was really the only option. Once other humans figured out to how automate producing trace Google has gone downhill simply because of the bullshit asymmetry effect. Even if google was totally customer based, it would still be much worse than the past because of the total amount of crap that exists.

This is also why no other competitor just completely blows them away either.

"and believe my word for it - it was much better back then than the crap you get out of torturing whatever your LLM of choice is"

I was around as well and my memories do not confirm this. But google search definitely degraded a lot.

Yes and no. You used to find niche websites more easily, but I vividly remember the frustration with ExpertsExchange results (with answers that were all paywalled).

This is one of the reasons why Kagi is so good - you can easily set it up to downrank cesspits like ExpertsExchange or Quora into oblivion.

Ah yes, Experts-Exchange was a plague for a while. They did downrank it at some point though.

Personally I like Google search. I think it's not crap - actually quite good. I use it multiple times a day (just checked - about 42 times yesterday). It's different from what it was 10 years ago but still works for most stuff.

That said I also use Perplexity which does things Google never really did.

I've got a theory that people just like to be negative about stuff, especially market leaders, and are a bit in denial as to how it still has the majority search share in spite of many billions spent trying to compete with it and ernest HN posts saying Google is crap use Kagi. For amusement I tried to find their share of search and Google is approx 90%, Kagi approx 0.01% by my calculations.

How long have you been using Google search for?

It used to be SO much less likely to return junk.

Since around 2012. What year would be the golden age of google search? I wonder if anyone has archived search result pages for relatively timeless queries so that we could compare. Wayback Machine seems to archive some of them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200801000000*/https://www.goog...

Around 2011 to 2012 after the first of many updates with names like hurricanes came and washed away the good.

Google search was actually great between the period where pagerank successfully defeated old-school SEO tactics and banner advertising starting earning enough that the "bloggers" could pay cheap writers to pad their articles in convincing ways.

First decade of the 2000's if I had to guess.

2006 was the first year I remember paid blog posts appearing from content farms that would exist only to increase your inbound links and page rank. Those days companies were paying cents per post to get their sites to #1 in Google while Google just wagged their finger and said "naughty, naughty."

It's a shame, because Page Rank was a smart idea.

Google randomly deletes words from your search term. Why would anyone think that was a good idea?

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