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Comment by azangru | Hacker News Reader

> now that Google isn’t really Google anymore

I can't say I've noticed any changes about google search on desktop recently. Yes; there is an AI overview widget at the top of the page; but it's been there for at least a year.

Has anything changed about Google search results for you?

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It did for me, I can no longer find any GitHub project. Duck duck returns them on first try. Absolutely ridiculous, couldn't believe my eyes when I finally realized that. I get a ton of ads and product placements on first couple pages. What I search for is literally, word for word, name of the repository and it's not ambiguous.

Thats interesting, because for me, I cant find anything on github, through github search and need to resort to google. Google search is super super terrible for other things tho :/

Possibly, but try this yourself to see how irritating Google can be:

https://www.google.com/search?q=marine+nav+compass+card

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=marine+nav+compass+card

Im curious, what is your query?

https://www.google.com/search?q=marine+nav+compass+card

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=marine+nav+compass+card

Huh? the github page of pretty much anything is always in the top 5 results for me.

https://www.google.com/search?q=marine+nav+compass+card

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=marine+nav+compass+card

It's all products and ads now with Google with anything vague enough that warrants up-selling for them.

And honestly, that's my biggest gripe. Identical search terms on different systems, or even the same system in different physical locations, almost always return different results from one-another. Telling someone to "Google it" stopped being a reliable way to share information.

Yes, significantly, but not recently. It can't search anymore. Like literally, it can't. You cannot reach a web page you know exists, like you used to.

Depends what you mean by 'recently', but for me they are much worse than they were several years ago. There was a period when people were complaining and I didn't really see why, but eventually whatever it was caught up with me too. I think it's a combination of losing the battle with SEO spam and prioritising things other than giving me what I actually ask for. There's lots of obvious junk (either 'AI slop' in the truest sense, or the human-written version that was common pre-AI) that finds its way to or near the top of the results; also, it can be difficult and frustrating to convince Google that I'm actually looking for X rather than the superficially similar and more popular Y, and that I would prefer a small number of actually-relevant results to a million irrelevant or sloppy ones.

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