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Comment by WarmWash | Hacker News Reader

It started when Google made a hard push to improve search for everyday people. They essentially nerfed "expert google skills" to bolster "noob google skills".

Regular people are/were really bad at using google, so google moved towards showing what it thinks you want rather than what you want. They paved over the skill gap between people who understood keywords and word order, and people who just typed in a quasi legible sentence to find something. In doing so though, they killed a lot of skill that people had developed with google for years.

Basically they made the game worse for pros so it could be better for amateurs. I have never heard a non-tech person complain about google getting worse over the years, and they seem to overwhelmingly use AI overviews now too.

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I just don't know what I'm doing different, I'm just keyword searching and using a couple of inclusive/exclusive flags.

Was I the frog in the pot and now I'm cooked? I don't feel like in search Google any different from maybe 2005 or so.

How do you get the inclusion/exclusion to work? My last few attempts to use “-x” really didn’t exclude what I expected, and almost all the results had “x”. I have seen massive changes since 2005.

> they seem to overwhelmingly use AI overviews now too.

Hard agree. The only thing I've ever witnessed another person do on Google (this is only an incredibly slight exaggeration) is:

1. Type a 'query' - either a brand/website name or some kind of stream of thought like "dishwasher error 03F" (without quotes)

2. Click or look at the very top thing in the results.

This used to mean 80% of the time they'd click the top ad, 20% the top organic result. Then they started putting non-clickable "answers" in that top spot, which would always be accepted as 'the right answer'. When those appeared, approximately no one would ever click any 'blue links.' These started out pretty reliable because they were just direct extracts from sites like IMDB: "Brad Pitt is 44 years old" etc.

Now it's like 60% of the time an ad, 40% of the time their bargain-basement-model "AI Overview" slop. Either way, approximately all users always just use whatever is on top and ignore everything else.

> Either way, approximately all users always just use whatever is on top and ignore everything else.

Wtf

>"a hard push to improve search for everyday people"

Citation needed. A hard push to change their search offering, sure. To improve it? Well, if by improve you mean 'require more interaction and viewing of more adverts on average before leaving' ...

Again, if you have been on HN since 2009, you are likely on the far fringe of Google's user demographics, which at this point is pretty much "The average human being on Earth".

I would bet all of my money that you never once did a Google search (pre-LLM mania, but maybe even after) that looked like

"What kind of clothing is best for when you are going hiking around the lake, so my feet don't get so cold?"

Sadly, this is how most humans have used a search engine for decades now.

I find that weird assumption. Why would you expect HN people not do such searches? They worked for years.

And you frequently ended up finding a discussion forum with around that question and relevant discussion under it.

Because OG tech nerds would google like

Forum hiking warm socks backpacking trail running

Which was basically a structured programmatic query that activated the old google algo just right.

Fwiw, I do/did plain language searches for the last couple of years, following Google's lead - I think the more natural language searches have only really been in the last 5 years.

I often use terse searches too, mostly when I forget to write it out longhand to satisfy Google - but either way it's getting less wheat with my vat of chaff in the SERPs and several times recently I've had to re-phrase to get anything useful.

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