The time filter in Google Search broke a few days ago | Hacker News Reader

The time filter in Google Search broke a few days ago

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54 pointslatexr28 comments

I really don't understand this stuff. I've run multiple companies, this stuff would be fixed in minutes if it happened and very likely never get released.

Aren't they hiring supposedly top-tier talent and paying them top-dollar?

Surely they have a test suite and surely this would fail in that test suite.

I really don't understand how they end up doing such things.

I can only imagine that they hire a bunch of 22 year olds from prestigious schools who have never had a job pushing production code and convince themselves everything will be ok.

> Aren't they hiring supposedly top-tier talent and paying them top-dollar?

Yes. But you assume they work on pesky things like "bug fixing" which is generally not how you get promoted, and since these people are basically all about the money, stuff like that doesn't get fixed.

> Surely they have a test suite and surely this would fail in that test suite.

Surely, but surely it doesn't, because then the deploy would be blocked, surely. More often than not, insufficient automated testing for the not-happy/average path tends to be what lets bug like this leak into production.

> that they hire a bunch of 22 year olds from prestigious schools who have never had a job

Indeed, because these people have nothing to compare to, they don't know why they feel so depressed, distracted or out of motivation even though they have "the best job in world", and even though deep inside they know what they contribute to is slowly making the world a worse place to live.

For quite a long time the company has been oriented around product managers who are paid for shipping something new, not for any sort of maintenance (occasionally posts appear on HN from people who got a poor performance review because they weren’t building visible new features and instead spent time fixing bugs). This is also why so many products are killed that it’s become a meme: the company’s incentives drive this behavior.

the culture has been eating itself from the inside out with narcissitic bullshit for a decade+ now.

Sometimes I wonder what testing these giant companies do for features.

A week ago Facebook's language translation broke. Results come back in the original language or a mix. How could no-one notice?

> testing these giant companies do for features

I think they all got rid of QA, and developers don't have enough time to actually care about what they're building/fixing.

GitHub/Microsoft is incredible at this. The feature for selecting and closing multiple PRs was broken for weeks even after I and others reported it. I saw duplicate "A user you've blocked has contributed to this repository" warnings (two of them, one above the other) for weeks too before that was fixed.

I've stopped reporting issues as well, as it seems to have no effect on how quick it takes, so I don't think it's an issue of not being aware of them.

Something I’ve also noticed is the number badge for open issues and pull requests not disappearing for a long while.

This is particularly annoying to me as I address everything in my repos quickly, but then the badge remains there making me think something new was opened, and then I keep clicking to find nothing. Or in one case I ignored something which was there because I thought it was bugging out as usual.

Yeah, large companies like to really excel at specifically the eventual part of "eventual consistency", and without proper testing of production latencies, lots of UIs just end up broken, buggy and janky.

I don't know if I just got seriously grumpy over time/with experience, but everything user-facing just seems so crap nowadays, unless it's made by a smaller company who actually seem to care even a tiny bit.

I've been forced to use github projects recently. If I change the label or status, say, of a task, the change takes its sweet time to propagate through the UI. Creating multiple new tasks is a huge chore because every action is really laggy. It's hard to believe that anyone at github uses any of this junk.

It's annoyingly disconcerting. A simple database row count apparently now difficult in 2026.

Don't worry, I've vibe coded a new database system and it'll save us (and net me a nice promo)

Yes! As a frequent user of youtube queues, it feels like they have a dedicated team of one or two junior devs to futz around with it on a weekly basis and zero QA, because it is always breaking in new, unexpected ways.

"Everything is broken" used to mean "all software is insecure because the inherent complexity of a modern software stack ensures it's beyond the abilities of the average developer to eliminate all attack vectors" [1].

Now it just means [2].

1: https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pndhO5DcSI0

Google typically has very, very thorough tests.

I don't have any insider information here, but it's likely that the creator of this menu is long gone (it looks old!) and this feature is in maintenance mode. Someone--or a bot--just trying to keep the build green may have disabled the test without understanding that it was pointing to a real issue.

> trying to keep the build green may have disabled the test without understanding

> Google typically has very, very thorough tests.

Yeah, sure sounds like they have figured out this whole testing thing perfectly well, if that's the case :)

Companies in general right now seem to be reducing staff to "just barely enough" right now and seeing what they can get away with. Twitter started it, and when they didn't implode (as I thought they would), everyone is following their lead.

So does your interpretation then also mean that a planned deprecation of Search has started, with well-timed reliability deprecations, so that users are deliberately being taught to rely only on AI summaries?

A draw-down of staff at Google? Have you been following the layoff news? Yes, Google is pivoting right now. Search isn't going away, but its shape is changing.

Or they noticed but cannot be bothered to fix.

"and we increased test coverage by 10% on Q3" doesn't get you promoted unfortunately

No, but if you found real issues along the way, it's enough to get a decent review. Search takes their five nines seriously.

The advanced search on Google is still pretty hard to remember how to use if you don’t use it very regularly.

I just did a Google search with “show me search results for fonts on hacker news from the last week” and while the AI Mode results were accurate, I wouldn’t call them search results. The search results were very much not accurate (results from May).

Weird that they couldn’t or wouldn’t solve this for the creamy middle.

Something wore out from overuse, with everyone, including AI-training scrapers, filtering on “three years or older” to get non-AI output…

I get the feeling the hidden 'tools' button that makes Image Search actually useful (filter resolution, transparent PNG, animated gif etc) is going to be completely broken soon too, like they did to reverse search.

I've noticed my daily search "is Mitch McConnell dead yet?" Keeps ignoring date bounds.

I expect it'll get fixed in Tuesday after the special election date passes, and we finally mourn.

They probably also sent AI on bug hunting quest there too like they were bragging for Chrome...

They were looking for another place they could cram Nano's Banana down people's throats.

What a powerful statement

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