For example, google seems to want full sentences instead of just keywords now. "How do I do X?" seems to get me better(?) results then "X + some relevant keyword". But I can't seem to get past this "most popular responses" google things I need. I do appreciate youtube videos marked at certain times but watching video isn't always what I want to do. Tangentially, has youtube search been integrated to youtube search or something now? I used to be able to search obscure music in youtube. "Sal dulu a" would both recommend "Sal dulu antasma" and list it but now unless i search for that particularly, it doesn't show up.
Any pro tips on how to google (or use search engines) like a modern human would be appreciated. Or modern version of google dorking (which also seems to not work like it used to for me). Thank you.
I've used DDG for the past ~5 years, and it is typically worse without using a hashbang like !so for technical queries. I guess that is what the web has evolved to-- knowing which mega-site you want to search against rather than discover new sites?
Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit"
Unfortunately I prefer to avoid reddit (which also has a fair amount of astroturfing), but I haven't found a good alternative. I severely miss Google's old "discussions" (or was it forums?) filter.
My deepest apologies for saying this, but for any type of query that has a monetization angle, I now add "site:www.reddit.com" to the query to find actual discussion about it.
Normal Reddit disclaimers apply as much of what you find is garbage but at least if you search "best exercise bike" confined to reddit you'll get real opinion not hellbent on monetizing you.
Instead of fixing the spam they are instead encouraging companies to spend more and more time on SEO and coming up with their own shenanigans like better ranking for using AMP (defunct now).
People who generally make great content (think a researcher or a great software maker) can't compete with billion dollar companies like Canva, Shutterstock and Pinterest who spend millions of dollars on SEO and have dedicated SEO employees who spend all day sending outreach emails and doing experiments. Henceforth the good content never even sees the light of the day; drowned by all this "SEO" optimized content.
FWIW i still believe it's the job of the search engine to find great relevant content and show it to the user instead of the other way round. Though I know it's much easier said than done.
The fundamental problem is that Google and the SEO spammer’s interests are aligned. Google is both the search provider and ad network. I think this makes Google tremendously vulnerable to competitors who don’t have that conflict of interest, and presents a massive opportunity to those with enough courage and cash.
All of these threads devolve into anecdotes and reminisces about the "good old days" and complaining about Pinterest. None of which is in the least quantitative.
I'd be interested to see some actual data or research on the subject, if it exists.
Or maybe it's not Google that's gotten worse but the web itself? Again, quantitative results, please, not anecdata.
- There are way more Google users, including grandmas.
- Conversations have moved from discussion boards to walled gardens and chats.
- Google relies more on neural network embeddings, so does a better job when you type full sentences and semantic similarity.
- Google relies on authority signals and incoming links to a website, so non-commercial, hobbyist, or controversial content ranks way lower.
- Websites rely on Google for income, so they start producing what Google and its readers want to see.
- Spammers rely on Google for income, so those surviving after decades, have created massively successful linking rings and spam production pipelines looking at keyword search statistics.
- You were really good at Google searching years ago, having a harder time updating and letting go of what worked for you. Easier to blame Google for this.
As for tips: Anything academic, search on specific websites or Google Scholar. Anything technical/coding, search on StackOverflow. Anything cultural/commercial you want a peer answer, instead of a salesman answer, search on Reddit. Try to join like-minded communities where you can ask expert questions, and research new things in your field. Exact keyword match still works by enclosing keyword in double quotes:
"sal dulu antasma"Edit: I'd love to see a some-of-the-web search engine like this. Start just with university sites, prepress archives, quality forums, public dev Slacks, etc.
It's a long article, with multiple headings and short paragraphs for each. Your search terms will be a near-match for one of the headings. The problem is that heading is 3/4 of the way down the page, so you have to scroll past pages of introductory paragraphs and basic info about whatever you're searching for.
For example, for the search term:
> how long does icloud photo upload take
Included in the top results are the pages:
- https://9to5mac.com/2018/12/31/upload-icloud-photos-iphone-i...
- https://www.blog.motifphotos.com/using-icloud-for-your-photo...
- https://backlightblog.com/how-to-upload-photos-to-icloud-fro...
Which all fit the mold of blog post I'm describing. General, multi-heading pages about a particular topic that rank highly for a specific contained within.
The content, once you get to it, isn't necessarily bad. But what I want from the results is a single page / blog post with only the specific heading and paragraph. Or even better, the best Stack Exchange question and/or Reddit thread that fits the term.
I like to append "reddit" to many queries, for example "best bicycle for under $500 reddit", where you can read some interesting discussions, rather than a random SEO website with affiliate links.
If you Duck Duck Go his full name, no quotes, the front page is all him and relatives; ancestry dot com and whatever.
If you Google it, no quotes? The front page is ENTIRELY "Miley Cyrus on Joe Rogan." Moreover, with quotes? Only 2 links total on the front page.
So I'd say YES.
- A ranking algorithm that penalizes commercial and ad/tracking bloated pages
- Ability to "mute" or "prefer" domains
- Ability to search for discussions
- Customize type and appearance of search results
Kagi Search is a new startup in the search space and we are currently in the closed beta.
If Google Search was perfect you'd never have a reason to click on an ad.
And they speak us about the "algorithm".
I've tried to search for news articles that were even a month old and have had trouble locating links to stories I know happened. I don't know any tricks to working around this. And if I don't recall specifically when the article came out (say, somewhere around 6 months ago), I'll usually give up.
Any tips on finding "historical" results?
I was running into an issue with a docker container that I was trying to install on my NAS. I searched using just the actual error, one word, and the name of the container/service, again one word. So two words in total: “FakeUserAgentError caliber-web”
DDG gives great results, where the first result is GitHub issues related to what I’m seeing and so on.
!g gives me first two links as some crap websites that have scraped the above GitHub issues, then the GitHub issue mentioned above and some JP/CN websites which are supposedly about the error but I can’t make sense. Utterly useless results.
This is the first time I’ve seen this, never before. DDG results were miles better than Google results. Note: I generally use DDG so not sure if this is recent development or not.
I might be looking for some sort of broad topic, like how do a I do a particular thing in SwiftUI, and it will return a bunch of stuff about SwiftUI that sort of skirts the topic. A search for do "a particular thing" "SwiftUI" is more likely to succeed.
After ranking results by profit it wasn't even necessary anymore to index or present other results.
Equally unnecessary it then became to maintain or create any such websites.
The future, if you ask me, is carefully crafted invitation-only websites. Get back to information exchange just for the sake of sharing, discovering and learning.
Or how GeeksForGeeks shows up higher than the pages for the official Python docs.
Or how searching for anything seemes to find an auto-generated page with that phrase that outranks any useful info.
The authentic source of the content should be the first hit, not someone talking about it, or a clone, or an SEO page linking to the authentic content. That is a colossal failure.
I'd just add that I think it's bad in the sense that many others have mentioned- lots of crap at the top, ads, very hard to find more obscure stuff. Otoh, I generally still find it better than bing / ddg for most mainstream searches I would do.
Correct. Google will give you better results with full-sentence-like input. After several years of refining results, Google concluded that there's more benefit in teaching the machines to understand how humans ask questions than to teach humanity how to keyword like a computer expects (especially when you factor in that they get as many queries via voice these days as via text, and voice recognition in general always benefits from more information to disambiguate on). There's an entire semantic-analysis layer in front of the keywording layer these days to determine some semantics of the query to try and guess what category of thing you're looking for.
I generally have no problem with a few keywords for software engineering searches. I usually go general-to-specific (for example, `react unit test useState`).
You can drop the video results by adding `-youtube` to the query.
> "Sal dulu a" would both recommend "Sal dulu antasma" and list it but now unless i search for that particularly, it doesn't show up.
I'm not sure, but it's possible Google dropped 'a' as a signifier because of the semantic query support (as a single particle, it doesn't add signal to a sentence-like query). `sal dulu songs` gives me a list where Antasma shows up as item 3.
In general, my advice for Googling these days would be "don't try to keyword it out." Think more like how you'd ask another human for a random fact they might barely remember.
There's also still some symbols that are specifically understood by Google for tuning queries, listed here (https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en). Worth noting: the `+` modifier got killed when Google+ came and went. To force a word or phrase to be part of the results instead of "fuzzy-matched," put it in "quotes". Quotes these days do double-duty as both "I want this literally matched" and "results must include this token."
> Any pro tips on how to google
Pro tip: try DuckDuckGo, https://ddg.gg.
But googling programming language problems, there's way more blogspam. A lot of crappy websites that seem auto-generated often rank higher than useful stackoverflow results. There spammy sites often have my search verbatem in the title, so they get clicked on...
It's pretty sad as IMO this is harming developers, blogging, and Google. I hope Google can fix the issue and reward useful content, not just content that's made itself look useful to generate clicks.
Google has mixed incentives since their main income is the ads they sell both on the search results page and in the pages linked from the search results. Looking after the interests of the users is a tricky balancing act, and it would be really easy for them to start cannibalizing themselves to eke out a bigger profit margin. In the absence of serious competition to keep them honest, it is in their economic interest to show mediocre search results with a painful amount of ads.
Google also appears to have pivoted toward a few particular use cases of search engines, finding where to buy things, and answering questions. I think a few uses fall in the cracks between those patterns.
They seem to be optimizing for the results that most people will click, which is fine if you are most people, but will worsen the experience for the long tail consisting of all the users looking for something specific off the beaten track. The algorithms seem to actively resist attempts at refining the query away from the most popular results, which is a peculiar behavior that I don't understand the motivation behind. I think this is a big mistake, as it makes what was already easy easier to find, and what's already difficult even more difficult to find.
Sadly your best bet when google is failing is to try Bing or other search engines.
I get that SEO is kind of a race-to-the-bottom scenario, but I always wonder - how are these random sites in business? I understand that they get a good amount of traffic from said SEO and "advertising" pays good money for that traffic, but do advertisers really not grasp that people spend all of five seconds on these pages before going somewhere else?
Google News used to be an easy to read html list that just worked. Now if you leave it open in a tab for more than 5mins you get a warning that it needs to be reloaded because of a software update.
This is why today sites like Reddit mostly focused on adding app nag messages to their site and appending posts with distracting badges for additional revenue. It's also why companies like Google don't care about your thoughts when it comes to removing dislikes from YouTube and continue to promote paid search results and their own search content every year.
Usually when the product becomes so bad that people forgot why they use it in the first place a competitor will come along with a user-first approach and disrupt the market, but this is a process that is likely to take decades rather than years or months. In the meantime you can expect Google and other tech monopolies to continue making their products worse from a user's perspective.
I find myself using a mix of search engines these days. Google is still my primary when working (code-related searches still preform better imo), but typically use DuckDuckGo on non-work devices and very occasionally I'll use Yandex when I'm searching for things which might be influenced by political bias.
In the case of this specific question though I'm not sure whether Google consciously changed their search algorithm in a way they knew would result in poorer results. What it might suggest is that Google isn't putting as much resource into optimising the quality of their search results as they have previously. I know in recent years I've found myself increasingly using the "site:" modifier to return results from specific high-quality forums and sites which I trust. I find the vast majority of results for general queries these days link to ad-riddled, low-quality content farms.
At one time, the premise was that good results would bring people back. Getting the exact right answer every time was the go-to means to get customers to return, and see more Ads. More ads meant more income, which meant a successful company.
But now, Google has the dominant market power. Customers are going to Google by default, never considering an alternative. Everyone who wants to have their results above the fold have to pay to play- because everything above the fold is a paid ad. And below the fold, sure, we can have something the algorithm dug up for you too. But that isn't the point anymore.
Google is a business. They don't optimize for accuracy, they optimize for money. It used to be that accuracy made money, so they did that. But that was never the end goal, and it's become far less important.
It coincided with the little green leaf that promises to route me on 'eco friendly routes'. Don't see how sitting in the car longer can be more eco friendly
"google search quality" https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search+quality
"google search worse" https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search+worse
Notably, from 12 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902999
(There are many other results.)
Use the tools dropdown to specify the time period, for example last week or last 24h. If your WhatsApp started crashing today, relevant content is likely fresh.
When searching for articles, try to write the search like journalist would write the headline.
Use the double quotes aggressively to filter out unwanted pages (by hinting you want a certain phrase).
I don’t think I usually go past the first page. Instead I usually refine the search.
Can’t say about the quality. I still keep finding stuff and I don’t really have any way to measure how it was year or 5 ago.
Advertising serves a positive purpose by informing people about products that they will like and otherwise would not find. It also serves a negative purpose by attempting to cause people to make decisions which are not in their best interests.
I am genuinely curious what proportion of ads seen serve each of those two purposes.
The time has come for a distributed, decentralized search engine powered by the immensely powerful devices in our pockets, with rankings determined by our peers and local network, not by a single global ranking. I'm not saying a distributed search engine with localized results will replace Google (you still want the global standardized search results in some cases), but rather we need a better alternative to simply asking your friends/communities like Reddit. The combined spare computing power of every smartphone on the planet is probably greater than AWS or Google Cloud could ever be. If people were incentivized to sell their spare battery/CPU/network capacity for web crawling, perhaps by earning money, this would solve the advertising/privacy problem with Google's business model as well.
[1]https://youtubecensorship.com/2019-08-18-google-youtube-rigg...
On a similar note, but this time for reasons that completely elude my reasoning, GPS navigation with google maps has become worse and worse over the years. It went from surprisingly good at avoiding closed routes and accidents at a time when there was likely a lot less real-time data available, to guiding me over and over again to the same closed roads that sometimes have been for weeks, even though they have troves of user data that clearly show everybody having to turn back and change course. WTF google ?
Also, please implement something like traffic prediction, when I leave around 5pm when it's still fluid, I get an ETA like 40 minutes later, even though I know for sure that it's going to get way worse while I'm on the road and those 40 minutes become more like 90. If I can predict it, why can't google ? That's just crazy stupid.
I'm with you on that 100%. When did we arrive at the point where relevant keywords don't return relevant results? Is training an AI on natural language processing more important than keeping your flagship product reliable? And the blog spam...
I think google has gotten qualitatively worse. It's no longer a search engine, it is a recommendation engine. I flat out don't use it anymore for anything other than addresses. This wouldn't be so bad if most of the major competitors weren't just metasearch engines relying on google. Bing is no better.
It's gotten to be what it was like in 1999, you can't rely on a single engine for anything. So "default search" in browsers doesn't serve as useful a purpose anymore. I find myself using an assortment of engines, including Brave (IMO currently providing the best experience, although that doesn't say much right now) and obscure engines like gigablast.
Anyway, I haven't used Google for many years at this point, so whatever. However very recently I'm now having issues with DDG -- seeming to ignore when I quote things, returning only tangentially related pages, including my location(!) when I didn't ask it to, etc. Does anyone know if something notable changed at DDG in the past month or so?
Result: Lots of "Best quality/value jeans for 2021" SEO optimised pages with Amazon/affiliate links and not a lot of useful information.
Search engines seem to have become entirely online retail focussed. Even things like searching a location is now productised in "Top 10 hotels in location for 2021".
For day to day work I use a mainstream engine like DDG first but they are insanely bad when it comes to respecting my queries. Earlier I used to fall back to Google who are equally bad but sometimes have slightly different results.
Now I also fall back to search.marginalia.nu for certain types of queries since if it knows about the topic at all the pages it ranks on top are often far better than what Google and DDG comes up with.
Another important thing is that with marginalia I know within a second if it had results. With DDG and Google I have to peek into every result to see if it is spam or ham. (There used to be that the preview snippets on front of Google showed where in the text the result came from but that probably was too useful and led to fewer ad impressions so they removed it.)
Also, I don't like how google tries to demote controversial "wrong think".
Why doesn't google show stuff like https://based.cooking/ or https://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq2.html higher?
I think it would be great if in the settings you could upload e.g. some python code that modifies some parameters. I would e.g. write something like
change_score("pinterest.com", -7) change_score("based.cooking", +8) change_score("stroustrup.com", +4)
Than you could share your code on e.g. hackernews. That way you could actually punish clickbait.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113007
It's not just an issue of refining results to fit a majority of the population. Something is seriously wrong with it.
It's gone from "haha who uses bing?" to the thing I turn to when I need to pull something obscure out of the web and it's always in the first page or two. It feels like google of 10 years ago - in a good way.
I'm not even talking about the last 2 years when they've been openly policing I mean stuff that's critical of employees that google has had to fire for committing felonies on their infrastructure.
This constant "refinement" is getting to the point that I regularly end up hitting page 4 or 5 on technical matters because google introduced a broken system to counter abuse from people claiming to be best friends with bigfoot in his UFO...
I with they'd trust tech blogs more than they do... Esp from authors sticking to the subject matter not conspiracies or opinion pieces. A decent tech blog is worth 1000x more than musk has ever tweeted for instance imo.
As for the quality of results overall, depends if you value "what the crowd thinks". I personally don't, but i can see the value of it, especially when searching something very niche where the google search right now can semi-comprehend the context and give you the ~best answer.
For me, I haven't daily-drove google search since 2015 (ddg, startpage,customized searx all work fine for me), so i can't say that i know the nitty-gritty besides using google to compare results between engines.It gave me the impression of becoming an echo-chamber due to the "fact-checking" role google assumed.
Why hasn't a group of passionate developers gotten together to build an amazing, open source, ad-free, tamper-proof search engine?
Wouldn't that instantly be like a mega impactful, economy-changing kind of project?
Adding "last year" to the filters didnt help either; I just got general docs from Oracle, but no developer blogs with best practices, benchmarks or experiences from fellow devs.
GAN image generators can be tricked into giving results with phrases like 'unreal engine', 'artstation', 'junjo ito', 'van gogh' https://minimaxir.com/2021/08/vqgan-clip/
same for google. 'gist' gives you a specific category of technical results. seems like the default is some combination of medium, SO + github issues
DDG and Bing are worse, as they ignore the quotes altogether rather than just most of the time. Yandex has a vastly smaller index and ignores quotes a lot of the time as well.
Plenty of technical topics where i get better results from duck duck go (and i dont even like it)
It tries to answer my question, it shows summaries of Wikipedia articles, it has a host of sponsored links, it can point to things on the map.
But I'm using a Web search engine and I was trying to find Web pages containing my search terms. That idea seems to have been lost somewhat.
(yes, I guess if you scroll down far enough. But it's probably a matter of months before they're all gone)
Well i don't know what you're talking about, i can always find the ads i m looking for. I mean the most serious business would pay the most to have their ad on top of results right? Works for meee
I also get SEO lessons from sites below the ads in the list, it's quite a sight to observe how they manage to all come up with the same content slightly rearranged, and still be clogging the frontpage.
I still find what I want - honest opinions and unpaid reviews - by adding "reddit" to the query. But without that the normal results on the first page are complete rubbish.
This is shocking given the existence (now) of publicly available, open source indexing databases. You can literally build a search engine without indexing infrastructure, but everything out there is still crap.
Google, Amazon, eBay... practically worthless.
So… yeah. The funny bit is that the actual search algo got it right.
I’m with others on appending Reddit to your search.
I've been using it as my default search engine the last couple of months and it seems to do a pretty good job.
Bing video search is obviously the best choice when it comes to porn.
Brave Search is getting very close to Google for almost 90% of text searches.
Who are these people at google that feel entitled to deprive the human race of it's most precious resource? DDG has worked well for me
It is a lot like Microsoft in the 90s.
I always thought a good one would be "And now for something completely Different" that would give you random low ranked results just for fun :)
I'm seeing an interim era of Boutique search engines (powered by better search & people curation) - just like the old Yahoo (yet another hierarchal * *) era. I also believe that a unified search algorithm will unfold following this "yahoo like interim" again, to reorganize the Web once again.
I'm sharing a document that I'm updating on this exact issue, with the information I have collected so far: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cSMY5wXSKhJdMxeJEvTUJ21e...
I'm working on a project as well, to try solving this: https://aquila.network - with an open, neutral search protocol. Anyways, some web standards organization can do the same thing better than me, with more impact. If they do, I'm more than happy to see that as well..
I switched to DuckDuckGo a few months back and I am very happy with the change.
Right now search is "free" (user is the product). How much would you be willing to pay for a non-ad-driven, curated search site?
Are we really shaming Google for having superior NLP? If you want the answer to a question, ask the question! I see no problem with this progress.
I find it more difficult to find what I am looking for, and I spend more and more time searching directly on Reddit or Youtube.
By owning demand for search the attention can be guided.
Now that YouTube has gotten rid of dislikes expect YouTube to go down the same path. There will be more trash content and you'll only know once you watch the video (comments can be deleted).
YT injects ads in front of unmonetized videos now, so they'll have bigger metrics for engagement and make more $$ on pre-roll ads.
Primarily, quality content and discussions are now all paywalled (e.g. journals, magazines, newspapers, comment threads, and original content).
Secondarily, remnant content is trivial search engine marketing content. This content is low quality, low information, often false, with a low-grade reading level.
Third, google is actively down-ranking & removing “controversial” content in the name of ML fairness & integrity. In many cases this may be just, but it’s also going to lower the overall content quality because almost everything innovative is going to be controversial .
So you have at least three massive forces preventing quality content & discussions from being found on web search.
Does anyone have a solution though? Even DuckDuckGo is bad.
Which search result is worse compared to "the time Google was good"? We need solid examples, which is usually extremely hard to find on HN threads such as these. Even the parent does not have a single good example.
I use google to search for results on websites I trust, it's basically useless otherwise.
I live in Argentina, and sometimes I search for Argentinian things, but also more often I search in English for things related to work, travel, hobbies, etc. It's reasonable and OK that when I search for certain things Google provides region-specific results (e.g. "servicio meteorológico nacional" [National meteorological service] brings up the Argentinian agency and other local results instead of any from other Spanish speaking countries). This has been like that for many years now, and is OK.
The new thing is that more and more often I've been getting results that include argentine or Spanish-language results that have NO relevance to the search, and are a super big stretch.
I haven't saved examples, but I tested for 3 minutes and just came up with one... trust me that I've seen much worse than this.
Let's say I search for "french tv cat puppet" (I watched an old show called Telechat when I was a kid). I get the following results:
1 & 2 - Kitty Cats - Wikipedia (a French Canadian TV show... OK...)
3 - Pacha et les chats @ imdb (the same show)
4 - YouTube (???? "Missing: french cat puppet", warns Google)
5 - "Carmel: Who Killed Maria Marta?" @ Netflix (this is a true crime show based on a very famous murder in my country)
None of those results were ads. I have no idea why Google would show results 4 and 5 except to think that their index for my country is very very broken/corrupt.
Another "not as bad but still very bad" example: If I search for "mccartney bear song" (see Rupert and the Frog Song, and the "We all stand together" song) the first two results are spot on, but the third one is a Spanish language result from a local paper titled "These is the full list of songs that The Beatles played in the Get Back documentary by Peter Jackson", the snippet has McCartney and the word "song" from "Song Of Love" in bold.
Final one. I search for "retro toys with water inside"... the search terms are super poor, but the image results show me that Google got me (e.g. the Tomy Waterful toys).
Image results - OK
Video results - OK
1 - Handheld water game @ Amazon (OK...)
2 - Pinterest results (groan...)
3 - A hacked home decor Argentine site that redirects me to a page that sells a doll, no water.
4 & 5 - Relevant retro toy pages
6 - A hacked Argentinian government page (under the .gov.ar TLD, which is for government site) with the "classic fashion CHATHAM ELECTRONICS JAN-CAHG-1Z2" title. Apparently has been fixed so now it has a 404 error.
I rest my case. It's a disaster.
For me it was the pinterestizing of image search that finally made me realize how pointless google was. Why use a service that is just going to feed me ads in response to every query?
it's almost impossible to google game dev programming things... IMPOSSIBLE to find good resources anymore, it almost as if old (and valuable) resources are not referenced anymore!