What's Up with Google?
Recently, I notice more and more search results Google are locked behind registration gates, and not only does Google list them at all, they're often the top results (Think Quora, Pinterest). I never had issues accessing the content in the results but recently, it's bad. Does no one at Google care? Are the people in charge investors at Pinterest/Quora?
I've noticed in the past 2-3 months that results from StackOverflow, Wikipedia, and official programming language documentation sites seem to have been abruptly downranked. They used to typically be in the top 3 results for me for appropriate queries, but now they frequently aren't even on the first page.
I think the utility of generic search engines is coming to an end. Services like Google, Bing and DDG are numbered in usefulness.
Instead, I am guessing (maybe hoping) that we see a return of the moderated directories, like Yahoo or DMOZ of old. A 2.0 spin on these directories, with lessons learned from all the years.
Imagine that you just go to StackOverflow and search there directly for your answer. Want a funny laugh, go to your favorite comedy website (like facebook.com) and search directly. Want some news, go to CNN or Fox (depending on your persuasion) and fill your echo chamber.
Not kidding. I think search as we know it is dead. And there is a new paradigm just sitting out there ready for the next generation to make.
A directory of well known lists of websites with specialty search engines available on each.
It's a rather standard tech company model: you build a product so good it becomes indispensable, then you stick the customers in a vice and squeeze until all the money comes out. "Produce the best search results" hasn't been the guiding principle for a good decade now.
"Not growing is failing" is the most toxic principle of modern business. There is a finite amount of people, of money to be made. Ever-increasing income is fundamentally impossible. When you can't increase revenue by further improving your product, you increase revenue by making the same product more profitable, which generally means a worse product. In the eyes of the business major, the ideal business is one in which all of your customers hate you not quite enough to stop using you.
It's a trend I've noticed with other services, notably Drive and Calendar - they no longer innovate, just get a UI tweak every few years. It's very reminiscent of cash cows, which typically are resourced to just keep going at minimal expense for as long as possible. Another possibility is that the product isn't "sexy" anymore, so they are having trouble finding the great staff they need to stay at the forefront. This would be fine if the rest of the world stood still, but clearly SEO has moved on in the meantime, and so we end up with a quagmire. It's basically another form of bit rot.
Unfortunately DDG is much worse in a different way - it seems incapable of dealing with synonyms. I can't recall a specific example since I switched back to Google, but it's on the order of searching for Python and getting results for Java (wrong subtree of the taxonomy), searching for Wellington and getting results for the whole of New Zealand (ignoring specifiers), or searching for double glazed windows and getting results for Microsoft Windows (no understanding of the semantics of the words being related).
It blows my mind that Google penalizes sites for being a fraction of a second slower than they imagine they should be, but a site I can’t actually view- right to the top baby.
If you can get a beta invite for https://kagi.com get it. Not only are their defaults really good you also have the option to customize your searches by blacklisting, creating groups with sites like stackoverflow, github, hackernews etc for a dev search and so much more. It feels like google in the 00s with better customization.
Google since Page and Brin bailed has become a highly political organization interested only in short term revenue growth, and is no longer an engineering organization focused on product excellence. Anyone that has used their messaging products over the years has noticed this.
This type of business attracts a different class of talent and nearly all of the old guard has cashed in their stock and left.
Google should just outright delist these sites, they are incredibly annoying and worthless
This is one of the many problems we're trying to tackle at you.com (full disclosure, I work there).
We felt like it's important that you can select your preferred sources and downvote sources you don't like.
For this and other reasons we separate the experience into a private and personalized mode. So you get exactly what you want based on your explicit settings (like StackOverflow code snippets or arxiv papers) and can have hardcore privacy when you want that (where your location isn't used, not even your searches are stored like on DDG).
Thanks to this cursed god forsaken parasite "Pinterest" I just completely stopped using google's image search option. I'm using bing/ddg now and it feels soooo good compared to how awful google search experience became
Ublock Origin is your friend. Add custom filters to remove these from search results. For example you can remove Pinterest from Google result using filter
google.##.g:has(a[href="pinterest.com"])
And DDG using filter
duckduckgo.##.results > div:has(a[href="pinterest.com"])
I just discovered how poor the search results are if you're logged in with your Google account. Have to log out or view in incognito mode just to see what you were searching for. Also I didn't realize how censored Google's results were until I started comparing them side by side with DDG.
I stopped using Google search (and most of their services) about three years ago.
I used DDG for a while, but I was not convinced.
Bing is average, not as good as Google once was, far from it in fact, but more relevant than the duck and less annoying than Google.
But yeah, search is in a bad state.
Can someone explain to me why the video results are so bad? Half the time I'm looking for YouTube and YouTube never shows up? Was this due to a lawsuit or something? Half the time it's some random website that has a 2minute video before two 30second ad rolls, never what I want.
I recently stopped using google and switched my default to DuckDuckGo. So far I haven't needed to go back to google for anything.
If you're looking for an alternative, try Kagi. Much better search results than DDG/Bing, but it supports all the DDG !bangs. No Google-style knowledge graph/instant answers though, and while the beta is free, they plan to eventually start charging.
https://kagi.com/signup?invite_code=morehumaneweb
It isn't so much about whether "Google cares" or otherwise. There are a lot of sites and a lot of vested interests trying to game their search rankings, and a huge number of keywords that the game is playing out in.
Sometimes low quality sites will have the advantage and sometimes high quality sites will have the advantage. Google is working with a bias to high quality, but they are fighting a broad fight against persistent opponents. Every so often Google does a big algorithm refactor to try and make life hard for these sort of sites.
It's also that free sites suck these days. Quora is still free for vast majority of content, just need to register, and has very interesting facts and nuanced opinions. The Economist is a place to read real news rather than talk shows that CNN and Fox have become. Ad supported doesn't seem to work for quality content. So do you want to at least be aware of the quality stuff or just browse junk? Serious question, there should be a search engine to cater to "free only" crowd.
Weird I feel DDGs search quality has also gone down recently. I find myself jumping between google and DDG and sometimes to Bing when both are broken.
It is like search is broken on all the major providers. Not sure if they are copying each other or if SEO spam has become a lot better.
In 2016 Google pushed for AI and replaced the guy in charge of the search product (Amit Singhal) by the guy in charge of the AI division.
From there it's all been downhill from an user perspectives, I'm sure at first the saw ad revenue increased.
An era has finished, that's all. Google's corpse will be decomposing for quite a while though. Hopefully they will find their Nadella before they get completely IBM'd.
I think it's probably tied to the rise in gated content. Especially news. Unless they want to delist every for-profit news site, they can't carte blanche remove walled content. The algo is fundamentally based on popularity. If enough users are logging in to those sites and clicking on them, they'll keep being ranked.
I have stopped using Google where possible. DDG and Bing.
Interestingly, Google used to offer own extension "Personal Blocklist" to hide undesirable sites from displaying in search result. But it was removed, I guess not to mess with Google's manipulations with search results. Now the link to the extention in the Google's blog post about it leads to 404. [1]
1. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension...
For about the past month I feel like I have had a ton of searches that returned irrelevant results. I use to be able to have a typo and other wrong things and it always did a good job until recently.
Its because AI like GPT-3 which can't fool a human, is extremely good at fooling a search engine and now we've effectively lost good search results to spam.
Try Kagi.com while its in free beta, and see if you like it.
I wonder how much this has to do with do not track and the search engines optimising towards people who don’t enable do not track / limit cookies.
I noticed this as well, and in addition I got two obvious malware sites for two unrelated searches (one programming, one entertainment). So I switched (back) to DDG. That was about a month ago. DDG isn't as good as the Google I remember, but it's better the Google that shows me obvious spam sites, so it's holding on in my book.
Go to kagi.com and ask for an invite. I think they have a serious chance to beat Google. Results are really good.
It's not just pinterest/quora. Bloomberg News is also often up there, and a few others.
Absolutely agreed + I have got redirecting links as top results and non relevancy results
I was terribly frustrated by the google results for "covid test to fly domestic". The "hoisted" response was:
"Get tested at least 5 days after your last close contact and make sure your test result is negative and you remain without symptoms before traveling. If you don't get tested, delay travel until a full 10 days after your last close contact with a person with COVID-19."
Domestic Travel During COVID-19 | CDC
https://www.cdc.gov › coronavirus › 2019-ncov › travelers
You need to look closely at this first hit to realize it dates from 2019 - and is therefore
completely useless. Clicking through takes you to a 2022 page with somewhat more complete information, but when I first saw that - two hours before I had to leave for an emergency flight, I was in a horrible panic.
I'm p sure my ad-blocker removes these results all.
I dont use google that often but never ever without ad-blocker. Whats the point of a page full or ads when I hardly ever search for anything I want to buy.
I feel like those discussions occur every few months on HN and here I am not noticing any degradation in search result quality. It would really help if you would at least provide some query examples.
I would like to see a search engine like Google, except without paywalled content, without PDFs, without whitepages.com type results in name searches, and without store product pages for items that are out of stock. A lot of that is repackaged public content, so the fact that they're duplicative should be a very strong negative signal. Relegate those pages to a DMOZ/Yahoo model.
I think that would take care of 90% of my frustrations. PDFs are the only questionable item there, I think, but invariably they should be on a research search site or converted to text...or even penalizing the sites that only supply PDF menus for restaurants and PDF manuals for plain consumer items.
Weird, I never see quora or pinterest in my results anymore. I don't think I'm doing anything special to make this happen.
Also talking about SEO it is all so gamified.
how can I just write something relevant and not do all the “tricks” and still reach to audience
Legally, Google cannot demote sites for having registration gates, otherwise they would be sued.
What’s up with Google?
It’s the best search engine that’s available today, in my opinion.
You forgot medium which wants you to sign up to read the article.
The google scraping bot gets past the pay walls in many cases
Blame the site operators. They probably have specifically allowed the search engine web crawlers to index their sites, while paywalling everybody else.
One possible solution would be for you to use the same user-agent string that the search engines are using, thus you will see the same content.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
Soon someone will train an AI that takes google search results and filters out the sites that repost content with ads. And the sites that are paywalled.
I can pay for a search engine service if it blocks paywalls, bloated sites, fake bullshit clickbait contents. It’s time consuming to find what you’re looking for with Google. Unfortuanetely, there is no alternative.
What’s up with all the “What’s up with Google?” Ask HNs?
Yeah, I know this violates the policies, but sheesh…
stop being so entitled and be happy with what you get, or build it yourself. I am not sure what makes you think you can dictate how a company should operate.
For those who aren't aware: Google is a lesser-known competitor of the recommended search engine DuckDuckGo.
You can Duck for 'google' to find out more about it.