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Comment by mda | Hacker News Reader

Half your searches? Isn't it a bit dramatic? You can always check your search history, but I seriously doubt 50% of your searches Google can not find anything - assuming data is somewhere accessible-. Tell us a few of the obscure things that you know exist openly and google could not find for you.

I see these claims all the time, but usually with zero examples.

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It's a very rough estimate. I'm not going to check every search in my history. But it feels like the chances I'll find what I need are comparable to the chances I won't.

One example: this weekend I was looking for lyrics from the British folk band Why?. I know they exist; my brother has a bunch of their albums. I have quoted lyrics at Google, I've searched for it on Youtube, I've searched for the band name combined with song titles or names of band members, and I found tons other bands and other random crap, but not the band I was looking for. Eventually I searched for a very specific phrase that was also the title of one of their live albums: "Jig at a Why? Gig", and that finally turned up results.

It's an obscure band, and their name being a common word certainly doesn't help, but certainly combined with song titles, lyrics and band members, it should be pretty clear what I'm looking for? But with Google giving strong preference to the most popular results, Google becomes primarily good at finding things you don't need a search engine for to find them. I want a search engine that's good at finding things that are lost, rather than in plain sight.

Lyrics are notoriously hard to find on Google. I assume it's in part due to copyright issues, but it's also not how Google works. Searches are based on key words, not exact matches of several words in order.

There was once I time where I could type maybe 5 random words from a song and get it as the top hit.

Now there are times where I can’t remember the song title, but I can type a few lines of lyrics verbatim plus include the musician’s name and get only random, unrelated links.

I think this particular query has a problem with the with the unfortunate name "why" which is probably causing the confusion. I don't think search engines did a better job before, nor this has anything to do with Seo. Change the "Why" with another obscure band with a distinct name, you would get results, could Gogle do better, sure, is it worse than before, I reaaly don't think so.

This is how most complaints about "Google these days" play out.

Once pressed to give actual examples, we realize it wasn't a trivial search anyways and certainly not something better Google did long ago on a technical basis. And Bing certainly isn't doing much better.

Of course, there are some things that Google does filter out these days like things that seem like pirated content.

Somewhat unrelated to your point but the phrase "Google these days" made me think the following: Could Google freeze its index and capabilities every one or two years and make it available as a sort of "search the web like it was in 2008" archive? That might also solve the problem of how to prioritize search results over time. The people in 2015 are likely to have been interested in different things than the people of 2040, especially for some search terms (vine for example). I mean they already do this by having different search engines for different countries/languages.

    - Error messages
    - Error codes
    - IC part numbers

Those are the top 3 things that routinely yield absolutely no useful results for me. The first two seem to produce pages upon pages of spammy SEO sites (with titles like "fix errors now") which don't even contain the relevant error message or code, and the latter alternates between no results or, once again, pages of SEO spam.

When I was still in an office with coworkers a while back, we had developed the habit of yelling "fuck you Google!" and showing a middle finger at the monitor whenever a search yielded absolutely WTF or useless results, which was a cue to everyone else around to jump in and help. A stronger tirade of profanity was reserved for when someone managed to trip the bot-detector CAPTCHA hellban. At first only the former happened once or twice a week, but shortly before working from home, we were getting Google-screwed multiple times a day, and tripping the hellban so often that most of us switched to a combination of Bing and Yahoo; while still not ideal, and the results weren't much better, at least we weren't routinely getting banned from them for trying harder to find what we were looking for.

Agreed, I almost always find what I am looking for on my first search. It might be a few search results down the page, but usually what I'm looking for is found on the first search.

Maybe I've just adapted to typing in words and phrases into Google in a way that brings up the results I'm looking for.

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