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Comment by omega3 | Hacker News Reader

> And it's mainly not even their fault.

It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users. Two examples just from top of my head: ignoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do. Another was ignoring completely the exact phrase search with double brackets.

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Ignoring double brackets drives me crazy. That's the last straw that sent me to DDG, although I have to say that DDG isn't much better either.

What made me really angry aboyt Google Search was when they removed their function to search in discussion forums. But even then you could more or less filter out crap.

Nowadays it feels very hard. I find myself using the site: flag many times, but you need to know the site beforehand, which is another problem.

Yeah, I also try DDG first then and only if not okay I go !g. Now I wonder, why did GOO break such a useful thing? They could have shown advertisements also in their "classic" search (let's call it like that) so I'm really at loss - what was in it for them to change??? Germans have a word for that "verschlimmbessern" (or even two words - kaputtreparieren) which means breaking something by trying to make it better.

I guess it has something to do with Google Internal dynamics. But I'm not the one being paid big bucks to think about such stuff. Maybe they've done their due diligence and made their tradeoffs, but I'm clearly not the target of the search engine anymore.

I'm only a dumb nobody, so if this is a problem for me, I wonder how it is for all the smart people that hangs out here at HN.

It just feels very uphill to use Google right now. No matter how many flags or tricks.

> Now I wonder, why did GOO break such a useful thing?

As far as I understand it, they want to catch synonyms and different tenses for the words.

But they do a remarkably shit job. nginx and apache2 aren't synonyms, but completely different tools for the same job. Yet apache2 instructions appeared as a match when I've used "nginx" in my query (the word apache2 was in bold in result snippet).

The median Google search user probably never learned to use any of these "advanced" features in the first place. For them, having Google ignore the precise wording of their query and show results for more common related terms is almost certainly an improvement.

I think there is a market here. "Dumb" search engines, that search exactly the words you type, maybe with advanced features like regex, metadata search, etc... It won't replace Google's guesswork, but sometimes, I just want to grep the internet.

All non-Google engines are all about privacy, which is nice, and almost a requirement if you want to compete with Google, but I'd like to see features that actually improve search too. DDG gets a honorable mention with its bangs and applets.

I think so too. It'd really be nice to get a search capability that doesn't take my past searching into account. I want an unbiased search, and give me good tools to filter.

I'd like to go a step further and hope for "dumb" search engines that are tailored towards indexing specific subsets of the internet as a whole. As an example, imagine a search engine that is specifically tailored towards programming questions. Or one that specifically omits some of the more annoying SEO optimized results, like Livestrong and USA Today.

My current product started off as precisely that kind of search engine.

User adoption is a huge problem - almost no users made it their default search engine because even programmers need to do non-programming searches and it's too easy to go into your browser, hit ALT+d, bang out your search query, and hit enter.

And because google and ddg do a good job on most programming related searches, they get to be the default search engines.

> DDG gets a honorable mention with its bangs and applets.

Yeah but it ignores most other operands. It's fairly frustrating to be unable to mandate a search term.

«I just want to grep the internet” +1

I also feel like some product manager decided that having a blank results page is horrible. So even if I put terms in quotes, and there are no results with those quoted terms, Google decides to show me results that have virtually nothing to do with what I want to see.

Except a blank page is exactly what I want to see if there are no results or if I mistyped my query. These shoehorned-in results throw me off every time because it takes extra mental effort to reinterpret them as "oh, google has no results for what I typed in past this point, so they're showing me random crap". I miss the old days when search was as precise as a scalpel.

Maybe I'm naive about the complexity of the problem (every article I read about the difficulty of what Google's doing certainly suggests so), but I honestly believe that we've reached the point where a talented and well-founded startup could outplay Google at their own game.

>"blank page is exactly what I want to see"

I literally couldn't agree more. I can't stand how bad searching has become.

While we're at it, you know what else I really hate? How google switches the order of the buttons for Images, News, Shopping, Video, etc. on EACH QUERY. Who in the world ever thought this was a good idea?

I've always assumed that this is a bug in their A/B tests, because I cannot even imagine how utterly degenerate their product design process must have become to come up with this on purpose.

Exactly, it's very easy to see how Google doesn't leave the user unspammed. YouTube's search works the same way, and even if there are useful results on top, they quickly trail off into clickbait garbage. Plus the unrelated lists of ‘people also watch’, injected every few items. The search filters are barely enough to dial in when you want to skip obvious trash, but give up on anything slightly complicated. On Play Store, it's worse: you just get troves of what Google thinks you should be getting, with no control on your side—because if people could skip apps with payment inside, they would, and who in Google wants that.

I feel like YouTube's goal is to always get you to watch something else. Scroll down in search results? See unrelated videos. As soon as the video starts? See a 'Recommended' badge. Pause the video? See an overlay with other videos. Leave the video running? Autoplay fixates on something else.

> It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users.

I think this is an overly harsh take. I strongly suspect that any algorithm for ranking search results is open to gaming and manipulation by malicious users.

Google changed SEO from a seedy practice to something they actively encourage, promote and support.

Google stopped shitcanning sites that that present different things to Googlebot and regular users, including sites that require a login for normal users but show content to Googlebot.

Google imposed arbitrary ranking criteria that favor long-wided blogspam over concise articles that immediately tell you what you want to know.

Yes, this is their making.

> gnoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do

Also the opposite: insisting on pushing local and localized results on google.com even when I set my browser language to english.

They used to have google.com/ncr

'ncr' stands for no-country-recognition and it did what it said on the tin.

Of course like all useful power-user features it got deprecated for the natural language query non-sense we have today.

Nowadays you need to VPN to the target country. For a reason to complicated to explain here I searched local businesses in the city of Melun, France. There were no reasonable hits. Well, my IP was Finnish (to my best knowledge they have no other means of localizing me) and "melu" means noise in Finnish with "melun" being a common form. No addition of French shopping terms could convince Google that I am not interested in noise abatement. Accepted language header did not help. After switching to a French IP it worked like a charm. And one would guess searching for shopping and businesses would be Google's strength.

How do any of those make people talk inside closed Discord groups instead of the open web?

I'm sure public human SEO manipulation is at least partly to blame. The only thing that is surprising is that it isn't worse than it is. At least the first half page is usually close to what you want.

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