Hacker News Reader

Comment by soco | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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).

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com