Comment by stiray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stiray | Hacker News Reader

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As far as I am concerned google already dropped the ball. For 2 years I am getting useless results immediately when I am not searching for something very generic. I am leaving shadow of a doubt that there might be a reason that I am never logged in and I am cleaning all the tracking cookies. I have skipped to self-hosted searx instance and I get much better results when they are aggregated.

I believe that the whole problem comes from their AI. Since most of people on planet are searching for things that are highly non-technical, the AI is learned to give them priority over the technical documentation etc. which almost nobody uses. I am also experiencing that the sites that I know are there, are not returned at all (or somewhere on 100th page).

I would really love to see the google search as it was 20 years back. At that time it was far more useful, quite frankly I didn't see any improvement in precision of search results from those times, it only went to the worse.

As a counterpoint, I feel like Google's results are far better than they used to be. What's more, I find Google ridiculously good for technical queries compared to the competition, and I'm often surprised at how Google will know the intent behind my search even if my query is vague. For example "cat pipe" gives me a bunch of answers related to the shell (as well as some pictures of cats dressed like Sherlock Holmes). They still aren't perfect, but most of the time the result I want is in the first page of the first query.

Twenty years ago, I had an actual advantage over others due to knowing how to write a good query and find the appropriate result (Google-fu). Nowadays that skill is largely obsolete.

This site cloning has always been an issue. Before the current iteration of SO/GH SEO clone farms, you had sites doing the same thing with expertsexchange and cloned forum pages. I do find it odd that Google won't just block the big ones, but perhaps they internally don't like doing one off hacks and prefer to find a cleaner algorithmic solution?

The counterpoint is that it's now actually useless to craft a query that tries to match exact terms, because there's this extra layer on top of it.

So you might be lucky if the inferred intent of the engine was correct, but good luck steering it away. It doesn't help pretty much all query logic operators are merely hints nowadays, more often ignored than not.

I very much preferred a dumber engine for this reason, since it was way easier to search precisely and avoid SEO, even as the SEO game changed.

I'm also using a local searx instance now. I'm not terribly happy about it as bing/ddg also have very similar issues, so searching for exact terms still doesn't work the way it should. But it's much easier to blackhole SEO silos, pre-filter queries NOT matching my exact queries, as well as yielding more obscure content.

+1

I want pure keywords-based search engine back [1]. If the keywords verbatim are not there, give me zero results back. It will be less time consuming to refine my query, or conclude that the stuff I am looking for is just not there. It's much better than sifting through low-precision results.

Google has 'verbatim' mode as such, which used to work well. I can't figure what they are doing to it, and why.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24609881

For me (both logged in and not), for many short & simple tech queries Google fares better than competition (for example, googling some package name or API method shows GitHub repo or official docs as first link, while in DDG it's often not the case).

On the other hand, for slightly more complex queries, in last months there's been an enormous flood of low quality GitHub / StackOverflow / blog post copy-pasta spam pages.

And overall Google quality is really getting worse for discoverability of internet gems or interesting pages with good writing; unless you use specific unique keywords (site's unique name etc.) and/or heavily use double-quotes, it will find SEO-optimized pages with low quality.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel that there's almost a counter-Google-fu these days. Finding something that isn't on the front page, or even just trying to use an older search style often leads to Google showing the weirdest results.

I use Searx or DuckDuckGo for these searches. While their results are often worse at the top, they provide a wealth of understanding and documentation that Google seems to just.. skip? To me, finding things is more difficult when there are two opposing sides trying to outsmart one another.

I have just tried. For `cat pipe` I get zero results related to `cat |`. On first 5 pages only cats, I didnt try to go beyond.

I dare you, remove all google cookies, logout (like - dont use chrome*) and try again. I think you will get to the same results as I did.

And regarding google spying on me - I will rather not use it at all. Even without the searx, there are viable alternatives like qwant.com.

As I have said, I believe the results are based on your queries from past (AI based) and if you are not using the google spyware ecosystem, the results are horrible.

Remember, the e commerce industry is $500bn a year in the US, and a huge proportion of those purchases started ultimately at Google searches. That isn't even including other online revenue like banner ads which aren't aiming to have you buy something, or online purchasing decisions that aren't e commerce (like when you choose a restaurant or real life activity based on Google and the websites it sends you to).

That $500bn is what makes the bad parts of the internet so resourceful. It funds all the blogspam and content mills and malware when you look for recipes, cleaning/DIY/repair content, advice on purchasing products, lyrics and guitar tabs, tourist advice, investment advice, health advice, error messages. It funds the scam "local" locksmiths and repairmen in Google Maps search too. By comparison, Google's revenue is $170bn and that's global. So could anybody "fix search" on Google's budget?

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