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Comment by akasakahakada | Hacker News Reader

This is not even new. Ever since Google ditched the old algorithm and turned to semantic algorithm, search result is completely useless.

For examlle search for USB, Google will give me result of USA and then ask me back if I need infomation about USB.

And it's frequently ditching keywords from the prompt.

Sometimes I want to look for specific comments on some product for instance, I try different vocabularies that people might using exactly in the comment. But then all of these returns the same set of results repeated for 20 pages.

What is the point of Google search engine? Kind of trash to the point that it is now phenomenal.

Last thing is I noticed that image search is not even working recently. The average result is like 100 photos and done. Instead of infinite images in the old days.

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This would be fine if they did a good job of semantic search. But they aren't particularly good at that. It's jumping to conclusions, ignoring parts of the query, etc. I find it infuriating when it just ignores part of the query so it can show you some stuff. If I type 3 words, there's a reason for it: they are all important to me.

It's gotten very frustrating to use because it tends to drown out good results with generic results from sites doing SEO optimization. There are some tricks around this. E.g. prefix any query related to AWS apis with stackoverflow or include some package names, use some quotes, etc. If you don't do that, you just get a 100 "this is why we believe AWS is so awesome" marketing to filter through. There are ways to mitigate that but they are quite tedious.

Bing on the other hand has rolled out gpt 4 based search. I've been using it and it's been pretty amazingly good taking over when Google fails me. Which it does frequently.

I particularly like it that I can ask follow up questions. It mixes answering questions and backs up the answers with links. I've been relying on it quite a bit since I got access a week ago. Very annoying that they make you use Edge for that but worth the detour from Firefox when Google is obviously not up to the job. Google is rightly worried about this.

But I guess BingGPT only look at the first 3 results and ignore the remainings. Speaking from my experience. It is kind of returning the same 3~4 results when I ask if there exist some paper about ML in the chemistry.

I remember when we had explicit syntax for what MUST and MUST NOT be in the search results.

Now the + and - tokens are just a mild suggestion. Wrapping a word or two in quotes sometimes helps, but more often than not just returns no results.

It's funny, in middle school we had a whole unit on constructing search engine queries. It was really quite powerful back then. But I guess it's less profitable for you to actually find what you want without spending 20 minutes sifting through ads

It becomes particularly bad if you're looking for anything money can buy.

Lightest laptop? Here's are 10 lists of laptops that exist in 2023, with zero effort put into distinguishing them. As if SEO spam wasn't bad enough on its own, Google started ignoring your query to serve more of it.

Then there are specific queries that are reinterpreted as generic ones. You get 5 results or so, then it starts dropping keywords on a 2-3 keyword query.

It's infuriating.

It's not even the change of algorithms. The results are filled with ads and promoted content, SEO spam, related search terms, images, news, and other nonsense. Long gone are the days when the SERP was a plain text list of the most relevant and useful results. Nowadays the page is designed to keep you as long as possible on google.com, or click through an ad.

Google Search today is only usable through frontends like SearX, and even then the results are no better than any competitor's.

When a site I click on immediately puts up a banner/etc. I back out instantly and try the next result.

Privacy concerns aside, ha ha, I wish a search site could rank results based on how long the user spends on the site. Most of the crap-sites that seem to get on the front page would disappear instantly from the rankings.

Using that metric has its own downsides though, depending on the content.

If I am searching for some particular piece of information, the best site is the one that has that up front, which means I get in and leave pretty fast.

Assuming that a user spending more time on a site is a good thing leads to large amounts of fluff (like with recipes...). But then again, there are some sites where that metric would be helpful.

The repeated results puzzle me, and it happens every single time. Show more results —> literally same results for pages! What’s the explanation for that?

I guess,

prompt: Hey ChatGPT! Here is a list of websites. Make a subset of it that looks like they are on the 4th page in the search result!

Double quotes are your friend. Not excusing how irrelevant the results have become, but when you anticipate this behavior, use the exact phrase method.

What I can tell is quoting and verbatim is clearly broken. The accuracy is not up to what it was 5 years ago. For example searching for the exact sentence in a news article, you won't find the article.

Double quotes hasn't worked in a long time. It used to be the case that if you search "foo" "bar" it would only return documents that had the words "foo" and "bar".

I will frequently search for z foo bar z, get documents that have synonyms of foo and bar (and the synonyms will be highlighted in the snippet), then I will search "foo" "bar" and get the same documents except now it doesn't highlight the synonyms in the snippet. Maybe I am in some awful cohort where this feature is intentionally broken to see if it reduces engagement.

Make sure your quotes are plain quotes and not smart quotes.

They used to have a bug with those

>Double quotes hasn't worked in a long time

Same here, but seems to be 30/70. 30% of the time it works.

A while ago I was looking at an odd NetBSD issue and searched using "NetBSD". I got a few results on top, but most of the results on the first page were OpenBSD without any mention of NetBSD.

-"OpenBSD" as a negative quoted keyword in these cases.

Once you get your query dialed in, prepare to take the Turing test.

They would be, except it ignores them sometimes.

If I search for USB google gives me search results for USB. I think you have a problem.

Searched for USB, not a single USA on the first page of results

It's a mataphor.

It's an "example".

A very bad example.

So false?

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