Ask HN: Is Google Search borked for you too? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Google Search borked for you too?

4 pointsdingosity8 comments

So... I just did a google search for "evince DMZ-Black" (I'm finally getting around to trying to convince evince on gnome to pick up gnome theme settings for window decorations). But the responses I'm getting back are:

* a list of four YouTube videos about video games

* the same four videos in a different order

* a horizontal list of what look like screenshot images from the four video game images

And at the bottom of the page, two hits that look like they may have something to do with GTK<N> themes on leenucks.

Is it supposed to do this?

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Ten minutes later I did the same search and one of the two relevant links from the bottom of the page moved up the page a bit.

Is there a way to tell google I'm not interested in searching YouTube videos about video games (or really any Video or Image searches at all?)

Guess it's back to Gopher and Veronica for me...

(more seriously... Bing isn't the best thing I've ever used, but damn if Google is just getting BAD. I used to be able to search for compiler errors and get relevant hits, now I get videos about juicing when I search for rust compiler warnings and errors. I wasn't ever in the "I have to use DuckDuckGo to protect my privacy" camp, but their results are MUCH better than Google's, so... I guess it's DDG and Bing for me.)

It really is bad now. Usually I get a half page of videos, then a bunch of “people also asked about” restating my original question. Oh, and ads. So many ads.

To be fair, the search query in your example is nonspecific, doesn't mention Linux, and assumes the answer will contain a string with your GTK theme's name in it. Any reasonable indexer probably won't put those pieces together, much less present them over a 20 minute Call of Duty tips-and-tricks video.

Google-foo has always been a bit of a trick-of-the-trade. The best place to start on all search engines is with a forced match for your topic (eg. <"Linux" evince "gtk theme">), and then using site-specifiers/bangs to specify StackOverflow/Reddit/whatever. I do this on DuckDuckGo, but I also did it back when I used Google. All search engines suck, I think we're just getting old.

Fair point. Results get better with "change gtk theme in evince" -- the top hit is now a link to Arch Linux, but then it's a list of several videos about juicing (I guess my android phone overheard me joking about juicing w/ my brother a couple days ago). And one video about video games and one video about someone installing a new gtk theme on ubuntu, so at least there's a relevant video on the first page.

Oh. Wait. We now have infinite scrolling instead of paging. Ugh. Seriously?

Maybe there's a spate of particularly bad performance as they update the front-end from paging to infinite scrolling. That doesn't seem likely, but who knows?

Bonus points for google. They picked up the fact that I switched to a dark theme in GTK and are giving me light on dark results. It wasn't exactly what I wanted, but is what I told my system to do.

Should probably have mentioned DDG and Bing searches let "evince" modify the "dmz-black" and they seem to give mostly hits about GTK themes, though they both have several images of black guitars and one video hit re: DMZ, which I guess is a video game (don't laugh, I'm old, I don't keep up with FPSes.)

I stand by my assertion that Google is much worse than it once was.

Every time I use Bing, it seems I get everyone selling the search term, or selling something possibly related to the search term, before I get a single useful hit. At least with Google, I get to a useful hit sooner.

It looks like DMZ-Black is a popular video game, so Google is giving you info about the game. Try "evince DMZ-Black -youtube" for better results.

Interestingly, this post is now the top search result when I tried to search "evince DMZ-Black".

Yeah, the results are all becoming lowest common denominator garbage.

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