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Comment by okdood64 | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure you could find doom & gloom talk about Google on HN 5 years ago.

That’s because it’s been progressively getting worse for years. For example, when they launched Google+ they stopped supporting the + operator in favour of “quotes” and people complained about that. Of course now the “quotes” don’t work either.

Google used to be amazing. If you remembered a set of words that were on a page, you could enter those words and it would find matching pages. It’s been broken for years and keeps getting more broken.

Broken?

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22may+have+been+less+attrac...

I just took a random snippet from Gergely's blog and using quotes I found it.

Look there's many issues with Google Search in 2023, but these nitpicks that aren't neccesarily true aren't productive to the conversation.

Yes it's broken, try searching 'python abs "Return the absolute value of a number"'. That string is directly lifted from the Python docs for the `abs` function. The official Python documentation does not appear for me until the 3rd page and the "featured snippet" is from some random website called flexiple.com

It’s not broken. I use the exact match operator “” all the time and it works pretty much every time. Selecting verbatim works even better.

https://i.ibb.co/D8VfKxc/75-FC1-FC6-DFD7-4-E2-A-A717-DBD8463...

I didn’t search “python docs” I searched “python abs”

Well that’s the problem then. You could say your problem has more to do with the relevancy of the results than the exact match operator (I personally don’t mind in this case since for the few times I’ve had to write python I’ve found the official docs not as useful as I’d expect).

As I said, I use that operator all the time and it works. I’d be the first to complain when it doesn’t. For instance, the - operator stopped working in YouTube a while ago, unfortunately.

It reminds me of when people would talk doom for IE based upon some tiny uptick in Firefox users and the relatively stagnation of IE as a browser.

They were obviously wrong.

Then Chrome happened. If Google doesn't change some fundamental things, they'll be the next one to fall for similar reasons.

I'd be less concerned for them if I didn't see signs of decline with Android as well. It is a key component for them to control.

Firefox did most of the early damage to IE all it's own. Taking IE down from an insane 90+% marketshare position and steadily eating up 30% marketshare by the time Chrome even really showed up. And it didn't even have to stealth install itself with every adobe flash update to do it.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...

In 2004 IE had 94% share of the browser market.

There were "tiny upticks" but, going slowly and steadily, in August 2008 Firefox had gained about 30-33% and IE was down to about 60%. And then (September 2008) Chrome happened.

In hindsight Chrome was worse for the internet than IE ever was.

A spyware and ads company fooling devs and users alike.

Well a lot of those devs seem to like the spying as long as they themselves have access to (some of) the data.

That reminds me of that quote about bankruptcy from The Sun Also Rises:

> “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

> “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

It felt like that’s how IE lost its dominance.

Only 7 years ago, the world was astonished with the release of AlphaGo. This was an algorithm dedicated to one very specific task of winning a game.

The most recent game being played is language, a game that Google has played alone, until now.

Doom & gloom talk about Google 5 years ago was probably unjustified and rightfully dismissed. Today, I'm not so sure about that.

it's been declining for longer than 5 years, especially since they've removed discussion result filtering

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