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Comment by stevage | Hacker News Reader

I would really love to read a deep dive on why Google Search quality has declined so much. There's a lot of anecdotes but I haven't read much that sounds particularly authoritative.

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On why, or on whether. I personally find Google Search to be pretty great, and recently switched back from DuckDuckGo which I had been using for ~4 years, because I found I was having to use !g in half my searches. It's also noticeable faster. When I'm looking for an answer, I find Google much more likely to give me the answer. So I'm not convinced that search quality is declining. I'd love to see a deep dive on whether it actually is declining.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on anything to do with search, and used DDG for my first year here out of habit. I have no inside info on search.

What's interesting is that I find Google's search quality today to be on par with the quality that existed before Google showed up and changed everything. Whether it is better than all the other garbage isn't really important to me. I want the good Google back.

It's the Circle of Tech. Earlier search engines such as AltaVista and Excite began to return what they thought you were searching for rather than what you were searching for, and Google was the fast, uncluttered alternative. Now the circle has turned, and today's Google looks an awful lot like yesterday's AltaVista.

This is more the fault of DDG / Bing being awful, than it is Google doing a good job. I’ve found Kagi and Brave at worst are on par with Google without being bloated with ads. And oftentimes they’re simply better.

I think it's unsurprising that a paid search engine (Kagi), or a likely unprofitable and optionally paid search engine (Brave), are better in some ways.

I don't find Google search to be bloated with ads. If I search for hotly competitive keywords then I do see ads, but the same is true where there is ad inventory on other sites, and when there isn't ad inventory that's not the true UX and it's only a matter of time until the ads arrive.

However, the majority of my searches are fact-finding, and I get facts, with no ads, or I don't even see the ads because I've got the answer before I get to them.

This is why I'd like to see a deep dive on this stuff, because the HN opinion is just not one that resonates with me at all at the moment.

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