Adding "before:2023" improves Google web searches | Hacker News Reader

Adding "before:2023" improves Google web searches

mastodon.social

46 pointsajdude14 comments

SEOs have been putting fake dates on articles to make them seem more recent. So this weeds them out at least.

I like Kagi's downranking sites with ads. Really removes the incentive for sites to spam you. Too bad I haven't found Kagi as a search engine sticky, it seems about as good as DDG on average.

This has not been my experience with Kagi. I used DDG full time for years, but, got increasingly disappointed with the results. Paid for Kagi and, omg, I couldn't be happier. It's fast, it just works, it returns more useful results than either Google or DDG.

Interesting. I failed Kagi - it's just SO easy to stick to what I'm used to. The mere act of trying it forced me to step back and evaluate my whole Search mindset, ultimately deciding "eh, Google is good enough."

While pricing is one barrier, I feel inertia is the prime destroyer of an innovation in a space like Search. While it can super successful among a niche user base, I'm not sure how it can gain widespread adoption.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39524669

I saw this on Tumblr a few days ago, and can happily report that it does seem to work. The test case was searching for images of "serval" (a kind of wild cat), and the addition did indeed clean up the results. Somebody else had suggested adding "-AI" instead, but AFAICT it did nothing. Kind of sad that Google can't/won't address this themselves in any way that seems to make a dent.

Bad actors would probably try to circumvent any "-AI" tag. Goes back into that other front-page story of Google finally deigning to do something about AI-generated spam clogging up search results.

What are you searching for that might not want to include over a year of posts? I mean not all spaces are 'polluted' by AI. I'm looking for info on a person. Current events story. Youtube videos. All want to include 2023.

Anyone savvy enough to be using switches like this should be able to discern which sources are reliable in the results etc?

It's a minority of my searches, but I sometimes find myself doing this exactly because I am looking at something related to a current events story. Something pops up in the news and I want to read background about it, understand it in context, see what people were saying about it before whatever controversy arose, whether it was predictable, stuff along those lines. So I google it but because my search term contains [current events thing], no matter how I phrase it google simply fills the results with recent news stories as if I could only possibly be interested in reading what journalists who only discovered that [thing] exists this morning when it [verbed] have to say about it, as if I want nothing more than whatever basic information they dredged up, filtered through them. Useless! Restricting the date does wonders in that circumstance.

> What are you searching for that might not want to include over a year of posts?

Well, for instance, Recently I was looking for the difference between bronze and brass. I'm contemplating using either in an upcoming project and my main worry is looks and rust resistance. Both google and duckduckgo managed to only surface obviously AI generated nonsense giving me no information whatsoever.

Excluding recent posts would fix that issue quite handily. In the end I found the information I needed on marginalia[0] which does similar exclusion of large swathes of the internet.

[0] https://search.marginalia.nu/

I'm sure "before:2015" or "before:2010" will improve them even more if you are only judging based on quality, but I'd wager almost everyone using the site wants up-to-date results, so this kinda defeats the purpose.

Dead internet theory strikes again (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory).

I wasn't aware of this, there have been plenty of times I've been looking for older stuff and found it hopeless because recent events utterly dominated the search.

The same goes for YouTube... it circumvents the stupid new search altogether.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com