Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

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Can we find shit now?

I swear search engines are getting borderline useless. And it's not necessarily their fault, it's just very difficult to find search results these days that aren't lists of affiliate links. And in fairness, this is probably less to do with SEO'ers "gaming" the system and more to do with the fact that all of the content we actually cared about just disappeared behind walled gardens.

I abandoned Google Search a few years ago because I was tired of it trying to guess what I was "really" trying to search for instead of just matching my keywords. But DuckDuckGo seems to be getting worse in this regard lately too. I will get a bunch of results that are about something I don't care about, identify a keyword that I could easily filter out and add the "-<keyword>" modifier to my search string only to see it have no effect what-so-ever. Grrr....

I also can't believe the amount of search results that take you to a walled garden. Instagram for example. You can't lurk without an account and every single time I've tried to create an account it gets automatically suspended after a few days because their system flags it as a "fake account", whatever that means. It used to mean a bot but I can easily prove that I'm a real human being and yet when I've appealed the suspension it has stuck. So it blows my mind that they rank so highly in the search results despite doing everything they can to prevent people without accounts from even being able to create accounts, let alone browse those results.

The Web is dead.

> Can we find shit now?

Absolutely.

Like with anything else, you literally get what you pay for. Free search services like Google and DuckDuckgo indeed suck. I pay for Kagi, and have a wonderful search experience. I seldom have trouble finding anything. Once in a while I use someone else's computer and have to use Google. What a jarring, unpleasant experience.

I find shit all the time. Google still works fine for me.

I don't know what people on Hacker News are doing that they can never seem to find a single useful result on any search engine, ever.

I search for somewhat obscure and highly specific things. There are queries which used to reliably return the results I was looking for. Over the past several years these queries no longer work.

It feels like the search engine used to accept whatever I typed and used that to query. The results had to be a good match for all the words in my query. This made it very easy to find exactly what I was looking for.

Now google feels free to ignore terms from my query or to use synonyms instead of the exact term. The results are now exceptionally broad and no longer are a good match for the specific query I've entered. I now have to use "quotes" "around" "every" "single" "term" or go several pages deep to find the page I want.

Because they remember the past far more fondly than it was and converge the utility they get from the current day with the ideals of back then.

The reality is there is far more creative and well produced content on the web and closed platforms today than there ever was in any other point in time. And if you can't find it fast enough, AI can generate direct, customized answers.

No, it is not us "remembering the past far more fondly". Today Google search results yield the same crap without fail.

For example, a search for "how do I repair widget X" will inevitable take me to a garbage SEO site following the same patterns. The internet is less useful today than it was 10 years ago. Probably it peaked 20 years ago, before big money completely took over and ruined the place.

It did not peak 20 years ago. This is laughable rose tinted glasses.

Also you can ask almost any LLM model for that type of answer and get it instantly and personalized.

...and you will not know if the answer is accurate or where it came from.

This is outdated. You can source with many modern public LLM products now.

Why is hacker news full of so much outdated thinking?

We just don't chug enough kool-aid.

I can honestly say the Internet doesn't provide any additional utility compared to what I used it for 20 years ago: email, messageboards, P2P filesharing, Wikipedia, search and online shopping.

Sure we have Youtube and streaming now. But streaming today is just cable TV by another name. You could subscribe to them all and still not have the selection that a Blockbuster or torrent tracker would.

It is objectively worse than it used to be because it tries to be too "smart" by rewriting queries in a way that genericizes them. Instead of getting 10 search results that are actually relevant to the question being asked, you get "10,000,000" results that are only vaguely related. I suspect the reason for this is that more search results -> more pages the user will likely click through just to make sure they are looking at the best links -> more ads served.

Related to this is the dumbing down of query input. Like, in many cases, even using double quotes around search terms doesn't guarantee that the page that will be shown in search results actually contains the quoted word anywhere. I've had one case where Google would helpfully find articles talking only about Linux given a query like '"freebsd" foo bar' (and where it showed the snippets for them, highlighting the phrase it treated as a match, it would say 'linux foo bar', so you could tell right away what exactly was substituted).

It used to be a power tool that had well-defined knobs and buttons that you could master to find exactly what you want. Now it's a magic wand that tends to do something inscrutable every time you wave it, and you "master" it by flailing around until it kinda sorta does what you want.

Google says it finds millions of hits but only lets you scroll though a few hundred. The rest they don't want to show you.

> I don't know what people on Hacker News are doing that they can never seem to find a single useful result on any search engine, ever.

And they never give specific examples either.

Yeah this one perplexes me too. I won't deny that there's a ton of blogspam on Google (or any other search engine), but Google is still the best search out there imo. I certainly don't understand people who say they find ChatGPT to be superior. Like, what? They don't even fill the same role!

I have been using DDG for the last 5 years and used google the other day after a fresh install, and i find the results are just worse (IMHO). Now, you also learn to write searches in specific ways depending on the search engine. DDG reminds me more of old school search engines (or at least it used to). Again, this is just my experience, there might also be something with google adapting to your search habits if you allow it, but not sure if that exists in google search like it does in YT.

Searching e.g. "xq31 curlyarrayconstructor does not use enclosedexpr":

1. In google, I get 9 results, none of which are a reference to the W3C XQuery/XPath issue. This is because google is actually "helpfully" searching for "xq31 curly array constructor does not use enclosed expr" -- telling it to not do that finds the issue, returning two results.

2. In bing, the bug report (bug 29989) is the top result.

3. In DuckDuckGo, it is also the top result.

I've had other problems searching google for specific error messages as it decides to remove quoting, tends to show results for space-separated compound identifiers (see the "curly array constructor" in what google searches for by default), does word stemming, and other "helpful" transformations on the search.

"I had to do an extra click on a clearly labeled link" does not equate "search engines are borderline useless"

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