[tomatofrank]

Last night I watched a YouTube video that had a song in the background that I hadn't heard but really liked. I pulled up Shazam but it didn't recognize the song, so I took to Google. I entered the lyric and added the search terms "lyrics" and "r&b" at the end. Google returned 4 YouTube videos to songs that didn't contain the lyric, a link to a Boyz II Men song on Genius that didn't contain the lyric (good job Google, you know an R&B band), a link to peterbe.com to find a song by lyrics, and a bunch of other useless links. I clicked on to page 2, which hilariously presented 3 of the 4 YouTube videos that were on page 1.

I was immediately turned off, so I pulled up DuckDuckGo and Bing, entered the same exact query, and both engines returned the song I was looking for in the first result. I laughed out loud.

I then thought to myself, "I wonder how many pages I would have had to flip through in Google to find this result." Eventually, I found it. It was the 68th result on page 7.

[heavyset_go]

I'm still bitter that they've deprioritized results from SongMeanings.net in favor of garbage like Genius. The former is one of the only sources for lyrics from smaller acts, especially from the 90's to early 2010's. Since it's from the pre-Web 2.0 era, it's disappeared from Google's search results.

[shiftpgdn]

Same with Sheldon Brown’s website on bicycle maintenance. Much of the information on his site is still the best resource on the internet but instead Google would rather serve irrelevant results that show ads.

[Tenoke]

I get songmeanings from Google sometimes but I personally like Genius due to the annotated and upvote/downvoted comments and it is a more visited site so I get why it's ranked higher.

[lumost]

I don't know anything about google internals, but in many other applications the search engine is optimized on long-term engagement and profit data. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out google optimized page rankings based on the profit google earns from it's ad business on the page.

[gambiting]

Google results have for a while stopped having anything to do with the actual search query. In the past they were magical, like Google could almost read your mind and guess exactly what you mean, but nowadays you can type in the exact search string, and still have the first page of results where Google just ommited half of the string to give you sponsored content. Like even for simple "C# <name of class>" why are the first few results for pages that sell programming courses?????

It's gone to absolute shitter and it's just not worth using outside of a very narrow set of circumstances(when you actually do want to buy something I guess?)

[hda111]

Seems like the SEO people have successfully reverse engineered Google‘s algorithms.

[PragmaticPulp]

I have the opposite experience most of the time. I’ve been trying to use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine but I end up clicking my Google bookmark a lot of the time because the DDG results are so low quality.

I have no doubt there are edge cases where Bing/DDG outperform Google, but most of the time I have better luck with Google.

[tomatofrank]

Yeah, Google is still my default browser, though I haven't used other engines enough to develop a strong opinion here.

I'll add that I could have been more clever with my query. For instance, if I surround the lyric in quotes, Google returns the right result first.

Original query: like you didn't care I don't know why lyrics r&b

Improved query: "like you didn't care I don't know why" lyrics r&b

At the end of the day, I'm not frustrated with Google. I use it every day and it saves me lots of time. It just amuses me that in some cases, other engines that probably use simpler search algorithms are objectively better. And in this case, I think it's fair to expect Google to produce the right result on page 1.

[Semaphor]

I’m now using Kagi (beta paid search engine), but I have used DDG for some years and rarely had to fall back to google. Most of the time it was only to make sure there really is no result, as DDG ignores what you searched for even more aggressively than Google.

[kauguste281]

Same here, one thing I find especially annoying with Bing/DDG/Brave is that they not only return worse results, but sometimes completely nuke certain search terms, e.g. try "aoi jav" (NSFW) in Bing image and video search. It gives zero results. Regular text search gives a few, but also looks heavily censored. Try the same thing in Google and you get millions of results.

Don't fully understand what is going on here. Safe search is disabled. Worse results would be expected, but zero results seems like an excessive amount of censorship. Other similar search terms work fine.

[yeuxardents]

I have found that for technical results, and niche programming, and anything really to do with IT, google gives top results. For just about everything else, use any other search engine.

[a_victor]

have you tried Bing recently? I tried DDG for almost a year and in every other search I had to switch to Google. I started using Bing a couple months ago and now I only try Google as a last resort (and most often than not I end up not finding what I want)

[Tenoke]

For what is worth, DDG's main provider is Bing so it's nor surprising they returned similar results.

[tomatofrank]

Oh that's interesting, TIL.

[rattray]

Source?

[colordrops]

It's getting bad enough where I'll put in a two word search, and one of them is unique and the obvious main keyword, but not necessarily obscure, and somehow the first several results still don't have the word. It's frustrating to the extreme.

[nefitty]

You can recreate this behavior with HN's Algolia search API. The common parameter that behaves how we expect is "query". Using "similarQuery" causes all sorts of weird behavior. I think it drops words until it find results, and considers each token optional.

It kinda gave me insight I to why Google is sucking so bad. Give us the option at least.

[sbierwagen]

The same thing happened to me! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544730

Google results for lyrics used to be filled with hundreds of scummy SEOed sites that stole content from each other. I wonder if some SEO-blocking algo change has had the effect of blocking all song lyrics from google results.

[pps]

I tried for few months, but unfortunately DDG results are really poor for local searches. Whenever I want to find something in Polish, half of the results are from some autotranslated websites. Also Google is the only one that shows local business in a useful way.

[vanderZwan]

Sounds like a pretty easy division of when to use which search engine though, no? Better than the hit-or-miss issue being completely random at least

[dec0dedab0de]

Under Search tools there is a toggle for all results/verbatim. If you switch it to verbatim it will give you something closer to you want. I hate that it is this way, and that most of the old google hacking tricks don't work.

The problem is that Google is no longer a search engine for the world wide web. It is an app that can answer questions, that happens to also have a web front end

[mv4]

but they reported great financial results.

[tyingq]

Now that they are taking every spot above the fold for ads for any lucrative query, it will be much harder to maintain YoY % revenue growth figures that exceed viewership growth. Or bigger video monitors, I guess, that make the 'fold' taller.

[tomatofrank]

fuck yeah they did :P

[FpUser]

I do not hold any love for Google but to be fair when I look up songs by lyrics, or lyrics by the name of the song or the combination it works just fine for me.

But they probably know that I never klick on ads unless specifically searching to buy something

[gundmc]

What was the lyric?

[tomatofrank]

"like you didn't care I don't know why lyrics r&b" was my query