Google Search results are below the fold

[dang]

Please don't put "Show HN" on posts like this—that's not what "Show HN" means. You can read about what it means at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.

Literally every submission shows something to HN, so if we have it on a post like this, it might as well be on every post, which means it might as well not exist.

I've taken "Show HN" out of the above title now.

[user3939382]

I remember when the search engine space was full of cool competitors. AltaVista, Yahoo, GoTo, Dogpile, Northern Light, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Excite, WebCrawler.

Now we have Google whose value comes with their incessant privacy abuse, and Bing/Bing front ends (DDG). Cool and exciting are definitely no longer the emotions I associate with web search.

[aeyes]

People might be slightly annoyed but I have to say that Yandex Search is pretty good, even for international users.

Try it: https://yandex.ru/search/?text=409a&lang=en

[j-james]

The search engine space is full of cool competitors today. Google, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Neeva, Brave, Startpage, Alexandria, Right DAO, Wiby, Marginalia, Teclis.

Certainly, a few of those are Bing/Google frontends, but many more are independent or weighted mixes of commercial and noncommercial indexes. I really like Kagi, Wiby, Marginalia (Search), and Teclis to name a few.

I found most of these through this post: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

[thatmiddleway]

Kagi is really shaping up to be a great search experience. The fact that it’s going to be a paid service is a killer feature. No ads is incredibly refreshing.

[barbacoa]

I've been trying brave as of recent. It feels like browsing the internet of the 90s; back when you search engines returned small no-name websites and blogs. Google gives me the same list of 50 or so "preferred" websites full of click bait run by media companies no matter what I search.

[alimov]

Somewhat related, but I remember Ask Jeeves as being my first exposure to search engines. I had just gotten internet on my home computer and one of my parents friends came over and excitedly told me about “this website that will give you the answer to anything you ask”. I didn’t even know what to search for (I think I ended up searching “tallest woman in the world”), the idea of being able to quickly look something up and quickly get references was pretty foreign to me and now it’s hard to imagine life without the ability to do so.

Edit: whenever I see the Jenkins logo, I always think of the Ask Jeeves logo from back then

[richardsocher]

I agree. That's why I started https://you.com/

[valleyjo]

There is a description of a 409a above the fold. So I don’t think it’s totally fair to say the results are all below.

[SamBam]

Agree, that's an answer box, not part of the ad. It happens to come from the same domain as the ad (and that may not be coincidental) but they don't always.

[ehsankia]

It also depends on many factors like your screen resolution. Most site I go to on my small laptop, 80% of the screen is covered with ads.

[version_five]

Try kagi.com (I have nothing to do with the company)

They are similar in feel to google, I think their results come from google as well as others (I say this having tried bing and ddg but going back to google because the results they returned were worse or at least not compatible with how I've learned to use google). They don't have any ads.

[browningstreet]

Is that the one that requires a browser extension to participate in the beta? That's why I don't use them.

[ageitgey]

Here's the same query on Google in 2009 vs now: https://twitter.com/ageitgey/status/1483410675548495874

[axg11]

I’m not sure this is proving the point you want to make. Arguably the 2022 results are more relevant. If you ignore whether the results are ads or not, the top results in 2022 are all toothpaste brands and lead you to toothpaste websites.

The way we search has also changed. In 2022, if you’re searching “toothpast”, you’re much more likely to be looking to make an online purchase of toothpaste than in 2009.

[bpicolo]

“Low prices on toothpast”

Ads with text interpolation are hilarious

[wodenokoto]

I’m defense of current google results, hardly any of those 2009 results was about toothpaste.

[ssss11]

Oh wow that is ALL ads!

[odonnellryan]

I was searching about something to do with fiberglass today. Every article was garbage that seemed like bot spam. Was nuts. Direct quotes stolen from forums etc..

[davemp]

I’ve been searching for a lot of info on a game recently (Eldenring). There’s actually a good wiki with well organized entries, but the results on bing/google are all stolen blog spam. I have to manually specify the wiki in the search to find anything reasonable.

[Cacti]

It’s become noticeably horrible lately. Half my search results these days are bot sites, just entire sites of copied material or material generated by neural nets that is completely worthless.

I don’t know what’s going on at Google but the search engine quality has dropped off a cliff in the past 6 months.

[ashtonkem]

Searches for tools and sporting items have become completely useless now. Even when Google does return an actual result, it’s mostly SEO spam.

[chrismorgan]

Meta: this isn’t a Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

[corentin88]

Right. If someone could change the title to "Tell HN:"

[haileys]

I find most of the web utterly unusable without uBlock Origin installed.

[hansel_der]

i think this goes for most literate ppl.

[lupire]

uBlock Origin doesn't block spam sites from search engines, tho

[phil917]

The most frustrating thing about Google for me these days is searching for recipes. Every web page that should have an extremely straightforward, straight to the point list of ingredients and instructions now has to use every fucking SEO trick in the book. Because otherwise, the page won't be considered "high quality" enough by Google and won't rank anywhere close to page 1.

This of course leads to a huge page with someone's life story interspersed with the actual cooking ingredients/instructions. It's so common to see some something like: "My mother used to make me this dish for me when I was a child and it's my favorite thing to cook in the winter time now, blah blah blah."

No one fucking cares! Give me the recipe in one concise, step by step list!

[jordic]

Google is no longer interested in returning good search results, their priority are ads. (Good results are on ads)

[tyingq]

That's not terribly new. Similar view with everything organic below the fold for most lucrative search terms. Try:

mesh wifi router

hotel in las vegas

flights to tahoe

leather sectional

[aghilmort]

dog food is my fave example, adding 409a to the test list!

& if we're listing out search engines, here's what it 409a search results look like on Breeze, https://breezethat.com/?q=409a

[bastawhiz]

On my phone, I had to scroll down a full screen height to get past the ads. I would not call that a win.

[SamBam]

Huh, but while I want my search results to work as well as the did in 2001, why does the website need to look like it was from then (at least on Firefox on Android)?

[wodenokoto]

Is the answer thing with source link not a search result?

[darinf]

This is why we created Neeva.

[nickreese]

Been using neeva as my daily driver for at least 6 months.

I do use !g somewhat frequently (2-4% of quieres I’d guess) but the results are definitely good enough for most quieres.

[unmole]

This is a Tell HN, not a Show HN.