Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?

[spaceman_2020]

Google used to be my first stop whenever I had to research anything, but of late, I've increasingly found myself appending site:reddit.com or site:stackoverflow.com to get any meaningful results.

Most of my searches lately have either revolved around a couple of medical issues (my wife's slightly complex pregnancy, and my own neck injury) or technical problems.

The medical results are absolutely hopeless. Almost all the top pages are the same article written in five different ways, and each only has the most basic, broad information. You can tell from a glance that the article wasn't written by a subject matter expert. You can also tell that the article is trying its best to "play it safe" and list out only the broadest possible range of results.

It's the same problem with technical searches. Outside of Stackoverflow results (which, thankfully, are at the top of the page), most articles are written for a broad, beginner audience (like a React article starting with a tutorial on installing React). Most content, again, feels like it wasn't written by subject matter experts but article writers copy-pasting solutions from multiple different articles.

I don't know if I'm the only one, but as a long time Google power user, I find using the search increasingly frustrating.

Or is that just me?

[ergonaught]

Google is increasingly useless, but there is a Garbage In Garbage Out aspect given that the vast bulk of what they're indexing today is junk. Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising. There seems to be a growing chunk of automated site propagation as well (90% identical content but with keywords/names/etc tweaked), perhaps for scams, perhaps again for advertising. There may not be great ways to filter this. GPT3/etc will exacerbate horrifically.

[super256]

> Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising

Some trivia: Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote about this in their 1998 paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". [1]

  8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives
  
  Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of
  the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For
  example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of
  Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and
  risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because
  of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on
  the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone
  ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this
  type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising
  funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the
  consumers

They just did not know how destructive this conflict of interests would later be.

P.S. I'm a happy user of https://kagi.com! Definitely worth a Netflix sub per month, at least for programmers. :)

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

[phpisthebest]

Google bet the farm on their ability to do just that though. PageRank and other technologies where suppose to suppress content farms that just aggregate the same content over multiple sites for ad revenue,

I have not done SEO in a long time but back in the day (early 00's) that was a sure fire way to get your site demoted in the google ranking was to have content 90+% similar to another site. It was a big problem for ecommerce sites that sold the same products as the larger sites because often they would just use the same product description from the manufacturer

[basch]

Part of it is trying to intake everything. Maybe google needs a "search the entire web" mode and a "search not garbage."

As naïve as it may be, I believe that crowd sourcing and metamoderation is probably the answer. Instead of full time employees, they should be offering some kind of kickbacks to their couple hundred thousand most trusted users, in exchange for upvotes and downvotes of content quality.

[dwighttk]

Not sure there is a bright line between scam and advertising

[cft]

Bing is much more useful. yandex.ru is more useful for anything that might have political connotations. I suspect it's the new focus on content policing versus search quality and corresponding resource allocation, that did Google search in

[meltyness]

This is how inflation effects media. Publishers want to be "growthy", Google hasn't gone full-bore in making new print ad-supported, hence the proliferation of paywalls.

[jsnell]

This discussion repeats, with a lot of comments, roughly once per month. Here's a sample:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29886423

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32209067

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31093439

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31427996

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339141

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31009713

[bryan_w]

What's weird is that there was a freakanomics episode that basically mirrors this comment section: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/

[pembrook]

I think this is good, the more people we have coalescing around the problem, the more likely it is to spill out of HN into normie-ville.

[zbuf]

Google is now a "recommendation engine" not a search engine...

I type something in and it ignores the words and presents something it thinks I might like.

For good measure, it prepends a word-spaghetti advert that's optimised on-the-fly to maximise confusion with the missing useful search result. When I accidentally click on it then they'll get paid.

[Sakos]

Oh, that reminds me. How long has Youtube's search been so utterly useless and downright terrible? Whatever I enter, it interrupts the search results with recommendations THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH MY QUERY every 5 results. What the fuck, Google. Are you doing this on purpose? Did somebody piss in your cereal and you decided to collectively punish all of us? If that's not the case, who's responsible so I can go over to him and piss in his cereal?

[0xcde4c3db]

I've been putting it exactly this way ("recommendation engine") for years. Whatever algorithms Google is using, they're absolutely terrible at distinguishing the considerations of relevance to a specific query on one hand and broader tranches of popularity on the other hand.

Unfortunately, nobody else seems to be doing much better. I've found that DuckDuckGo's results suddenly got drastically worse a few months ago: markedly fewer results overall, and the results that do show up have worse relevance (in particular, generic pages about the closest major city, e.g. its official homepage or Wikipedia article, tend to show up for no obvious reason).

[kbrkbr]

Yes! I hate this so much. The only search engine that respects what I type in seems startpage these days.

Other search engines give me results that are useless most of the time, because they do not contain all my carefully chosen search terms.

[Wazako]

I also use Google in the same way. Google is really amazing as a recommendation engine for finding keywords. Then you just have to get those keywords and put them in a real search engine.

[theGeatZhopa]

It's not just you.

First, I wish you & your wife all the best.

For me it's the same. The search has been made more easy for everyone by Google. But that implied the reduction of some Poweruser functions.

In the early times, one could use "+" and "-" to define the search in detail. Nowadays, no +/- anymore accepted in the search, but... There is a link somewhere for "advanced search ".

If you get onto that page, you can define the search in detail. I, for me, automatically use the advanced search, with exclusion of certain terms within the search results.

May be this is not be known to you - if it's already used by you, then:

Yes. The SEO-Cancer has brought us link farming. The reason for existence of such sites is just to raise the "creditability" of certain domains and having a lot of Backlinks & clicks - thus, being listed by Google at the foremost top.

I usually skip the first page and start my search with the 2nd page of results.

Or, I start the search and whilst not getting good results, I use the very same search page, and type in different/further search terms for my topic. The results become more refined in the second run..

Goog is still the best, but one needs to adapt to the search workflow of theirs.

Alternatively, you can try www.startpage.com..

[mdorazio]

- still works. I just used it yesterday. Enclosing terms in quotes also mostly works as an alternative to + although it’s not quite the same. The biggest difference is that I find myself having to use both far more often than before to get non-spam results and now often have to go beyond the first page as well.

[MisterTea]

> In the early times, one could use "+" and "-" to define the search in detail. Nowadays, no +/- anymore accepted in the search, but...

This has been bothering me as it seems large sites are knee-capping advanced search. eBay used to let you search for an item using partial keywords with a wildcard but no more. Used to be simple to find a close matching part number by adding the first few digits and an asterisk.

Google search have been a mess for a long time, years. Their search results have lately been randomly cluttered by frames and boxes, their awful, idiotic snippits that attempt to provide an authoritative answer to question queries (e.g. what is the weight of water), ads that look like results, shopping categories if it thinks your looking for a product, etc.

Their results in the past were quality but now I mostly use duckduckgo because if I'm going to be flooded with SEO spam, I might as well do it anonymously. I fall back to google if DDG fails to provide me with anything useful.

[borbulon]

startpage.com, IIRC, uses google results. You're better off with something else if you're looking for non-googly results (I do not have any suggestions)

[jaggs]

Yes indeed. The SEO industry has finally worked out how to beat Google and get their stuff pushed to the top.

Meanwhile the real experts, who don't have any SEO skills at all, are disappearing down the results. It's a tragedy.

[encryptluks2]

Google ignores their own SEO recommendations and bad practices regarding deranking.

[dplgk]

I actually find that the SEO industry follows Google's advice on how to structure and optimize pages and they are rewarded by showing their shitty pages in top results.

[leandot]

I recently switched to Kagi (and pay so they can sustain it) and I have to say it's very good, I rarely have to use g!, maybe for maps only. It also previews code snippets nicely.

[CapmCrackaWaka]

Yup, I've started to really appreciate the pay-to-not-be-the-product business model in general. Kagi is great, the easy domain blocking feature alone is worth the $10 per month. The results in general are also good. They do suffer somewhat from the same SEO optimization problem as Google, where auto-generated crap turns up in search results, but once you block the majority of those domains the search results I get are very good.

[mprime1]

+1 for Kagi

Googled ‘Python queue’ the other day and the official python docs for queue was on page 4 of results.

(Page 1-3 were filled with examples websites, so query intent was well understood)

[10729287]

Same here, in french language. Kagi is awesome (paying user too).

[sidlls]

"Outside of Stackoverflow results (which, thankfully, are at the top of the page), most articles are written for a broad, beginner audience (like a React article starting with a tutorial on installing React)."

This is the result of a confluence of two issues that plague (yes, plague) our industry: the disinterest/dismissive attitude towards documentation and the infection of celebrity status/hero worship as having importance. People apparently feel the need to self-promote, and a quick-and-easy way of doing that is "publishing" articles like the ones you mentioned. And thanks to the lack of documentation discipline, that depth of content is more or less the norm.

[Sakos]

It doesn't help that increasingly communities are migrating to closed-box tools like Discord. A generation's worth of information is being sucked up and lost forever.

[tbnat]

The quality has dropped massively, even compared to 5 years ago.

Partly it is an input issue. Interesting conversations are increasingly happening in walled gardens like Telegram.

Academic websites rarely show up any longer. Even for simple keywords the number of search results is sometimes only 8 pages. If you read all of them or your queries get too specific, you are classified as a bot and get the "unusual activity" nag screen.

It was good while it lasted. I think Google could be disrupted now.

[pembrook]

If you boil this down, it’s actually a fundamental issue with Google’s ranking algorithm not keeping up with the times. They’re now a monopoly giant with zero incentive to innovate.

We all know the algorithm is too easily gamed (1)(2), but they make way too much money to ever blow it up and start from scratch.

Why care about the free results below the line, when the real goal is to get people to click on the ads at the top of the SERP?

——-

1. If it’s general information you’re looking for, you’re hit with low-quality keyword spam sites, with 900 ads playing all over the page. Google makes the vast majority of its money on ads, so they can’t penalize sites bloated with ads due to anti-trust issues.

2. If you’re doing research on products/software/etc, the results in almost every category are now bloated with affiliate marketing spam. Again, Google cannot de-rank sites that monetize this way due to anti-trust.

[Kuinox]

I switched to kagi and the results are far better since. I can block SEO spam results like pinterest, and boost SO/Reddit/language docs results.

[dpkirchner]

This is by far the greatest advantage Kagi has over Google and is frankly something we should expect from any search engine created since the turn of the century.

[HarleyBestfield]

It stopped being helpful a while ago. It's now moved into being harmful.

A popular scheme among shady SEOs and marketers is "rank and rent." This is where they choose a major city and a common contracting service (eg, plumbing, carpet cleaning, fence building, home remodeling, etc.).

Then they register domains using generic search terms. They build a website presenting itself as an independent local business. They even go as far as lying on the about us pages claiming years of experience.

They create content on the site, social media profiles, and business listings.

When the site begins to rank well enough to generate leads, they either rent the website to a local contractor and/or sell them the leads.

It sounds helpful, but it's shady. First, they're usually competing with the local contractors for search space. Second, they usually rely heavily on fake Google Business Profiles.

While the latter practice violates Google's guidelines, getting them removed is tough. That's because they pay local residents to "borrow" their home addresses. This allows them to get the verification code sent out by Google to verify addresses.

For our family business, we've even had them report our Google Business Profile on several occasions because we were outranking them. Then they had the gaul to try and rent one of their websites to us.

In the end, the practice is harmful to local contractors and customers who don't realize they going through a middle man.

[derivagral]

Didn't grubhub and ilk effectively insert themselves this way for food service to a lot of restaurants?

Somewhat relatedly, I know my local tech hub has a couple places that do leadgen like this for financial verticals and it has been... lucrative. In my local cases, usually either a license or a snapshot of supporting technology is part of the deal and the vertical is spun out as a new entity to the acquirer. Rinse and repeat several years later, when the "acquirer" has years-old versions of the original stuff and needs something fresh to reinvigorate their pipeline...

[agnostic-one]

Speaking of software engineering related searches, the quality of the results have gone off the cliff. Now instead of seeing the original github issue, pull request or discussion, the first search results point to some crappy websites that mirror the original content. The UI/UX of those websites is awful: part of the content is hidden behind a registered account, they are slow, I get popups and other garbage.

Google Search needs to be disrupted and, while I've tried using DuckDuckGo, I don't think that's it. However, my concern is that so much of the really good user content is hidden behind walled gardens, such as FB groups, discord, slack etc.

[Someone1234]

I find myself turning on "Verbatim Mode" for almost all of my searches.

Seemingly Google is being "helpful" by removing large chunks of my search query, so as I can more specific, Google just throws all of that out and I get the same junk SEO results. You can go back to Old Google, but going Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim. This is NOT the same thing as quoting your entire query, it just doesn't let Google simply drop 50% of your query's words.

[paleotrope]

It boggles that someone thought that dropping a keyword from a search was a good idea.

"You are looking for product x in relation to situation y"

"Here are the results for product x!"

[worldofmatthew]

If Google wants to improve it needs to place bans on domains using automatically generated content and threaten lawsuits if the webmasters try to evade the ban. The bigger problem is that most content is no longer on the public world wide web, it is on private chats in Discord and on closed Facebook groups.

[bacchusracine]

How about when they promise you there's thousands of results, then somehow there isn't a third page of those results...

[atonse]

Been using ddg for years and my use of !g has reduced considerably because it doesn’t result in better (but often worse) results.

Google stopped being an innovative company many years ago.

They’re in their Ballmer era. They’ll hopefully get a Nadella soon but not before it gets worse.

[dmingod666]

DDG is very nice -- I was pleasantly surprised, I wanted a few images in a python script a while back.. get the library, run all the searches you want, save images.. haven't looked but I just assume, Google won't let you do it and if you wanted, you'll need to install some Google commandline to your machine and enable it's metered API

[bhrgunatha]

Annoyingly ddg also ignores +<must include> -<must exclude> and "verbatim" search terms and just shows the results they decide you must want. There are no good search engines any more. At least ddg still has bang searches.

[jck]

I think google has reduced their weights for github drastically. The other day, I googled a github url verbatim (without the https:// - Firefox Android somehow didn't have the option to open the url when I selected it) and the repo was nowhere in the search results.

[intsunny]

Sometimes I worry about how long the "site:reddit.com" gravy train will last...

It is getting too hard to make the Internet useful these days.

[CapmCrackaWaka]

I think that some companies have already caught on. I've seen suspicious recommendation patterns on Reddit before, where one product will be relentlessly mentioned, to the point where a naive searcher would think it's the "clear choice". But this could also be astroturfing.

For example, yesterday I was looking for a good toaster oven. The _only_ brand that gets recommended consistently is Breville, on multiple different subreddits. However, there is nothing that makes me believe their product is any better than the competitions. Mass produced in china out of cheap materials, lots of reviews stating that they break once the warranty is up, etc etc. All of the Reddit comments are also very simple. Doing due diligence as a consumer has become a nightmare.

[hnthrowaway0315]

Too many Ads. I usually scroll down half screen for the first page. And then still more to avoid the "aggregate-sites" (sites that aggregate info from other places).

[jyu]

when X marketplace becomes valuable, it becomes a worthwhile target. we see this everywhere. remember pinterest and rapgenius polluting google searches? etsy opens up and becomes a crappier and more expensive aliexpress.

we yearn for curation and expertise, but aren't willing to pay for it with money. instead we pay for it with behavior modification attempts (ads), time (bad ux), and unintended societal side effects.