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Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

188 points by alan_wade ↗ HN
Past few days(weeks?) I find myself more and more frustrated with google search. It seems to frequently omit the most important keywords I'm typing. I constantly have to click "Must include 'Keyword'", because more than half the links on the first page miss it, even if it's the first one out of 3 words in my query.

I'm not the kind of person who thinks about search quality, this is the first time in my life I have ever noticed it being frustrating.

108 comments

[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] thread
EGKW
Totally! Actually not 'worse' as such, but search results are more centered around earnings, rather than around providing information. You can't blame them for that, but by shifting focus they can expect a shift in public too.
enz
I have the same feeling, I have to click "must include keyword..." to get better results. I thought it was because I use google.co.jp since I moved to Japan a few weeks ago, so I was guessing Google tried too hard to correlate the results with my new geographical area. It seems I'm not the only one.
whateveracct
Sounds like someone in Google had a successful feature launch :) good for them on delivering something to production!
synesso
Now you mention it, yes. I've been seeing this for a few weeks. It seems often the most salient word in my search phrase is ignored.
s9w
Not sure if it was in the last weeks.. I would say in the last months. But google searches without verbatim mode are increasingly useless.
anc84
Absolutely it got even worse in the past few weeks after an earlier, perceived drop a couple of months ago.
Jedi72
It seems only a matter of time until Google is just an interactive yellow pages. Why would you spend millions trying to index peoples personal blogs etc. when companies will pay thousands for the spot in the results and give you the link to put up? All they need to do is maintain their position as the default internet portal.
quickthrower2
People advertise on Google because of the massive audience, and that audience exists because of quality organic search results. They are not going to mess with that.
jim-jim-jim
Glad I'm not alone. It's so bad I'm actually _using_ DuckDuckGo these days, instead of instinctively typing in g! before all my queries like I usually do.
x38iq84n
I have had the same feeling for months and not limited to Google, sadly DDG suffers from the same. Search result quality has been getting worse and my search queries contain more and more quotes just to get back to a previous level. What I miss is a tick box for "power users" to disable spelling suggestions, search terms omission and similar "features".
operatorequals
What's the business model of it anyway? Is it providing you good search results?
SquareWheel
Search's business model is showing adverts at the top of the page.
abbiya
and knowing about everything on web
keiferski
The "must include" functionality makes zero sense to me and I'm dumbfounded as to why it was ever added. If I didn't want my results to include a particular word, I wouldn't have included it in the search. Boggles my mind how Google could mess up something so simple.
DarkWiiPlayer
Because people are dumb and type in entire questions or sentences, so google tries to be "smart" and remove words that hold no real meaning.
TomMarius
Actually I think it's useful to google whole questions - for forum thread titles. The problem of course is that Google does not search for the whole thing and wrapping it in quotes makes it useless as well.
brazzledazzle
Asterisks within quotes still seem to work. I use those when I have a good idea of what string I’m looking for but I’m not sure about some words or want to find posts where someone (for whatever weird reason) apparently typed in or pasted an error in chunks.
samwhiteUK
I'm dumbfounded as to how you don't see the usefulness of this feature. Sometimes there exists more than one word for a situation, and you might miss a forum thread, for example, that is relevant to you, but you're saying to Google "only use these exact words" and not accounting for differences in dialect etc
keiferski
Because often the key word is the one being dropped by Google. If I search for "Einstein quotes about social democracy" and it drops "Einstein" it defeats the entire purpose of the search.

A single button that says "try searching without word for more results" would be far less frustrating.

DanBC
I search for "suicide" (for my work) very often. It _fucking sucks_ that Google seems to think "death", "died", "murdered" etc are all valid synonyms. It means that for every single search I do I need to do extra work.

I miss the days of +forced +terms.

eudora
Surely using quotes around the term does the trick?
matthewmacleod
Honestly, you're both kind of right.

It's totally correct that often we want search results that don't include the exact word which was specified in the search request. We often want close synonyms, stems, elimination of redundant words etc. and flexibility on this helps to retrieve much better search results.

On the other hand, Google has a particularly frustrating habit of dropping words which are absolutely key to a particular search. You know, those cases where you are searching for details about a very specific set of explicit keywords, and 90% of the results exclude one of them, making them totally useless.

It's like an "uncanny valley" in some ways. When it says "You probably don't need the word 'and' in your search, and also 'video games' is the same as 'computer games' so I'll just include both" then the process makes sense, feels helpful, and indeed you probably don't notice. When you search for two explicit technologies and one of them is ignored, it feels like you're fighting a system that's trying to second-guess what you mean.

Ultimately the search engine is tuned for common queries, and the majority of users aren't likely to have the required technical skill to express exactly what they want to find without some help. This results in mismatch between the expectations of different users.

Verbatim search helps with this, in that it allows advanced users to better control their results. I'd be super happy if I could just toggle this "on" all the time.

natch
They have definitely messed up in many ways, but having a must-include operator was not one of the ways.

It allows (allowed?) you to tell the search that the other words can be used for ranking and are nice-to-have words, while the must-include words are treated differently and must be present and match exactly.

If all search terms were automatically must-include with no override, search results would be garbage because as a user you aren’t going to predict the perfect inflected forms of words used in documents every time.

Being dumbfounded should not lead you to think other people are wrong. It should lead you to wonder what you are missing.

Yetanfou
Search engines - Google amongst them - are moving from using the search term as (possibly stemmed) literal words to search for to attempting to interpret the 'meaning' of the term. This interpretation can be somewhat... lacking, with the observed result of nonsensical answers.
tinus_hn
One of the original defining features of Google was that all results included all terms. Now even when you search for +”term” you get results without “term”.

It seems just stupid to return these completely useless results but I guess it makes them money somehow.

fergie
It definitely did. As a complete outsider (albeit one who has done a bit of contract work at Google a few years ago), it seems that they are going all in on ML-driven personalisation, rather than an "objective best match" approach.
charlesism
It's trash now. I noticed this a few months back:

    The final straw for me is that it now "helpfully" drops 
    search terms on my behalf. I was already using DDG for a third 
    of my searches. I'm going all-in now. For people who don't spend 
    much time online, maybe what Google is doing works for them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18266966
kowdermeister
No, good as always :) But seriously, yesterday I wanted to deploy my beta to a fresh server install and I did like 10 google searches of various server and tool issues. I got it all resolved and the beta is running but I didn't stop at how bad these results are.

What are you searching for when you see a decrease in quality?

[dead] kowdermeister
Keep the downvotes coming, how dare I share my null result.
Timucin
I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo, so didn't notice that but I noticed something similar on YouTube.

For some reason, it keeps recommending the videos I already watched, the ones in my save for later and the most annoying one: the ones from the channels I marked as not interested.

My recommendations also getting less and less relevant.

They definitely changed something and broke a perfectly working system.

SquareWheel
It seems likely that people would search for videos they've previously watched. Must consider that these products are made for "normies", not power users.
nihil75
Second.YouTube keeps showing me the same (promoted?) videos on the right-hand bar, so I keep navigating back to the home page to get half-decent recommendations.
brazzledazzle
I’ve noticed that as well. Also noticed that sometimes I’ll watch a video and if I watch it again the timestamp it resumes at is somewhere near the beginning liked I’d only watched a few seconds. Perhaps a problem with the system that keeps track of how much you’ve watched or not is breaking other things.
saiya-jin
its even worse with youtube - if I leave the TV, it will continue playing videos youtube considers somehow related to original one. But it often forgets what it already played in a row, so sometimes plays the same video multiple times. Like 1 2 3 4 2 5 1 6 5 3 etc.
kirb
A few months ago I found that if I played music on YouTube and let it go on autoplay, it would eventually play a specific song. It’ll play something else next as per usual, but the Up Next for this video would almost always be that same specific song. I can’t fathom how this worked so well for years and is now totally broken. Or how the algorithm chokes as soon as it reaches that one specific video.
pjc50
Searching for stuff you've already seen is reasonable. But reccomendation really needs to have a simple partition into two categories: watched and not watched. Both are valid but they are very different use cases.

Also they need to stop reccomending flat earth, anti-vax and other toxic nonsense without prompting.

[dead] the_other_guy
>I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo

here we go, the entire post was made just for this to derail the entire discussion into a free marketing/shilling for an even much worse search engine with aggressive online marketing techniques

Timucin
Not really.

Put X instead DuckDuckGo, the meaning and the intent of my post doesn't change. You just choose to see it in that way.

pure-awesome
Is DuckDuckGo good now? When I first tried it out a couple of years back, I found it didn't give me enough (relevant) results on my searches, so I stayed with Google.

I assume it must have improved in that time; maybe I should try it again.

Timucin
It requires a bit time to get used to it but not more than couple of days I think. The interface is quite similar to what google provides and I quite liked seeing the answer I am looking for as a part of the search.
DrAwdeOccarim
It's OK. It works well for me for common things that are easy to find. Restaurants, wiki entries, etc. But for example a new paper published today in Nature? Even searching for the whole title in quotes with DDG will not return it. Gotta go to Google for that.
aembleton
DDG index is not as fresh as Google's. That and local, location specific searches are what I use Google for these days.
alpaca128
My impression is that DDG requires a slightly different choice of keywords. But you'll get used to it and in my experience it currently delivers better results than Google.

When I started using DuckDuckGo I often switched to Google for certain queries, now I do that very rarely because Google's results get more disappointing every year.

pindab0ter
As pointed out by the other commenters you need a slightly different approach to search terms since they don't build a profile of what is and isn't relevant to you.

That said, it's definitely a lot better than a few years ago. I'm the same in having tried it back then and I couldn't get many useful results. I've been using it for half a year again now and only occasionally do I use the "!g"-bang to revert to a Google search.

tropo
It seems dramatically better. I think the reality is that this is only relative to Google today, not Google long ago. Lots of us have been like the mythical frog in the slowly-heated pot, failing to notice that Google is getting worse. For business reasons, or because executives have an agenda, Google now refuses to prioritize what users want.

So yes, you should try it again.

crypticlizard
it's pretty good, when it's not i put a g! before the query
zython
I had a similar experience with youtube lately: I was looking for a song that I knew the tune and a related artist and for the love of god could not find it with the current youtube recommendations. Most of the videos I'd get recommended when searching related songs, were not even music-related. So I went to archive.org and within a couple of results found what I was looking for.

Youtube's recommendation has really changed for the worse.

palerdot
Youtube search quality is horribly bad in recent weeks. I'm being suggested videos that are minimum 2 years older continously in the home page. There are more recent videos from the same channels, but all I see is 2-3 year old video suggestions as if my phone/computer clock is reset to a date few years back. I'm not even sure if they are running some kind of experiment or is it a bug.
buboard
They should give more tools to creators to organize their content. The default channel video listings is a mess with no rhyme or reason.
NeedMoreTea
It's frustrating in its simplicity. I don't need 5 more versions of the same track. They're showing far fewer of the same genre and era but a lot more conspiracy theory garbage that I will never, ever intentionally click, yet their algo has never noticed the total lack of clicks on those "Proof of alien life", "brexit is great" or "lizards are running the show really" videos.

"recommended for you", yeah right. How do they arrive here from say 1 from CGP Grey, 2 from ACDC and 1 from Iron Maiden?

Last.fm used to have my music taste well nailed and followed up with a lot of unknown stuff that I ended up loving and buying. YT had more data for longer yet has no clue at all. Now I just search and play direct from DDG.

YT never worked that well for me, but now it's rarely worth even checking the other videos column.

buboard
most frustrating when you re watching a series of lectures and it recommends the previous one , or breaks the series
Jefff8
Similar. I can't quantify, but I seem to be getting less useful results, certainly on the first page, and often beyond. I'm not sure it's not just perception though because I've not kept any log and it's also possible there are genuinely no matches to the searches I've been doing.
twic
Also similar. What do we mean by "recent"? I feel like it got a lot worse a year or two ago, and has been consistently bad since then.
einr
It feels like the philosophy has become "return lots of results at any cost".

For instance I just now searched for a specific e-mail address that ends with "@hotmail.co.jp" -- since it didn't find any hits with the full address, it decided to strike out the username part and return thousands of results for just "hotmail.co.jp". This is literally useless and they should know better.

It just gets worse and worse for technical searches too, I find. Searching for stuff like datasheets for chips and vintage obscure computer programs and peripherals rarely returns anything useful without "wrapping" "everything" "in" "quotes".

icebraining
They have a Verbatim mode which doesn't do that (as much?), but you have to click on Tools → All Results → Verbatim every time.

Alternatively, if you can edit the URL used by your browser, you can just add "tbs=li:1" to it; for Firefox, you can add it as an alternative Search engine by running this on the Console:

  window.external.AddSearchProvider("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/popthestack/1530165/raw/c99a1c5e6e783aecffa432397a527f557944926d/google-ssl-verbatim.xml")
This doesn't invalidate the overall point, of course, it's just a personal tip.
einr
Yeah, I used to have verbatim mode as a separate and default search provider in Firefox, but I had to stop using it as my default -- I find sometimes it's just too verbatim and it's like using Altavista in 1996 all over again.

I feel like Google a few years ago had struck a decent balance between trying to be smart (sometimes automatically including synonyms to your search terms, etc.) while still respecting your actual search terms. Now it's way too far gone in the "assume user is a total idiot and doesn't know what he wants" direction.

garyclarke27
Yes Good Point - I've noticed many more missing terms in the past few weeks. Extremely irritating - Problem is Verbatim mode is buried and cannot be defaulted and does not work with Time Filter, Time Filter is often essential for useful searches. More control for advanced users is settings is required, Mobile first layout still annoys me on Safari iPad, so much so that, I have to iCab Browser - lets you change the user agent and lots of useful options such as Text Sizes
[dead] PostThisTooFast
Google stupidly eliminated the + operator, which used to require the presence of words marked with it. Their excuse was that it somehow "interfered" with Google Plus. Now that Google Plus is defunct, do you think they'll restore it? HA HA no.

So now we're stuck with prefixing searches with "allintext:" and then quoting everything.

kazinator
The principle is probably more like: return such approximate results that, among them, advertising doesn't look out of place.
[dead] the_other_guy
I know that this post is about bashing Google since it's the big _evil_ boy and then slowly promoting DuckDuckGo since we are used to at least a weekly DDG shilling thread here in HN, but let me tell you the honest truth that Google is still the best search engine by far (e.g. indexing javascript content, accuracy based on your history for instance try searching "Prometheus" if you're a developer and again on not logged in account with another IP), the only other sea rch engine that comes close is Yandex especially for images. Nothing wrong if you like using DDG with for worse results accuracy and a fake sense of privacy if that's what you want, but please respect our intelligence here since 99% users of this website are software engineers and you know that DDG can't beat technically Google by any means.
isostatic
If google works for you, great.

> 99% users of this website are software engineers

Citation Needed

the_other_guy
>Citation Needed

nice way to invalidate my whole argument

isostatic
If you want to present an extreme figure and are unwilling to back it up with even anecdotes, you don't have an argument
the_other_guy
I already stated my argument, you're the one who's trying to invalidate it without offering any counter argument
isostatic
You have claimed 99% users of this website are software engineers

That is an extraordinary claim, and thus requires extraordinary evidence

the_other_guy
that wasn't even the point of my comment, you're insisting on derailing my argument and reducing it to something I cannot verify, and seriosuly, wtf do you think HN users are? housewives or wall street bankers? HN is an online community for tech workers especially software engineers, insisting on giving the evidence that 99% exactly of the users are software engineers is childish to say the least
tannhaeuser
Google search superiority is a myth IMHO. If you're a SW engineer, you're better of searching StackOverflow and using an old-school curated list of links for on-topic sites. Basic thinking tells you that Google Search are incentivized to show you pages with the most ads, rather than relevancy. There aren't that many good resources for any given topic anyway; creating a simple search index over those isn't rocket science. Certainly, "searched 130.000.000 sites in 0.13 ms" style info isn't helpful, unless you find Google giving you random crap sites entertaining.
[deleted]
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thiago_fm
Just search using "". For me it didn't change, as the way I search by using "", + etc since I started googling didn't change and it is even obvious in some ways that maybe I could just ddg all the way.
pi-victor
I use DDG but when i wanted better results i used google. It gets harder to differentiate, they both miss the point.

Granted search engines are no psychics, you also need to better phrase your searches sometimes.

I remember Google used to return way more accurate results a few years ago. I guess privacy regulations, increasing demand for higher ad revenue have made it a lot worse than it used to be.

[dead] Reimersholme
Wow, that describes exactly my feeling the last few days.
brazzledazzle
I think Google is focusing on the friendlier natural “human” queries. I noticed this some time ago when I’d ask it in a “lazy” way because I’m tired or distracted. E.g. “What day is Mother’s Day?”, or “What time is it in London?” I’ve noticed it seems to be more and more optimized for this sort of query as time goes on, to the point that I use the quote modifiers in many (most?) of my searches and the other modifiers more frequently than I used to.

I suspect that the people who’ve noticed this and feel frustrated have, like me, been searching on Google since back when it was on its way to unseating Altavista/Yahoo/etc (or maybe somewhere between). But I don’t hold it against Google because they’re optimizing for the widest possible audience and if it makes it easier for most people I’m ok with being a little inconvenienced. As long as adding quotes or other modifiers kicks in the old/advanced search I’m ok with that price for something I not only don’t pay for, but don’t click on the ads for either.

pure-awesome
I remember the days when I had to include "AND" and "OR" between words in the queries.
brazzledazzle
Nice! I remember when they finally added spellcheck. Probably a (welcome) contributor to my decreased ability to remember how to spell many words.
ur-whale
The quality has indeed declined drastically for pointed technical queries versus "where's the nearest hot dog stand" type queries.

Two possible explanations:

1. The latter is much more of a moneymaker.

2. I don't think there is anyone left at Google that actually understands how the search engine works these days.

guhcampos
What really, really bugs me is what they did with the image search at some point.

I always used image search to try and find the original source of an Image. It's super useful to determine the authenticity of a news article, identify the author of a photo for licensing and a million other uses.

Then at some point, search by image started to simply return results based on the image classification tag on the image: so instead of similar images, or other instances of a photo, I get results like "beach" or "bicycle" or "city". This is so frustrating and completely useless. I'm sure anyone is capable of typing "mountain" in the search field to find generic photos os mountains.

So that got me back to tineye.com - I just with they had a larger coverage of the web =[

EForEndeavour
I see that particular un-feature as a consequence of undue focus on ML that automatically generates image tags. While it's impressive for a system to be able to auto-tag billions of images at high accuracy, these generic tags are almost always useless as search terms.
jkollross
Have you tried Yandex's reverse image search?
seventhtiger
I've also noticed this and this is a big loss of utility.

There aren't many tools that find exact/slightly transformed matches of an image. That was very valuable, especially with the power of Google's webcrawling. Imaged get shared, stretched, watermarked, and artifacts build up. This was the single best way to find a source image.

Now the image is converted back into text and it searches for images using the text. We could search for images using text before. This is not new. The unique thing about reverse image search was killed and turned into just a fancy input for the same old image search.

nullandvoid
I have encountered this with YouTube which prefers to offer me garbage results back rather than searching all my keywords. E.g I was searching on a react topic and all I got back was 'x reacts to this'. It looks like it weighed the word 'react' much heavier than the others even though the other words were essential to getting a useful result..