Ask HN: What is the worst thing about Google search?

You can't give feedback about the search results.

You can't opt out of advertisement results.

They link you to their amp pages, again, with no choice.

You get news and trending results when you were looking for something more factual.

You can't give feedback about the search results.

Search results are at the whim of SEO and not usefulness.

Sometimes Clickbait.

Search operators are much less useful than they were before.

Etc..

Mediocre sites aided by purchased links are returned instead of great sites with excellent content.

The fact the search engine seems to think it knows what you want better than you do. The amount of times I'll enter a query and get results which have nothing to do with said query is astounding, especially when the result crosses out an important word and says it matches one of the others instead.

Or when I enter a phrase and they think it's a typo despite not actually being one, giving me a whole bunch of irrelevant results related to the 'corrected' term in the process.

It's lack of PRIVACY! Here are some good alternatives IMHO. https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.startpage.com/ (uses Google but respects privacy) https://www.qwant.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/

That it’s turned from a search engine into a shopping portal and there are certain things you simply can’t search for because Google assumes you must be going shopping.

9,999,999 results in .0000009 seconds.

Result 1: not even close

Result 2: that's the opposite of what I asked

Result 3: not even close

The sense that I’m being shielded from dangerous ideas.

The interface. I switched to DDG because Google results are large boxes with pictures that are taxing to scan and take a lot of screen space on mobile.

For learning I don’t go to a general search engine. I search Wikipedia first. If I’m trying to find a code library I search GitHub first, etc.

Google is pretty good. Here are the things I find frustrating:

1) It tries to guess what I mean, and it's hard to make it change its mind. I was searching for a specific thing and Google decided I was looking for clothing brand in this colour. In the past adding or removing words, using the + (or "") or - operators would help, but I couldn't find the right combination this time.

2) Sometimes I want to search for results from a different country in a different language and I don't know how to do this. Google seems to really want to only push English language results to me. I don't know if /ncr is still a thing.

3) There's a bunch of heavily SEO'd content that's sort of okay but not great, and a bunch of content that's great but hidden.

4) Google really wants you to use natural language queries. So when you're fault-finding a problem you type a question into the search box. This will return many people asking that same question, but often they will not have got an answer. I don't need to be linked to a closed, with no answers, Stack exchange question, or a forum when OP says "never mind, fixed it" with no more details.

5) Google has decided to de-prioritise certain types of link. If you search for torrents Google has chosen to put other stuff in the first few pages. I think I'd prefer it if they just said "nope, we don't do those links" than what they do at the moment. Try searching for pirate versions of Pozner and Dodd's Cross-Examination Science and Techniques and you get a lot of links, but they're all terrible. They all lead to malware infested sites, or sites that are part of a weird complicated network that don't provide any content, but cause you to spend some time finding that out.

Shitty SEO content at the top - articles with repeated the same phrases to get better rank, ads.

Many of these complaints listed here are valid, but another one is that it executes JavaScript code on the web page to find the text, and I don't want it to do that.

The most annoying 'easy' fix is I'd like an easy way to stop domains showing. I used some extension in the past but it doesn't work now. Would be great if Google had a drop down next to results saying 'dont show this domain' for future searches. Probably useful data for their algorithm too.