Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

Yes. I've been finding myself resorting to other search engines. Especially regarding things that remotely have anything to do with political hot button topics in the US.

It happen to me few times. Apparently no one ever has the same problem as me before. This happen super rarely and I'm proud of it.

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Absolutely agree. Search results are now heavily biased toward popular categories that have advertising opportunities. Double quotes and logic (and) isn’t working to drive more specific results. I am about to move on.

Yes. I've especially had terrible luck finding pages I remember visiting before. This made me wish they hadn't gotten rid of full text history search in the browser.

So now I try to save important stuff as markdown notes so I can search them with vscode later.

To head off any misunderstandings, what time period do you mean by "lately"? Past few hours? Days? Years?

I've been struggling with context. I fight for Google to know I'm talking about Rust the language and not the game or the oxidization.

"Rust Vector Drain" really struggled today.

I'm a bit surprised that Google isn't prepared to remember context. "User has been looking at a lot of Rust Lang so let's promote those kinds of results"

Between the search engine getting worse over the past few years, and the failings of the history/search built into Chrome, and the loss of RSS and Delicio.us a while ago, the web seems to be less and less useful as time progresses.

The worse now is email search in gmail.

It used to be very efficient, but now, if you don't type the exact word in full with the exact spelling, it will not find it.

The most annoying is sometimes when you only remember half of a name or first name that you are looking for. (Note: assuming that it is not in your contact list already)

Yes. It's great for finding commercial products and absolutely terrible for anything else.

It's making my research for technical translation a lot harder recently.

Its been pretty bad for me for the past year or two.

Sometimes I have moments it only gives me Google books results for certain queries. Luckily I havent had that one in a while.

Google search over the past 5+ years: result quality getting worse overall; relevant results pushed further and further below ads/sponsored (now on page 2); privacy issues wider and deeper.

I recall being amazed at the seeming clairvoyance of their search results up to about 2014. It seems like when they reorganized under Alphabet, the division of responsibility became sharper. Alphabet to Google: you are an _Advertisement_ company. Your goal is to get as much info as possible on all people so to target and sell ads for maximum profit. The search engine, and other Google products, are to focus on that goal. The other innovation stuff may be done some by you, but we'll shift a lot to the other subsidiaries. I think the clarity and narrowing of purpose is wise, from a business perspective.

As a consumer, though, I've switched to DDG.

Do you have the same experience when logged in and when logged out in an incognito window?

Google search isn't the same for everyone. It varies based on your location, language, profile, and recent search history (i.e. if you do 3 searches in a row about items in a video game, it will assume you are looking things up while playing and continue favoring results about that game for a while).

If things have really gone of the rails to the point you are dissatisfied, try clearing your entire search history here: https://myactivity.google.com/privacyadvisor/search

More than anything, I've noticed that Google prefers to offer search results that are from advertisers. This isn't surprising. Another commenter mentioned that context has gotten worse, and I'd agree with that. It's still a "good" search engine. I say "good" in quotes because I have yet to try a search engine that's as effective, but the "good" aspect of Google is now debatable in many contexts. For example it's "good" if your compare it to Yahoo. I think I might be trying duckduckgo more often (despite the ridiculous name) and even gasp Bing.

You don't complain when it works, so I'd want some hard data here.

For sure. Google's ability to surface useful pages above SEO gamed "articles" has been dropping for years. I've had to start adding '-best' and '-top' to searches in an attempt to stop getting blogspam stuff like "december 2020 best X" with no substance when searching for X.

It used to be possible to, for some topics, limit the search period to pre 2010 to help improve the relevancy of results. But I've started to notice that their index seems to be forgetting about the past as time moves on.

Yes, over the last six weeks the results you would normally find in the first page are now on page two or three.

Search results for previous searches where I know the response corpus are significantly degraded.

Search quality has been falling pretty steadily over the last couple years.

I’ve had DuckDuckGo as my default search engine on all devices for two+ years now and don’t miss Google at all. On the rare occasion I use the !g bang, I’ve seen a noticeable decline in the quality of results. DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, seems to keep getting better and better. Not affiliated with either. Just a happy user.

This has been a thing since Google did their RankBrain update 5 years ago. They essentially released a system that used ML to negotiate unknown "long-tail" queries into more common queries and then returned the common queries results.

One of the immediate effects was quoted strings became less relevant, sometimes completely ignored, and a lot of the other tools for negotiating with system were lost. It's only continued to progressively get worse since then.

Was noticing the same thing. Asked the librarians I know and it seems like a well known issue in that circle. Being that they are 1) professionals at gathering information and 2) talk to a LOT of people who gather information that they maybe know something about this.

Ask your local librarian, I’d be curious if you get similar feedback.

Trying to not be a pure Google hater here but I can expect a lot of their products will become shittier (in terms of U X) in the next few years. It’s what happens to every web property after they have their insane period of growth. Now in order to continue growing without naturally adding users, they will have to get more $$$ per user. In order to do that, they will need better/more ads. In order to do that the UI/search experience will need to prioritize ads rather than an end user experience. It is not even limited to web properties. Every company lures users in with something really great at the beginning in order to capture the market, and then once the market is captured gradually raise prices to monetize users. Think uber with ridiculously cheap prices at the beginning to get users onto their platforms. In Google’s case ad-free great UIs are the “currency”. Now we’re going to have to sift through more and more garbage to get what we need, and it’s probably going to get worse.

yes, I have to use bing and duckduckgo a lot more than I used to if I actually want a peer reviewed source on something

for everything else, such as a faster search for wikipedia, or cliffnotes about an actor that don't go to any website, it works fine.

the majority of my searches further from that are just finding messages in fast moving chats on Telegram, so that doesn't use Google or any service that is a dedicated search engine.

Its been getting worse and it think its inevitable. Over time algorithms can be figured out basically through reverse engineering. These days seo optimization has meant resources is just as important as relevancy

the extent to which google wants to stop this is another matter

Definitely. Possible reasons include: * A lot more information, including low quality sources, making it harder to prioritize * The SEO cat and mouse game * Google's commercial interests

I believe the worst degradation happened around 2013-2014 when it enabled its first "AI" search engine core.

I always felt that it "tries to think for me" since then.