Or sites that are just SEO/GPT spam made for ad revenue. Say I want to know if a side effect my pet is experiencing is normal for a medicine the vet gave them. I search DuckDuckGo for "cat {medicine} side effects", and half the results are pages where you have headlines like:
What is a(n) {issue}? (what you went to the vet for)
Should you worry about {issue}?
What to do if you see {issue}
Is {medicine} safe for your cat?
Is {medicine} appropriate for {issue}?
...and more
Only after a half dozen or so stupid sections (with ads littered between them) do you get to the actual list: "What are the side effects of {medicine}?" Why don't search engines have a way to report spam sites?
I found You search, especially quick fact app, is an amazing thing for that usecase. No ads, rich content (web results, facts, videos, etc.) and super compact.
It would be naive to think 100,000 of the most elite practitioners at the company that became the verb for what it does working on the problem for 20 years would be able to keep up.
I built my search engine in part to test this hypothesis, and think the result is that it's wrong.
A large chunk of the internet, as it used to be, is still there. You just can't find it in the sea of aggressively search engine optimized (and often machine generated) junk that it has to compete with on Google. You can't find it on Reddit or Facebook or Twitter either, because none of their algorithms favor that sort of content. This creates an illusion that it doesn't exist. But it does.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I think a big part of the problem is Google's dominant position essentially puts them in an impossible uphill battle against an entire industry attempting to game their algorithms.
The solution to this problem is search engine diversity. If you have multiple search engines with incompatible algorithms and disparate views on quality, then even if you manage to game one of the algorithms effectively, that search engine will just lose popularity and your SEO will be less useful. The winning strategy becomes to attempt to SEO against multiple contradictory algorithms, which is something that will never be as successful as manipulating Google alone.
> Google didn't get worse, the internet did and Google just reflects the junk we put in the pile.
Given Google's role in pushing stuff like Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), I'd say that Google's role in degrading the world's internet experience goes way beyond being an innocent bystander.
The "good" internet is still there, better than ever.
Sure, there is a lot of crap, more than ever, but finding the good stuff in the pile of crap is what search engines like Google are for.
I don't know why Google search results appear to be worse. Bing (and its many proxies) are not getting better either, so it is probably not only Google's fault.
Among the explanation I can think of:
- There is a cognitive bias: results are not actually worse
- There is an arms race between search engines and people trying to game the results (SEO), and SEO is winning
- There is a recent disconnect between what is in best interest for Google (and Microsoft) to show you and what is best for the user.
- We are reaching some technical limits. We went from simple indexing, to PageRank, to deep learning, constantly improving, and now we are stagnating.
- Google (and Microsoft) is suffering the large company syndrome, which is like SEO form the inside: employees optimize for their paycheck instead of the quality of the end product, and the corporate structure can't make these goals match.
What I don't believe:
- Google is turning evil: Google is not evil, Google just wants to make money, it has always been the case, and giving out great results made Google a trillion dollar company. AFAIK, Google is not owned by Satan, it has no reason to "turn evil" unless it makes them money, and why it would abandon a "not evil" strategy that worked so well in the past requires some explanation.
- There is a simple solution: Google may be a corporate mess, but people there are not completely stupid. If there is a simple solution that fits in a random HN post, they would have done it. As they say, for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
We take the view that Google and Bing are becoming answer engines. Answers on the SERPs suppress discovery on, and navigation of the web. A real search engine has organic results that minimise your time on the SERPs, providing a diversity of relevant, useful destinations to click on with enough info (snippets & title) to decide where to explore. You also need an independent index and crawler (spider that follows links). Otherwise you are a proxy service or a correlation to a search engine. Whether you use a real search engine API or scraping or query-click ML model(s) you are not independent and really a search service. We've taken the hard road; our search quality is patchy (now with an index >5 billion), but we are one of few genuine search engines if you think that matters.
I think Google just simply doesn't need to be good anymore. They really did need to be good when they were a small company with a goofy name in a sea of small companies with goofy names. Now they are not. They don't need to stand out. They don't need to be better.
Until they have a serious threat from competition (you'll know this is the case when you hear a lot of non-technical people talking about "Binging" or "Yandexing" something instead of Googling) nothing will change.
At least Goodle has not degraded to nothing and can search at all. Youtube search is working only if you have seen a video where some interesting X have been mentioned which leads a lot of people to search that X - you will find that X from entering 1-2 letters. Otherwise it just gives you random stuff even if you ask him "channelname avesome-video-I-know-precise-naming-of".
Hardly ever. I switched everything to Bing some time ago. If I feel I’m missing something I try Yandex. I hear Brave is good, and Kagi and Neeva may be interesting newcomers.
Even if Google were on par with Bing (which I don’t find it is, but my interests may differ from the average HN case) I’d still want to see the company burn for its betrayal of its own mission, of the internet, and of humanity (I mean why not, while I’m being dramatic).
From “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, to “to present a peep-hole sized view of the world, where said view best suits the values and interests of Google and its sponsors.”
I hate Google because I stumbled on it in 1998 and it was sheer magic, but now it’s 1997 again. They were a really, really good company and deserved all the success. Too good to survive becoming a public megacorp. It’s like how people are sadder when the bright young student full of promise and dreams falls into drugs and alcohol and ruin, than when it happens to the one who was always a delinquent since they were four.
I switched to using DDG for the last few months, and unfortunately it's even worse than Google is. I mainly search for technical/programming purposes; as an example, DDG rarely if ever links to anything on docs.python.org (the canonical reference for python), compared to Google where the relevant page is usually in the top 5. For other domains they might be comparable though.
Yup I do, tried the other search engines, they aren’t as good. Google still gets me what I need with relative ease. I would totally pay to have the ads removed
Yeah it's ridiculous. You don't have to upvote them even if you want to read the comments and discuss. Stop wasting our time sharing posts from random outside reddits too. They're purely anecdotal nonsense wasting everyone's time. We've got enough similar posts here.
It increases the visibility for this critical problem. Too many people are still unaware of the situation. Hopefully it will bring more people off Google.
the entire Google ecosystem has gone downhill by killing off products or invading people's privacy for advertisers. i heard even your gdrive files are mined for advertisement.
I'd add that the recent wave of spam plaguing Google Drive, and lack of adequate response from Google to address this massive problem, also contributes to erode confidence in their services.
Now that's not related to google, or maybe indirectly, but I used to search with qwant for at least a year, roundabout. I read on HN about github clones, riddled with ads, and in the end directing to github, with adding an referer. I never saw one of those myself though.
A few weeks ago I decided to switch to search.brave.com, because I read they build there own index. This is what I ultimately want from an alternative search engine, not relying on googles/bings results.
It then turned out, that at least their image search is not an own index at all, because the first site of results was 100% similar to googles image search.
Also it turned out, when searching with brave, all of a sudden I get to see these github clones in my results.
I am not sure about the reasons for all this, but I went back to qwant.
Depends on how you look at it. The Google search user isn’t the customer, the advertisers are. I would say that Google has gotten much better at getting search users to click links that generate income for Google.
Don't know if it is google but in the last couple of years when I type a phrase like, "Konjac Rice Near Me," half of the search results that state the product is available to pickup today return the following,
"""
This site can’t be reached
Check if there is a typo in ad.doubleclick.net.
Try:
Running Windows Network Diagnostics
Changing DNS over HTTPS settings
DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN
Check your DNS over HTTPS settings
"""
I personally switched search engines and it has made coding, general searches, and overall just browsing the internet 10x smoother. I tried a couple like DDG, Brave Search, and Kagi. I started using You.com and find the search results just better than Google's. Less SEO sites bogging down search results, website filtering, and optimized results layout.
Yes. Google search quality is abysmal today. Results are always content farms, top 10s, click-baity headlines, and sponsored articles. I've tried Duck Duck Go. It's "ok". I like their stance on privacy, but their results always seem to miss the mark. I've ended up using !g more often then just using the engine itself. I've tried Brave search. Similar experience. I most recently have joined https://kagi.com/ . I've been enjoying it the most so far. I enjoy the results enough and its features to pay for a subscription when it eventually comes out.
HN continues to pay lip service to wanting to make this better but does NOTHING to move the ball forward. Simple things like providing barrier less access to HN content and harder things like crawling all content linked from HN would be a great resource to bootstrap new search engines.
I agree Google’s quality has declined. But has anyone else noticed the ubiquity of these types of posts? Is this some kind of guerrilla marketing campaign for a stealth startup? If so, can they do iMessage next?
47 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 88.7 ms ] threadNow 'site:news.ycombinator.com' and 'site:reddit.com' are sad norms — like condoms.
The draft title of this comment was '9 Reasons You Can't Google Expert Feedback', but my cat came and looked at me with immeasurable disappointment.
https://you.com/search?q=cat%20NSAIDs%20side%20effect&fromSe...
https://you.com/search?q=steroids%20side%20effects%20on%20ca...
A large chunk of the internet, as it used to be, is still there. You just can't find it in the sea of aggressively search engine optimized (and often machine generated) junk that it has to compete with on Google. You can't find it on Reddit or Facebook or Twitter either, because none of their algorithms favor that sort of content. This creates an illusion that it doesn't exist. But it does.
The solution to this problem is search engine diversity. If you have multiple search engines with incompatible algorithms and disparate views on quality, then even if you manage to game one of the algorithms effectively, that search engine will just lose popularity and your SEO will be less useful. The winning strategy becomes to attempt to SEO against multiple contradictory algorithms, which is something that will never be as successful as manipulating Google alone.
Given Google's role in pushing stuff like Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), I'd say that Google's role in degrading the world's internet experience goes way beyond being an innocent bystander.
Sure, there is a lot of crap, more than ever, but finding the good stuff in the pile of crap is what search engines like Google are for.
I don't know why Google search results appear to be worse. Bing (and its many proxies) are not getting better either, so it is probably not only Google's fault.
Among the explanation I can think of:
- There is a cognitive bias: results are not actually worse
- There is an arms race between search engines and people trying to game the results (SEO), and SEO is winning
- There is a recent disconnect between what is in best interest for Google (and Microsoft) to show you and what is best for the user.
- We are reaching some technical limits. We went from simple indexing, to PageRank, to deep learning, constantly improving, and now we are stagnating.
- Google (and Microsoft) is suffering the large company syndrome, which is like SEO form the inside: employees optimize for their paycheck instead of the quality of the end product, and the corporate structure can't make these goals match.
What I don't believe:
- Google is turning evil: Google is not evil, Google just wants to make money, it has always been the case, and giving out great results made Google a trillion dollar company. AFAIK, Google is not owned by Satan, it has no reason to "turn evil" unless it makes them money, and why it would abandon a "not evil" strategy that worked so well in the past requires some explanation.
- There is a simple solution: Google may be a corporate mess, but people there are not completely stupid. If there is a simple solution that fits in a random HN post, they would have done it. As they say, for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Until they have a serious threat from competition (you'll know this is the case when you hear a lot of non-technical people talking about "Binging" or "Yandexing" something instead of Googling) nothing will change.
That was a choice
it's a bit harder to find the best articles, but it's still better than the average google search.
Even if Google were on par with Bing (which I don’t find it is, but my interests may differ from the average HN case) I’d still want to see the company burn for its betrayal of its own mission, of the internet, and of humanity (I mean why not, while I’m being dramatic).
From “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, to “to present a peep-hole sized view of the world, where said view best suits the values and interests of Google and its sponsors.”
I hate Google because I stumbled on it in 1998 and it was sheer magic, but now it’s 1997 again. They were a really, really good company and deserved all the success. Too good to survive becoming a public megacorp. It’s like how people are sadder when the bright young student full of promise and dreams falls into drugs and alcohol and ruin, than when it happens to the one who was always a delinquent since they were four.
https://dkb.io/post/the-next-google
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=21796070
A few weeks ago I decided to switch to search.brave.com, because I read they build there own index. This is what I ultimately want from an alternative search engine, not relying on googles/bings results.
It then turned out, that at least their image search is not an own index at all, because the first site of results was 100% similar to googles image search.
Also it turned out, when searching with brave, all of a sudden I get to see these github clones in my results.
I am not sure about the reasons for all this, but I went back to qwant.
""" This site can’t be reached Check if there is a typo in ad.doubleclick.net.
Try: Running Windows Network Diagnostics Changing DNS over HTTPS settings DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN Check your DNS over HTTPS settings """
Bad thing is that Google is like ethanol for internet knowledge. What is not googleable, it is like not existing on web.