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

185 points by spaceman_2020 ↗ HN
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?

157 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] thread
aww_dang
The Youtube video tutorials popping up when searching for specific documentation or programming language features is especially disheartening.

I've also noted that COVID, vaccine related or climate fact checks are pushed to the top when I search for specific topics which are only tangentially related at best.

The outcome is similar for me. I find myself using domain specific searches more and more. This is unfortunate, because it creates a monoculture of information.

grumpymouse
I searched for a product on Youtube recently, and the main result was a computer-generated voice narrating words that felt like they had been generated from the product spec (rather than written by somebody with experience with the product)!

It will be interesting to see where we are in a few years time.

worldofmatthew
YouTube search is even worse than Google. Takes 5 to 10 searches to find what you are looking for.
aww_dang
YouTube search is almost unusable for me. The geotargetting stuff gives me totally unrelated content in a language I have no love for or related languages I cannot understand at all.
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..

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)
marcooliv
maybe you.com or neeva.com? never really explored then on a daily basis, but they seem really good.
desumme
I use and really like neeva, even paid for the annual subscription.

It's incredibly nice not to be shown ads, especially mixed in with search results.

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.
aww_dang
-"negative keyword" is the way to get the old behavior.
erdos4d
When I do quotes on google I often get hits that have the text in the description somewhere but when I open the page search for it, nada. I don't get why google can't figure out that quotes mean we actually do want the text on the page when we open it. They have a workforce the size of a small city and they can't get the most basic aspects of their job right.
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.

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.

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.
jaggs
So true. Search results now represent the best gamers on the planet, not valuable information. It sucks.
OnuRC
I agree and IMO Google is the new Yahoo, just a lot bigger. So we all need new search engine, again?
worldofmatthew
A big problem is the real World Wide Web is getting smaller.
Mortiffer
Try adding site:uptodate.com for medical information. A large percentage of US hospitals pay for access to the full app for all their docotrs. The idea is that UpToDate pays people to constantly review the literature on topics and update the summary in their article for a fast reference on the job. (Not sure what the downside to this free web version is but you can find the whole catalogue on your typical pirate sites)
femboy
I find myself having to add `site:reddit.com` to an increasingly large of queries to have any useful result. I wonder if I should make a little userscript that can add it for me with a hotkey/text combination..
seanwilson
In Chrome, right-click the address bar and select "Manage search engines" and you can add shortcuts like "r <search term>" to search reddit, stackoverflow and wherever.
femboy
Thank you, in Firefox it seems a bit more complicated, cannot seem to find a way to add a search engine..
fiachamp
I've been working on a tool that also filters out the cruft comments from reddit / ugc searches. We just came out with a chrome extension as well. Would love your feedback on it: www.thegigabrain.com
candiddevmike
Almost all of my searches start with site:reddit.com, possibly even a specific subreddit.
borbulon
I do not disagree with anything you're asserting here. Google is a mess of gamed results most of the time. The internet in many places has become a series of sites searching for eyes to get ad dollars. The only thing I think I'd question is your claim of being a "power user." A power user would be able to construct queries that removed (or at least lessened) the gamed results.
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!"

Filligree
It isn’t a keyword search in the first place. Your query gets fed through a NLP AI, so you need to use English.
JohnFen
I suspect the use of NLP AI is the primary reason for Google's decline.
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.
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.
bacchusracine
How about when they promise you there's thousands of results, then somehow there isn't a third page of those results...
MonkeyMalarky
I have no idea what you mean! Receiving 15 images and then the message: "The rest of the results might not be what you're looking for" is totally useful! Well, much more than when it decides to fill half the image search results with ads to products...
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.

otikik
Breville toaster: I bought one that was recommended by my mum’s favorite food influencer. It had no power down button. Ok, I will unplug it when not using it, annoying but ok. But then the Teflon on the hot plates wore off… and it isn’t possible to replace them. You are supposed to buy a new one when this happens? Never again, never will trust that influencer ever again.
fiachamp
I've been working on www.thegigabrain.com to address this problem. Filtering out the noise from reddit and other UGC sources to get the most useful answers
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.
10729287
Same here, in french language. Kagi is awesome (paying user too).
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)

superdisk
God, there's something uniquely bad about searching for Python standard library stuff. I swear every time I search `python len` or something and w3schools, geeksforgeeks, programiz, and all sorts of other annoying useless SHIT appears I want to scream. Just show me the Python docs!
Tozen
Not only that, but Bing search results look highly competitive now, if not better in various comparisons.
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).
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.

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.
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
seydor
Hey you can search for ads with it. I find their ads relevant - sometimes.
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.
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
ergonaught
I almost never get relevant searches out of Bing. It's bad enough I have (seriously) wondered how much Google pays them to operate in order to avoid antitrust prosecution.
kurisufag
>yandex.ru is more useful for anything that might have political connotations

unless, of course, the politics are .ru

;^)

sho_hn
What types of political content policing is Google engaged in on the search engine?
rhaway84773
None on their search engine. The claim is likely specious.
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

bin_bash
they didn't "bet the farm" on that at all, they've been desperately trying to diversify out of search advertising for basically the life of the company. Of course, they haven't succeeded but not because they're relying on search ads.
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.
dwighttk
Not sure there is a bright line between scam and advertising
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

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

Doing a Google search for "cellular phone" now returns those poor-quality results.

Google's just... not good.

iamthepieman
I really wish Kagi had family plans. I would love to have my whole family using Kagi but with 7 people in the household, it makes it rather expensive.
islon
That's the reason I don't use kagi. I even sent them an email to ask about it and the response was "pay per person". A shame really, I was really happy with kagi in the beta.
QuantumGood
kagi.com/pricing shows that the teams plans allows unlimited users for $19 monthly plus $0.025/search
freediver
Coming soon (december!) $4-5/mo per user. Announcement tomorrow.
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.

MattDemers
I mean, that just introduces another level of crap as sites clamour to be on the "not garbage" list; it'll end up like the issues Twitter has/had with verification.
basch
That's why you need the right screeners, and the right metamoderation tools that when people start making a mistake, a more authoritative trusted person can invalidate the lower bad input.
zkanter
Google started with nerds; nerd learned to write good queries. Then normies appropriated Google and wrote dumb queries in massive volume; Google optimized for handling dumb queries. To get good results today, you have to write dumb queries. For example, a nerd would never write a question as a search input – nerds would write a series of hyperrelevant keywords. Normies don’t understand keywords – they ask questions of Google, like it’s a person. So, only way to get good results for most queries is to reform them as questions.
a_bonobo
Google Search switched to transformers (NLP) to understand search queries, which led to a certain boomer-isation of Google search. Full English questions work much better now. https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understa...

HN is a very techy crowd that probably has muscle-memorised all the Google search tricks (possibly made obsolete by these transformers), I wonder how the 50+ non-tech crowd sees Google these days - perhaps it got better for them?

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s_dev
DDG is my default but I regularly switch back to Google if the result I want doesn't appear in the first or second search.
api
Yeah, it's getting increasingly riddled with spam. I use kagi.com and DuckDuckGo and pay for the former.
c-fe
I recently wanted to learn more about the python match operator and was hoping to find some good blog posts explaining them and I only found low effort, practically useless SEO sites that are probably all hyperoptimised for any searches containing python... At some point I just gave up.

In contrast, I also do SwiftUI development, and here you often find tons of useful, beautiful blogs from people where you can see that they really care about this and dont just do it for SEO.

SwiftUI example: - Google search "SwiftUI in app purchases" -> https://blckbirds.com/post/how-to-use-in-app-purchases-in-sw... (extremely helpful article, and they are only at the very bottom briefly advertising their book)

So in conclusion, I do agree, Google search is becoming useless as for popular searches, i just brings up trash.

_bohm
This is a large part of the reason I switched to Kagi, I can tell it to always promote, e.g., the Python official documentation to the top of my results
secretsatan
I find it easy to get good results for Swift in general most of the time, but I have a feeling it's because it's not one of the top languages.