Ask HN: Has anyone else been struggling with search lately?

Yup. Feels like we're being dissed.

> Whats going... That's trivially easy: The big gorilla engine is a monopoly and it "thinks" this is the way to make get more money.

What methods, algorythms, rational they're playing with - sorry, I got no chops in that lane.

Google search quality was deliberately harmed to boost ad revenue. Forcing you to search multiple times and refine your query means you see more ads and are more likely to click on them. Ads were also obviously prioritized over real search results long ago. The good guys within Google who wanted to preserve search quality lost the internal debate to the ad people. Emails that surfaced in the recent antitrust case strongly indicated this.

No, because I use seek.ninja. The LLM's are also better.

Have you tried Kagi?

I use Kagi and my search experience as never been better.

I gave up entirely and use LLMs unfortunately

Search is great, using Kagi. Just bought the family plan, never going back to google. Also FastMail.

I struggle more than ever to get Google to recognise my query and not a watered down interpretation of it. It was bad before and now it’s even worse. Yesterday I struggled to find the most popular salary tax calculator in our country.

From the other side there is also a massive drop in traffic reported by the entire industry. I am gearing up for a post-Google existence.

Kagi is still working pretty well for me. I think its partly that, being a paid-for product, the commercial incentives are different. And party that I can customise search results by promoting/demoting/blocking particular sources.

I have to use Google and Bing at work (I'm a developer) and the difference is very noticeable.

I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but what you describe fits with my experience as well. This article describes events since 2015 that also fit with the same thing: https://archive.org/details/search-timeline

Google is supposed to have decent competition, but for some reason it doesn’t.

Here to second Kagi, never going back to Google, etc.

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I found my Google reflex has become my AI reflex. I reach for whatever is nearest.

> What's going on? Why is the modern search experience so frustrating?

Because 1. They try to be smart asses and fail terribly.

If i search for a specific error message, i mean it. I don't want any crap which contains some of the words or AI generated content.

It is a shame for the whole western world that, one of the best search engines, from a results perspective, is Yandex

I’ve been on Kagi for several years now and haven’t noticed an issue.

They've essentially dropped a significant chunk of the Internet from their index. The goal was to fight blog spam, but from what I've seen, they've de-indexed anything that doesn't get significant traffic and coverage.

So if there's some obscure manual for a device out there, it won't be indexed. Your ability to find it isn't just hindered or reduced; it's basically zero.

Sounds like you've just woken up from the matrix. This is nothing new. Search engines have been degrading for ages. You just have to learn how to navigate them and not waste time. Also try less popular alternatives, like Yandex, Seznam, Baidu... DDG uses Bing on the backend and it shuffles results when you refresh the page or search the same thing again. Keep in mind that search engines nowadays are for making money and showing ads or otherwise promoted/paid content over relevant results.