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Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
185 points by spaceman_2020 on Nov 30, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 151 comments
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?




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.


> 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


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.


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.


Coming soon (december!) $4-5/mo per user. Announcement tomorrow.


kagi.com/pricing shows that the teams plans allows unlimited users for $19 monthly plus $0.025/search


>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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


Not sure there is a bright line between scam and advertising


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


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.


>yandex.ru is more useful for anything that might have political connotations

unless, of course, the politics are .ru

;^)


What types of political content policing is Google engaged in on the search engine?


None on their search engine. The claim is likely specious.


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.


This discussion repeats, with a lot of comments, roughly once per month. Here's a sample:

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=29886423

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32209067

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31093439

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31427996

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339141

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31009713


What's weird is that there was a freakanomics episode that basically mirrors this comment section: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/


I think this is good, the more people we have coalescing around the problem, the more likely it is to spill out of HN into normie-ville.


Google is now a "recommendation engine" not a search engine...

I type something in and it ignores the words and presents something it thinks I might like.

For good measure, it prepends a word-spaghetti advert that's optimised on-the-fly to maximise confusion with the missing useful search result. When I accidentally click on it then they'll get paid.


Oh, that reminds me. How long has Youtube's search been so utterly useless and downright terrible? Whatever I enter, it interrupts the search results with recommendations THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH MY QUERY every 5 results. What the fuck, Google. Are you doing this on purpose? Did somebody piss in your cereal and you decided to collectively punish all of us? If that's not the case, who's responsible so I can go over to him and piss in his cereal?


Disclaimer: this is just my opinion, I have no idea what the actual reason is.

I think the problem is not malice nor stupidity.

Most youtube users are non-technical/layman people who don't really know what they want. They type "fun cat videos" or "minecraft" or whatever and want suggestions of popular things to see.

The technical people who know what they want are the minority so it's not profitable to create a separate search mode just for them, because they are tech-literate enough to figure out the idiosyncrasies.


True, it's not malice or stupidity, it's just "making money".


I feel like most major media companies (and this probably generalizes somehow to a larger subset of capitalist enterprises) go through a lifecycle that starts with fulfilling real demand and ends with increasingly desperate attempts to generate fake demand. The exact mechanisms and motivations seem to vary (e.g. TV networks deciding which shows are worthy of "prime time" vs. YouTube trying to goose its engagement metrics), but the overall arc is strikingly similar.


NSFL example when I tried to search for "reply girl" videos because I wanted to know what they were: (seriously NSFW and definitely not appropriate for HN) https://i.imgur.com/gaOSfbd.png

Google. I want compensation for emotional damage. What is this crap? Those aren't even the worst recommendations in those results. IT GETS WORSE.


BUT HOW ELSE WILL YOU KNOW WHAT "PEOPLE ALSO WATCHED"?


I've been putting it exactly this way ("recommendation engine") for years. Whatever algorithms Google is using, they're absolutely terrible at distinguishing the considerations of relevance to a specific query on one hand and broader tranches of popularity on the other hand.

Unfortunately, nobody else seems to be doing much better. I've found that DuckDuckGo's results suddenly got drastically worse a few months ago: markedly fewer results overall, and the results that do show up have worse relevance (in particular, generic pages about the closest major city, e.g. its official homepage or Wikipedia article, tend to show up for no obvious reason).


I'm also finding the same difficulties with DuckDuckGo.

I don't think Google is "terrible" at anything; they know their stuff. But they have created peverse incentives around advertising which lead to this.

They're paid by the advert clicks, so if you actually find a search result you're not clicking on an advert.

The definition of an advert is "I want to push something at you that's only indirectly relevant to what you are looking for, and I'm willing to pay for that" -- that's what an advert _is_.

In my simple brain, I'd happily see Google paid per-display (not click) of adverts. Then my incentives (to find a search result) have a fighting chance of aligning with theirs. Show me the advert, in a separate column marked "adverts".

But I appreciate this is a vast over-simplification their broader business.


Then they try to keep you using the system longer


Yes! I hate this so much. The only search engine that respects what I type in seems startpage these days.

Other search engines give me results that are useless most of the time, because they do not contain all my carefully chosen search terms.


I also use Google in the same way. Google is really amazing as a recommendation engine for finding keywords. Then you just have to get those keywords and put them in a real search engine.


What would be a real search engine according to you?


If it's generalist Duckduckgo / Yandex, otherwise directly search on specialized sites (wiki, anidb, algolia, reddit, youtube, ...).


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..


- 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.


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.


-"negative keyword" is the way to get the old behavior.


> 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.


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)


maybe you.com or neeva.com? never really explored then on a daily basis, but they seem really good.


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.


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.


Google ignores their own SEO recommendations and bad practices regarding deranking.


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.


So true. Search results now represent the best gamers on the planet, not valuable information. It sucks.


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.


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.


+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)


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!


Same here, in french language. Kagi is awesome (paying user too).


"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.


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.


The quality has dropped massively, even compared to 5 years ago.

Partly it is an input issue. Interesting conversations are increasingly happening in walled gardens like Telegram.

Academic websites rarely show up any longer. Even for simple keywords the number of search results is sometimes only 8 pages. If you read all of them or your queries get too specific, you are classified as a bot and get the "unusual activity" nag screen.

It was good while it lasted. I think Google could be disrupted now.


If you boil this down, it’s actually a fundamental issue with Google’s ranking algorithm not keeping up with the times. They’re now a monopoly giant with zero incentive to innovate.

We all know the algorithm is too easily gamed (1)(2), but they make way too much money to ever blow it up and start from scratch.

Why care about the free results below the line, when the real goal is to get people to click on the ads at the top of the SERP?

——-

1. If it’s general information you’re looking for, you’re hit with low-quality keyword spam sites, with 900 ads playing all over the page. Google makes the vast majority of its money on ads, so they can’t penalize sites bloated with ads due to anti-trust issues.

2. If you’re doing research on products/software/etc, the results in almost every category are now bloated with affiliate marketing spam. Again, Google cannot de-rank sites that monetize this way due to anti-trust.


I switched to kagi and the results are far better since. I can block SEO spam results like pinterest, and boost SO/Reddit/language docs results.


This is by far the greatest advantage Kagi has over Google and is frankly something we should expect from any search engine created since the turn of the century.


It stopped being helpful a while ago. It's now moved into being harmful.

A popular scheme among shady SEOs and marketers is "rank and rent." This is where they choose a major city and a common contracting service (eg, plumbing, carpet cleaning, fence building, home remodeling, etc.).

Then they register domains using generic search terms. They build a website presenting itself as an independent local business. They even go as far as lying on the about us pages claiming years of experience.

They create content on the site, social media profiles, and business listings.

When the site begins to rank well enough to generate leads, they either rent the website to a local contractor and/or sell them the leads.

It sounds helpful, but it's shady. First, they're usually competing with the local contractors for search space. Second, they usually rely heavily on fake Google Business Profiles.

While the latter practice violates Google's guidelines, getting them removed is tough. That's because they pay local residents to "borrow" their home addresses. This allows them to get the verification code sent out by Google to verify addresses.

For our family business, we've even had them report our Google Business Profile on several occasions because we were outranking them. Then they had the gaul to try and rent one of their websites to us.

In the end, the practice is harmful to local contractors and customers who don't realize they going through a middle man.


Didn't grubhub and ilk effectively insert themselves this way for food service to a lot of restaurants?

Somewhat relatedly, I know my local tech hub has a couple places that do leadgen like this for financial verticals and it has been... lucrative. In my local cases, usually either a license or a snapshot of supporting technology is part of the deal and the vertical is spun out as a new entity to the acquirer. Rinse and repeat several years later, when the "acquirer" has years-old versions of the original stuff and needs something fresh to reinvigorate their pipeline...


Speaking of software engineering related searches, the quality of the results have gone off the cliff. Now instead of seeing the original github issue, pull request or discussion, the first search results point to some crappy websites that mirror the original content. The UI/UX of those websites is awful: part of the content is hidden behind a registered account, they are slow, I get popups and other garbage.

Google Search needs to be disrupted and, while I've tried using DuckDuckGo, I don't think that's it. However, my concern is that so much of the really good user content is hidden behind walled gardens, such as FB groups, discord, slack etc.


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.


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!"


It isn’t a keyword search in the first place. Your query gets fed through a NLP AI, so you need to use English.


I suspect the use of NLP AI is the primary reason for Google's decline.


If Google wants to improve it needs to place bans on domains using automatically generated content and threaten lawsuits if the webmasters try to evade the ban. The bigger problem is that most content is no longer on the public world wide web, it is on private chats in Discord and on closed Facebook groups.


How about when they promise you there's thousands of results, then somehow there isn't a third page of those results...


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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).


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.


I recently went through a very similar experience as yours and agree that the medical sites provided by Google are basically pamphlet material. It has indeed become very hard to get detailed, complex information from simply googling things, to the point that I don't trust getting valid info from a google search. Instead, I look for books by authors that are cross-referenced by multiple sources, I look at forums to see what different people agree/disagree on. In other words, I like to look at people from different backgrounds and places agreeing on similar issues or facts to confirm that the possibility of information being true is larger than otherwise.


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..


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.


Thank you, in Firefox it seems a bit more complicated, cannot seem to find a way to add a search engine..


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


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)


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.


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


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.


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.


Oh well. I stopped using Google entirely around 2006-2008-ish and I never looked back. I do not know the exact time I stopped, but it was way before the company was called "Alphabet" and before smartphones really took off. Back then Google was a Search Engine with an advertising company, but I was getting annoyed by what I thought was mixed interest (ads/information) as reflected by the increase in their analytics tag being put on lots of web sites and I thought I'd do the experiment of blocking them out and see how that panned out (some thoughts about privacy mattered as well). So, I stopped using Google, and not only that: I blocked Google.

Now I use all kinds of other Search Engines and I always find an answer to whatever problem I'm searching a solution for.

(edit: elaborated slightly)


What do you use now?


In South Korea, the domestic search engine giant Naver also operates a blog platform and the search engine is partially optimized to surface blog content, partially because this simplifies the indexing problem to the few sources that are dominant in Korean-language content.

That has an interesting effect on how Koreans access information. Sometimes it works out badly, because top search result is not subject to any wisdom of crowds but often just one person's anecdotal view. On the other hand, you often find high-effort content by informed individuals or direct experience reports instead of SEO spam much easier than on Google.

My wife is Korean and much more fluent in the lang than I am. Her Naver search often outperforms my Google search lately in speed and quality.


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...


I agree! The top 7 links are usually all ads anyway, or low quality content like you mentioned. I tend to use Bing (not much better) but only switch to Google for getting scores, e.g. 'world cup' to see the current games.

Seems like search could go in two directions (away from Google): Personally curated search results, not sure of a good example on this but thinking of something that takes the best reddit comments on a query, something like that. Or search with the GPT-3 models, a recent demo that's cool is: https://metaphor.systems/


It's not just you. Feels like unless I'm searching a specific quoted error message all I get are what read like vague non-insightful AI-generated articles that were fed whatever keywords I searched on. Usually from a very generic almost humorously content-farm-sounding domain.

I've recently spun up a self-hosted SearXNG instance which, while it doesn't really solve that problem, pulls and collates top results from a bunch of different search engines on the back-end, so the page 1 ratio of actually useful results to SEO garbage feels a little better to me in most cases.


Why are you surprised. Querying others for useful or authoritative answers, whether it is something as inconsequential as tips for an upcoming trip or matters of life and death has always being a complex task fraught with risks. Our response has been relying on networks of trust, building up indicators of authority through scholarship (proof of work :-), vetting for potential conflicts of interest, sniffing out malevolent objectives and blacklisting bad actors etc. etc.

We have somehow assumed that all this can automated away. We've got what we deserve.


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.


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?


Judging by the "related searches" and supposed questions that people apparently ask, Google assumes the average user to be an imbecile and generates search results that cater to them most accurately. Unfortunately on the other hand it also seems that individually catering search results poses its own issues. Some folks are concerned that this could be used by bad actors to influence certain people (like targeting specific ads to specific groups of people) which is already commonplace.


Google results are way too political and censored nowadays, if I wanted to get some uncensored results I have to go to Yandex, Brave, maybe Kagi, but I agree Reddit is good option as well.


Yeah the worst are the long wordy articles that I could have written myself with the knowledge I’m bringing to the search (which is usually limited).

Yesterday I was trying to figure out the World Cup sub rules and I knew they had gone up to 5 but my friend was saying “are they limited to three sub occasions to make the five subs?” and the top ten results were complete garbage with any actual info in the 5th paragraph and none were aware of the limits except that the rules had recently moved up to 5 from 3…


Its not just you. I noticed this since around 2017. They changed the algorithm to control information. Its eternal September, the powers that be don't want the broader public knowing too much stuff.

Before the internet was only accessible to a small percentage of the world population so they would let them have any information they would want but as more and more people enter the internet they need to control the information to control the population.


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.


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.


YouTube search is even worse than Google. Takes 5 to 10 searches to find what you are looking for.


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.


this is everything you need to know for the current state: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/gen-bypassing-google-tikto...

I personally do something similar, pretty much all my searches have 'reddit' as an extra keyword.


I wish I could replace "reddit" with "forum" or some other type of category as opposed to reddit itself, especially with how much of reddit is already bought for (marketing, bots, enforced echo-chambers, etc.)


Reddit is replacing fora, unfortunately.


Last night tried to research some lodging for a vacation. Very poor google experience. Just ads and the current SEO contest winners.


Google's problem is akin to Windows virus problem. All the hackers wrote viruses for Windows, because that's what everyone used. Now the hackers retrained as SEOs and they attack the search engine that everyone uses.

Switched to Bing generally (why use extra redirection in the form of DDG?). Image searches are better done by Yandex.


Pretty much all useful areas are being spammed ad nauseam. Humans are being overwhelmed with information overload and increasingly that information is AI generated or in some way misleading. If someone can implement the online version of Heinlein’s honest witness idea that would make the world a much better place.


Interesting. I use brave search on a daily basis and when I can't find what I'm looking for, I use !g as q last resort. For dev inquiries google is still king (Brave search is getting better and they're focusing on crawling SO posts).

Google is focusing on ads and it's really hurting them.


I keep finding top 5 results that are literal reproductions of SO questions and answers. It's genuinely useless to find rundowns of products--I either go to a few trusted sites or search with "site:www.reddit.com". God help you if you're doing any Windows troubleshooting.


There is a growing possibility that any search engine using advertising-based business model will either not exist or will have to carry 'for entertainment' label in cca 10 years (as in 'do not take these results seriously, they are here for your entertainment only', similar to the disclaimer some ad-based media like Fox news already has in their terms to avoid liability [1]).

The conflict of interest produced by ad-based business model is so strong and will continue to grow like a malignant body. Public's erosion of trust in information served by an advertising company and at the same time realization by the users that what information we put in our heads is as important as what food we put in our bodies will inevitably lead to a major shift in the way search works.

We will see the rise of search engines with paid subsription business models that will align the interests between the information provider and customers (I am the founder of one, not trying to promote it but participate in the discussion close to my heart) and increasingly better AI that will be able to condendse multiple pages of information to produce contextual answer with references (an example here in fighting misinformation [2]).

Once we have this, there will be only one way for search to go and that is becoming better and better for the users, as the positive feedback loop between the search engine and its customers will drive such behavior.

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/terms-of-use (beginning of the third paragraph)

[2] https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1597423319598305280


I agree and IMO Google is the new Yahoo, just a lot bigger. So we all need new search engine, again?


A big problem is the real World Wide Web is getting smaller.


>The medical results are absolutely hopeless.

I recommend skipping Google and going straight to:

https://www.nhs.uk/

https://www.msdmanuals.com/home


Google used to have an option to exclude sites from search - but then advertising... bit painful especially with all the scraping and frequent domain changes now, but better than nothing. IIRC there's some browser extensions which can do this for you.


"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." Thank you! I agree 100%.


Unless I add in quoted search terms with "site:" filter i feel like it has become harder and harder to find "Quality" results. I am almost on the verge of creating personalised crawlers with custom search capability for personal usage.


Almost all of my searches start with site:reddit.com, possibly even a specific subreddit.


Google+iCloud Relay is an even bigger mess.

I get a captcha ("our systems have detected automated queries") and the wrong language. I suspect this might be deliberate to get users to turn off iCloud Relay as YouTube doesn't do this.


It's not just you. The quality of Google search results has been declining for a long time. It reached the point of being no better than alternatives a while back for me. These days, it's worse than several of them.


I sometimes see surprisingly good results from this gpt3 based search engine, if I take a bit of time to write out a sentence or two:

https://metaphor.systems/


I get surprised by so many AI startups using discord as their product interface. First time I saw it used, I was like, don't you have enough funds to build your own interface? Still find it jarring to go from a slick looking site to a discord login. They probably don't want to reimplement chat, but I'm sure there's got to be a couple of opensource chat projects out there..

I don't know - haven't used discord too much to know, does it serve a lot of utility to invite bots to your own server and stuff.. is that a big plus?


I think with discord they can easily collect lots of examples of prompts + results to feed to their model to improve it.


Google is an advertising engine, not a search engine. Someone has to pay for Google search and users don't. Advertisers pay. And what is advertising? It is a way to convince you to spend your money unnecessarily.


Hey you can search for ads with it. I find their ads relevant - sometimes.


It's just you. Google is an extremely useful search engine. As a demonstration of its abilities, note that searching for "Is Google becoming useless as a search engine" with our without the quote marks turns up this obscure article that's only 1 hour old.

I use Google hundreds of times every day. I use it to search C++ STL documentation, where I generally get an exact hit in the first slot. I use it to find out whether some cafe is open or closed right now. I use it to find city records.

Your actually complaint appears to be about the web itself. Yes, the web contains a lot of junk and often does not contain the article you believe should exist, which is annoying. But no search engine can make good articles spring into existence.


Kagi managed to make good articles “spring into existence”. Your trust that Google is showing you the whole Internet is misplaced.


Really? I also have Kagi so here I searched for the brain cancer with which I was once afflicted. Top results: all garbage of the type the OP is whining about.


For tech stuff there is customized google search with whitelist on https://notrashsearch.github.io/ .


I only use google with the site keyword helper now. For searching the net in general it's not entirely useless, but I haven't felt lucky enough to smash that lucky button in ages.


Not only you. I remember when Google was new.

Amazing. You typed in your query and pretty much always found something relevant.

Now the standard procedure is to open the first 10 results in a new tab and weed through them.


See also: https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying


I no longer use Google because it was serving up incorrect, corporate sponsored answers to my technical questions. I pay for kagi.com, I highly recommend it.


It's bad. I used to be the guy who could find anything. Now it's a "2022 here's what you need to know from my sponsored links!"


It's surprising how often I'm just adding "site:reddit.com" to get some semblance of a human answer to questions.


Yeah, it's getting increasingly riddled with spam. I use kagi.com and DuckDuckGo and pay for the former.


For medical isssues one thing you can try is searching for .edu or .gov web sites. site:*.edu should work.


Since last 6+ years, my default search engine is either Ecosia or DuckDuckGo. F*ck Google.


Not just you. There's a thread about this topic on here almost monthly


I use a technique of going to the search items beyond the first ten pages.


Brave search is great.


I think its just you


Verbatim Mode


[flagged]


But Yandex is Russian. Aren't we supposed to be boycotting everything Russian these days?


Its fine as long as you are not looking for political content in relation to Russia or Ukraine.

I suspect Yandex is "older" in design, so does not suffer as much from the SEO spam that is optimized to rank on Google.


Not only that, but Bing search results look highly competitive now, if not better in various comparisons.


Embrace search diversity: https://blog.mojeek.com/2022/02/search-choices-enable-freedo... (self-disclosure: Mojeek CEO)


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.




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