If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

https://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives

by abhinavsharma • 4 years ago

285 457 4 years ago

moltke• 4 years ago

The truth is that normal people like abusive software. Using software that gives them freedom also gives them the responsibility to understand the behavior of the machine which is something they do not want. No amount of evangelism or possibly even education will fix this. IMO for their own good people who behave this way should not be allowed to use computers and should delegate the task to people who are willing to think through the consequences of using a particular piece of software.

Allowing normal people to use computers is cruel in the same way making a dog order its food over the telephone is.

dash2• 4 years ago

I use search.brave.com and it's usually OK. It fails on some complex queries. Unfortunately SEO spam for Google also catches Brave.

ncmncm• 4 years ago

Because Microsoft sucks too? Because browsers default to connecting to it?

hobz22• 4 years ago

i use opera on android, firefox in windows, safari on mac and duckduckgo for everything and have been for YEARS. I'm offended you're including me in your cohort. lol

TechBro8615• 4 years ago

Give it time.

turbinerneiter• 4 years ago

Im so used to the UI (down to the fonts, things I can't even name), that DuckDuckGo looks off to me. So although it is set as my standar search engine, I g! most of the time.

cruelty2• 4 years ago

Maybe you could write a Greasemonkey extension to redirect requests from Googles page to DuckDuckGo

post_break2• 4 years ago

I use DDG most of the time, then when I cant find technical stuff I g!. And let's be honest, bing is the king for porn.

dddnzzz334• 4 years ago

bing is the king for porn.

I would disagree. It is nice at the start but it shows the same things on the same search result forever. That is not something that you'd want in a Porn search engine, you'd want it to have some amount of randomization.

post_break2• 4 years ago

All I know is that I've fed bing some of the most obscure keywords to find what I'm looking for and it's been like "oh I know exactly the video you're looking for I've got you".

mathteddybear• 4 years ago

Curious thought, isn't in this area that the most important thing to avoid showing to the user certain undesirable result by accident? Not implying that bing ever failed to do that.

traceroute66• 4 years ago

Just use Startpage, its Google without the tracking.

DuckDuckGo is ok too.

TL;DR there's no reason to default to direct Google.

disintegore• 4 years ago

You still get Google results in the end, which are growing more full of blogspam and affiliate link farms every year.

spiderice• 4 years ago

Google results are the one thing keeping me on Google. Not sure why getting the almost indisputably best results would be bad. Even if they are getting worse, they're still miles ahead of anyone else.

I've been waiting for a Kagi invite for a while because I've heard good things on HN about it. Finally got one a couple weeks ago. Finally switched off of it and back to Google yesterday. The results weren't even in the same ballpark, despite me really wanting it to succeed.

SllX• 4 years ago

My standard line on this is that Google today is not as good as Google of (at this point more than) 10 years ago, but it is still the best available option today because nothing is as good as or better than Google of (at this point more than) 10 years ago.

That said there have been a stack of new search engine posts on HN in the last few months and I may have to update my priors once I’ve had a chance to actually investigate the new options.

EDIT: Maybe I should note that I’ve also been relying a lot more on Reddit too in the past year since Apollo has a decent search interface for Reddit and I’ve gotten used to processing new subs quickly and getting information out of them. If nothing else I usually at least have a stack of new terminology to feed my search queries elsewhere.

dariusj182• 4 years ago

Also, the internet is a far better and worse place than it was 10 years ago. So much more content, but astronomically more bad actors.

93po• 4 years ago

I think it's also only going to get worse when the amount of bad content and blog spam is 1000 times the ratio it is today due to really human-like AI writing. I am sure Google will find ways to detect this, but it will be a cat and mouse game for decades because at some point we won't be able to tell apart bad, lazy human writing from AI writing.

At some point the internet has to go to a circle of trust model with real identities tied to online content of any sort. I see no other way to curb this pending disaster than being able to block bad actors and bad actors having very limited means to publish under an alias.

ct0• 4 years ago

If you're referring to google search specifically, a major tool to combat the spammed ads in search that has helped me is available here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt...

https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs

anothernewdude• 4 years ago

Inertia

johndfsgdgdfg3• 4 years ago

I tell everyone to use Bing. It's decent, but better than using Google. Google invades our privacy, keeps users hostages for money. I wish Amazon has built a search engine so that Google's tyrannical regime on internet ends.

sithadmin2• 4 years ago

Amazon did build one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com

johndfsgdgdfg3• 4 years ago

Oh thank you. We should definitely promote this more.

AnimalMuppet• 4 years ago

How, exactly, does Google keep users hostage for money?

johndfsgdgdfg3• 4 years ago

G Suite Workspace users are being kept hostages by Google unless the users pay more money[1].

[1] https://www.ghacks.net/2022/01/20/google-ends-the-g-suite-le...

Gualdrapo• 4 years ago

I still use it mainly for non "standard" search:

- Its location feature is better than DDG or anything else - It has gotten worse a bit, but if I tell it to show me results from Colombia, 95% of the results it will return are from actual websites from Colombia. DDG will throw anything from Latin America, for example. Not to mention the disaster with Bing.

- Its image search feature is still more precise than others. Reverse search won't return sometimes what I'm looking for and I have to resort to Yandex/TinEye/Bing, but still. Oh, and it can search for SVGs, which others can't.

- Double quotes aren't returning exact matches, but other operators are working fine as far as I can tell. Filetype operator is great and way bigger than DDG's, cache operator is great for looking for a cached version of a website that is not working at the moment, the minus operator still works (sans the advertisements).

Melatonic4• 4 years ago

Generally I have found google to always work the best (location wise) when you just put a zip code at the end of your search query

penjelly• 4 years ago

i use brave and brave.search, havent had search issues since switching over.

falcolas• 4 years ago

The moat is worse than we think. New search engines are not only hobbled by the bandwidth and processing power and storage required to spider the web, but by the websites who will preemptively disallow them because they're not Google.

I can't imagine trying to build a new search engine when the landscape is intentionally (if justifiably) hostile to new search engines.

nr2x• 4 years ago

robots.txt is a joke tho.

mrkramer8• 4 years ago

Elaborate? It is the best thing web has for crawling rules. Yea ofc crawling rules can be broken and violated but all serious internet search engines respect robots.txt.

ALittleLight• 4 years ago

Can't you just set your user agent to Google bot?

pixl974• 4 years ago

You cant set your IP range to a Google IP

sithadmin2• 4 years ago

I'm defaulting to Brave, then falling back on DuckDuckGo, then Bing, then Google these days. Feels a lot like the early web again.

fdgsdfogijq2• 4 years ago

Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search.

These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that democracy has failed so lets replace it, replace with what? Its the best we can get given the alternatives, and its flaws will always be exploited.

taysix• 4 years ago

Not sure if you read the post. They don't advocate for replacing Google. They want to add onto Google and other search engines.

joering22• 4 years ago

Democracy would be best replaced with cashless society. Society based on everyone value of doing what they love doing most (aka hobbyist), and virtually everything else replaced by robots and technology we already have. This is what's coming eventually, but its not something that can be installed on the top of your "operating system"; you will have to format the whole hard-drive (civil war)

FastMonkey2• 4 years ago

I suppose in the absence of cash we would just force some people to do the necessary tasks that aren't anyone's favourite hobbies?

xboxnolifes• 4 years ago

I don't understand how any of that has anything to do with democracy.

zargon2• 4 years ago

No. Google is an actively hostile experience. Try it without adblock and get a taste of how most people get treated by Google. And for the search results, Kagi is already better for 90% of my queries.

It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)

fdgsdfogijq2• 4 years ago

I think that with current technology, beating google at the scale they run at is impossible. I think with advances it NLP, its possible. But right now, its pie in the sky.

Kuinox2• 4 years ago

I disagree, Kagi is not yet "better in 90% of the queries" than google, it's good enough to not have to launch google in 90% of it's query.

black_puppydog2• 4 years ago

Came here to mention kagi. Very happy user here. The no-spam results make it so much more useful as a tool. Also, "block this site from myresults forever" gives so much more agency to the user than anything Google has release in years. Googles "we know better" just reads as a big middle finger to me.

buildbot• 4 years ago

+1 kagi was the first alternative engine that has passed all of my random tests, mostly weird cameras and python coding searches…

sltkr• 4 years ago

Kagi requires users to sign up (even though it's currently free?) which is 1000x more user-hostile than anything Google does and makes it a nonstarter as far as I'm concerned.

ApolloFortyNine• 4 years ago

Even my grandparents figured out how to scroll by the ads at the top of Google search. Actively hostile is a bit much.

Tenoke• 4 years ago

I use Google without AdBlock on my phone daily and it's not quite that different.

notriddle• 4 years ago

Kagi is probably a lot more usable, right now. Nobody’s trying to game it.

As long as it remains niche, it might actually stay that way indefinitely. I’m just worried about Google taking inspiration from them. I bet whatever “tricks” they use now would get a lot less effective if they did.

huynhhacnguyen2• 4 years ago

Do I have to wait for their invitation to join the beta list before I can try Kagi? The comments here are promising and I tried to take a look for myself but apparently only beta users are allowed in at the moment.

jpalomaki• 4 years ago

What’s the story behind Kagi - are they somehow related to Google?

To my knowledge besides the old experiments with client side search, Google has never allowed (even paid) api access to their search. I thought they did not do this, because it would have allowed somebody to jump start a search engine that might eventually become a competitor.

Kagi seems to be open about their Google relationship, so I assume they have agreement in place.

This even feels like some experiment from Google to create a premium, paid, search product (like what they did with YouTube).

bsder• 4 years ago

Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine.

No, they are underestimating the difficulty of funding a good search engine.

I liked the runnaroo search very much as did several of my friends. The guy who ran it couldn't fund it. He shut it down.

Altavista (Yeah, that far back) had a nice feature where it would draw a cluster graph of your search results. So, if you searched for "python", it would show your results but would also draw a little graph and you could see that "Hey, there are two clusters here--programming and reptiles." You could then click on the "programming" node and the "reptiles" cluster would go away. It allowed you to drill through irrelevant stuff really quickly.

Note how that feature doesn't exist today--in spite of orders of magnitude more programmers being thrown at search, graph algorithms, and nifty Javascript web UIs. I wonder why ...

(/sarcasm in case you missed it. I don't wonder why. Such a feature would let you drill through irrelevant Ad and SEO garbage too quickly and would impact Google's revenue.)

aghilmort3• 4 years ago

building Breeze, which does pretty much that minus the cool UI angle, and yeah, only way for it to work at scale is premium like neeva, kagi, etc.

we started out with topics and then moved to web, and are now folding topics into the web search experience, it's really hard stuff to get right

our first main filter was blogs, which is getting renamed to posts for a mix of reasons, adding forums shortly, along with other more specific topics

re: https://breezethat.com/ -- & better on laptop / desktop atm, premium version will be ad-free

thomassmith65• 4 years ago

  Honestly I think people are completely underestimating 
  the difficulty of a good search engine

I suspect that is not difficult so much as expensive.

Boutique search engines pop up all the time here on HN, but they can't compete fairly against Google, without the resources to crawl a billion webpages day after day.

charcircuit3• 4 years ago

Google also keeps a copy of the "entire" web in RAM to search it faster.

joe_the_user• 4 years ago

I'd say you're half right. Things are harder now and the success of Google has contributed to this.

However, I think Google has severely degenerated from just two years ago, when most of the problems were fully in effect.

Google is a bit of a product of the situation of scams being the easiest way anyone makes online.

kodah3• 4 years ago

Nobody is coming along with a better search engine

https://neeva.com/ better than pretty much any solution (Qwant, DDG, etc) I've personally tested. It also indexes specific websites like StackOverflow, GitHub, and GMail.

Edit:

Neeva does require an account to create because eventually the product is going to require a subscription.

sokoloff2• 4 years ago

"See results for '<my search term>' Create your free Neeva account."

"To continue searching and access all of Neeva's features, create your free account. Already a Neeva member? Sign in"

Yeah, no.

AlexCoventry• 4 years ago

I experimented with neeva, because I'd really like an alternative to Google, even a paid one. However, I found its results pretty disappointing. At least for my work, I had to go back to Google, because I don't want to waste time "on the clock."

quantified2• 4 years ago

DuckDuckGo has been good enough for my day-to-day use. I’ll use Google for a few things.

kaan0200• 4 years ago

Neeva has a free tier (with only access to the search engine, so people can still test the search aspect), but when you pay for it now you ALSO get LastPass premium and Bitdefender VPN Premium as well, along with all their integrations into your system.

If you trust these people are doing what they say, it's a pretty good deal for securing your internet spaces and trying to get away from google, imo.

DantesKite• 4 years ago

I don't think these posts should be blocked, because they create discussion, which creates interest, which incentivizes for problem solving.

Humans are incredibly good at solving engineering problems they can see from a mile away, although it takes time to solve.

RC_ITR2• 4 years ago

The progression that people almost always forget:

1) New system comes out that indexes/controls/regulates a naively created dataset

2) Data consumers adopt that system and experience benefits

3) Data suppliers learn rules of system and take advantage of it to improve the positioning of their data, thus breaking the intent of a system built on the assumption of naive creation

4) Users complain about the broken system

5) New entrants realize that the original system actually solved the core problem really well, and there are no easy ways to solve the 'gaming the system' problem

6) Flawed system remains the best available option indefinitely

It's like entropy, there's just no fighting it.

EDIT: And to extend this beyond Google - do you see a lot of long text blocks in 7 second tik tok videos? That's because the creator found a way to game the algorithm.

pixl974• 4 years ago

3) ban abusive data providers?

jessriedel4• 4 years ago

Honest question: what else besides web search has followed this progression?

Kye• 4 years ago

People said this about pre-Google search engines. Someone will figure out the next PageRank and give us another 10-20 years of useful search.

skinnymuch5• 4 years ago

There were many multiples less people online. The internet economy was almost nothing back then.

There’s no comparing how things were in the 90s and early 00s to now.

Every social media company before Facebook faltered or began losing a good chunk of their user base fairly quickly. Until that stopped happening with Facebook and IG for over a decade now.

Reddit’s position has also been here for a decade now.

space_rock2• 4 years ago

Sorry but duckduckgo or probably any other search is better than Google at this moment

temp• 4 years ago

Not everyone lives in the US and/or an English-speaking country.

I can't find shit with DDG and the experience is like using Google from 20 years ago when it didn't have any of its bells and whistles.

bricemo• 4 years ago

Some side by side comparisons just now:

"pizza near me" - Google suggested a well rated place within 5 miles. DuckDuckGo suggested a pizza place 91 miles away??

"busted kids lip" - Google says gauze and a cold pack. DuckDuckGo says salt water??

"best monitor for mac" - Google says Dell Ultrasharp with 4.5 stars and 738 ratings on amazon. DuckDuckGo says BenQ 4 stars with 174 ratings on amazon?

how is this better?

Gtex555• 4 years ago

Could you please go into more detail , I agree with you btw.

huynhhacnguyen2• 4 years ago

I believe blocking an honest discussion is never going to do more good than harm. The original post doesn't even suggest that we should overthrow our Google overlord to replace it with whatever we find interesting. It's just pointing various limitations and issues that Google users are facing right now. And apparently from the replies here, there are even more aspects that people are have troubles with.

It's true building a good search engine is an gigantic undertaking but if Google (or someone else entirely) is aware of the current issues, they may have ideas to tackle those problems and then we can all share a better internet.

Same for the argument with democracy and any other similar arguments, pointing out problems within our current institutions doesn't remotely mean that we want to abolish everything and start from scratch.

mohanmcgeek6• 4 years ago

Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then

Has anyone considered the possibility that all this Machine learning and AI models is what made Google and YouTube searches worse?

JohnFen7• 4 years ago

I strongly suspect that's a very large part of what is making everything worse. Or, at least, there does seem to be a correlation in time between the implementation of ML and the degradation of the quality of results.

np-• 4 years ago

We’re all just searching Reddit anyway and it’s just easier to use Google to search Reddit than to use Reddit’s own search tool.

Koshkin• 4 years ago

Paraphrasing Stroustrup, there are only two kinds of services: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

mohanmcgeek6• 4 years ago

But now with the benefit of hindsight, we do know how it turned out for c++. right?

ubvhgidft• 4 years ago

If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

If prison food sucks why do prisoners eat it?

dymk• 4 years ago

https://www.google.com/search?q=list+of+alternate+search+eng...

philovivero• 4 years ago

If Vladimir Putin sucks, why is everyone letting him be in charge over there? If Donald Trump sucks why did we ele-- If Barack Obama sucks-- The FBI sucks. Facebook sucks. C sucks. The WWW sucks. Fiat currency sucks.

Maybe the real truth is "the top N% of everything sucks?"

dariusj182• 4 years ago

Rule 44 of the internet

http://web.archive.org/web/20070110035128/http://www.encyclo...

Edit: NSFW

mcbutterbunz• 4 years ago

The truth is, everything sucks. The more you use something the more you see its faults. The grass is always greener...

Shadonototra• 4 years ago

because it is good, the only people who complain about it are on pro-mozilla mediums, even though mozilla sells their users to google, the irony :)

dkersten• 4 years ago

I actually don’t use google (search or other services aside form YouTube) very often. As for “everyone”, I assume habit and momentum. People are used to it so it’s hard to change to something else. Many people also don’t know what alternatives there are.

frenchy• 4 years ago

This article is really not that good, it suggests a bunch of obvious reasons why Google has a moat (Chrome, everyone's personal data) and misses some others (brand recognition). Then it goes and an explains reason why OP thinks Google sucks (to be fair I agree with him, but they're pretty subjective). Finally, OP claims that people are abandoning Google. Their single data point is that since 2009 there have been fewer searches for mortgages, because that couldn't possibly have been the result of an mortgage-driven recession in 2008.

Havoc2• 4 years ago

Recently managed to finally de-google my search.

SearXNG funneled through protonVPN

snowl• 4 years ago

My searxng is slow to search. How long does it take for you to search?

Havoc2• 4 years ago

Slower than a google search certainly, but not problematically slow

Median response time is 0.9 for most engines

Jean-Philipe• 4 years ago

I tried switching to DDG a few times over the past few years and always found that it got in my way, especially when working. So I usually got annoyed enough after a few weeks and switched back to google.

About two months ago, the opposite happened. Google gave me so much spam and advertising, the search got worse, now I ended up using DDG. It still sucks, for sure, but somehow it sucks less than google now.

andrewstuart• 4 years ago

Because people stick with something thats "good enough".

The biggest barrier to any competitor for any product/service anywhere is a "good enough" incumbent.

karaterobot• 4 years ago

By the end of the article, this is full-on marketing the OPs product, so be aware of that when thinking about how the problem and solution are framed.

It's an interesting question though. I think the answer is that most people don't really care? The bubble we live in is filled with other people who, like us , are very knowledgeable about this domain, pay attention to what's going on behind the scenes, and have very strong opinions on it. 99% of the rest of the world doesn't give the quality and nature of Google search a second thought.

nightski• 4 years ago

I'm not using it directly. Have been using DDG for about 10 years now.

alligatorplum• 4 years ago

This feels like one of those things where people only notice the bad experiences, bad search results, and ignore all the times it was right, good/neutral search results.

One of google search's biggest advantages is the ability to save a click for the user. If I search for "NCAA scores" google will show me the live scores directly instead of showing me a link to the ncaa website which also shows me the score but at the expense of me having to click on the link.

IMO, the right way to dethrone google search would be to have better (or more) QOL features.

frb• 4 years ago

I don’t think that most people care about using Google or quality of search results at all.

I’d agree that the average HN user and certain professions like developers do care. I tried them all, kept switching back to Google and recently stuck with Kagi.

If I look at average not-so-technical users, they just enter words into their browser’s navigation/search bar and are happy to get useful results.

It’s worth to remember that Google is the default search engine in most common browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox).

Recently my wife, a typical Mac and Chrome user, got a new Windows computer from work. She didn’t notice that she was using Edge and Bing as browser and search engine until I once looked at her screen and commented on it. She shrugged it off as unimportant and keeps on using it, even though she could change the browser as well as the search engine.

gnyman• 4 years ago

I had a similar experience with trying to switch a few times during the last few years and only within the last few months I've actually managed to keep using another search engine for more than a week, and it happened to be kagi.

If this is because Google has gotten worse or Kagi is better I can't tell, but either way I think we are at a point where Googles dominance is threatened for the first time, at last from my sample of one.

But there are other signals like how many of these "google isn't good anymore" posts we see on HN nowadays and the above example of a user not even noticing they aren't using Google.

helph67• 4 years ago

Because `common sense' ain't!

richardsocher3• 4 years ago

They don't know yet about you.com? - No spam, no ads, you control the ranker with your source preferences, hardcore private mode that doesn't save anything nor uses your location (even DDG saves your queries and gives location-based results), many developer apps that include what you want - eg code snippets in a StackOverflow app, AI apps like you.com/write that would write essays for you, etc.

Also, many folks (outside the hackernews crowd) never change their defaults and Google pays Apple 15B per year, as well as Samsung and many others, to be that default.

Disclaimer: I work at you.com

timothylaurent• 4 years ago

You's been a refreshing break from the Google-sphere - and it gets better and better - The mobile browser is also great!

Ennea• 4 years ago

you.com does not even load in Firefox with beacon.enabled set to false in about:config.

richardsocher3• 4 years ago

Hi Ennea, Honest question since this is the first time I hear this issue. What's the use case the changing that setting in your config?

From my limited understanding whatever beacon does can also be done in the backend it just makes it a little more complicated for developers?

JSONderulo• 4 years ago

Great stuff, Richard. I've been using you.com since the beginning of the year and it continues to get better.

richardsocher3• 4 years ago

So happy to hear. We'll keep making it better :)

soniman• 4 years ago

I like you.com but would like the option to search using google if my search on you.com fails. You.com will default to google if there are literally no results, but it disrupts my flow to paste the search terms into google if I don't like the you.com results.

aabbcc1241• 4 years ago

If you're on desktop, you can use userscript to integrate Google search into you.com

thesunkid• 4 years ago

there is a simple solution for that. Search for '!g {your_query}' in you.com and boom, you'll be taken to google.

They introduced that feature here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScDcj-hX5ns

ncann• 4 years ago

- It's free

- It's better than most alternatives, and in many cases there isn't even an alternative

- People have amassed too much data on Google services and the cost of moving/switching is too high

- People don't care

pixl974• 4 years ago

- Near monopolies are hard to get away from

mrkramer8• 4 years ago

People don't care

I think people not carrying is the saddest part.

People have amassed too much data on Google services and the cost of moving/switching is too high

I think this shouldn't be a problem since query is the only thing you need when searching. You should be able to personalize and narrow down the search from UI of search engine not rely on search engine amassing data about yourself to do it for you.

kauguste2812• 4 years ago

Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they have all the same holes in the search results.

Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see something that organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text search (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever).

I feel there is a lot of untapped potential that gets missed by just trying to be a Google search clone.

LeoPanthera• 4 years ago

Google had a "search only forums" filter. I was devastated when they took it away.

You can fake it by searching one forum at a time with "site:whatever.com", but you have to do one at a time and that doesn't help if there are forums you don't know about.

Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.

vopi• 4 years ago

idk if you know this but kagi has a "discussion" filter (among other filters)

Melatonic4• 4 years ago

I feel this same way about a lot of aspects of Google search.

sph• 4 years ago

Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.

It is now evident Google is not in the business of making its search any better.

srcreigh• 4 years ago

But do those forums run Google ads?

jessriedel4• 4 years ago

Are there any wrappers for Google search that try to implement a bag of these sorts of workarounds this with a nice UI?

wolpoli• 4 years ago

This could be solved with selectable ranking strategies. Of course Google isn't going to offer that.

pinky1417• 4 years ago

Shouldn't there be a way to only search multiple forums through some userscript? Only found out about userscript after messing around with an iOS app called HyperWeb.

At least in my limited understanding of userscript's capabilities, you'd still need to explicitly specify the forums you want to search, but I imagine that would solve lots of use cases for search filters.

aww_dang2• 4 years ago

Forums were somewhat decentralized. Without attributing motive, platforms are interested in moving in the opposite direction.

visarga• 4 years ago

You can make custom search engines by selecting an explicit list of sites on top of Google here

https://cse.google.com/all

thrwawy283• 4 years ago

You mentioned things I hadn't thought of. Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that. It treats its power users like kids, and offers no complex filtering to do things like removing search results that require logins. Librarians love when you come to them to specifically refine your search. Google still has the most useful search, but they've taken away methods to get better results. I remember I was pretty upset when i couldn't search for images by exact dimensions anymore. Bing allows this.

Google's product direction has been inching backwards for a decade.

dlsa• 4 years ago

Going backwards and standing still often look the same. I think its both in this case to varying degrees. Google is competing against itself, obvious competitors but also obvious refinements that appear so regardless of actually being implemented. The no-login filter is a refinement that would be useful to many.

There are so many obvious improvements that could be made to gmail but there's no real way to do them as a consumer.

pessimizer• 4 years ago

Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that.

Google has removed features that it had 10 years ago.

everdrive• 4 years ago

It treats its power users like kids

It's worse than that: Google's power user features used to work reliably and repeatably. Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it.

I've recently noticed that Youtube has a similar feature. If you search for a video, you'll only get a small number of results before Youtube will start showing you "recommendations" which are only somewhat related to your original search. Somewhat ironically, the only way to avoid this is to query via Google (site:youtube.com [term]) where you will get a much larger set of results.

It just seems that raw search is disappearing, and "recommendation engines" are appearing everywhere.

Geonode• 4 years ago

Honestly, Yandex has really good image search. I now do all three (Google, Bing, and Yandex) when I'm researching for a design.

mrkramer8• 4 years ago

I agree with you but I think the problem is that majority of internet users are casual users who don't care about complex queries. Maybe good business idea would be to make internet search engine which enables complex queries like the one you described. Google was made for masses not for power users.

thereare5lights• 4 years ago

Google sucks compared to Google from years ago.

Came here to write exactly that

Why are we still using it?

There's nothing better out there.

elevaet2• 4 years ago

I've been starting to use kagi for search. I'm still using google by default, but when I get a screen full of ads and clickbait articles I turn to kagi and it's almost always better.

wyclif• 4 years ago

You should try Brave search.

CraigRood• 4 years ago

Google is still my default as 9 out of 10 I get the answer I need quickly. Bing does my other 10% where Google provides junk or stale results.... Google Search really is declining. I'm tempted to move my default over to Bing for month or two just to experiment. On the Maps front, I'm really enjoying Apple Maps as it has less junk - I just want a map!!

bko• 4 years ago

Google sucks compared to Google from years ago

How much of that is based on general incompetence, SEO gaming, growing complexity of searches or manipulation (e.g. filtering "disinformation")? Or something else.

supernovae• 4 years ago

none.. it’s all because of paid placement taking priority

etherael• 4 years ago

manipulation (e.g. filtering "disinformation")?

This makes it basically unusable for anything that isn't a technical question, for which it is still reasonably good if you restrict to sites where it will likely get a reasonable answer.

If special interest groups aligned with google have a position on what you're searching though, it will simply be spammed outright and any evidence to the contrary either concealed or "fact checks" which consist of minor modifications on the core underlying fact in question spiked with something that is obviously false so that the fact check can say "false" whilst actually the underlying fact in question is not at all false. Even when those special interest groups are right, google is still useless because it will give you such a slanted view of the territory you will be utterly clueless as to what other sides of the debate even exist as anything more than silly strawmen. Most questions in this class people would be better served by just petitioning Blackrock and similar directly and asking them what they should think.

For commercial stuff it's almost as bad, I find myself having to figure out the underlying financial realities of the industry that produces x, then getting a summary of the market space by volume and associated data, then speculating on stuff that might exist within that market space that might be nice in light of whatever flaws afflict the market space in question, and maybe if I get lucky I'll find something through the reams and reams of valueless SEO optimised pop-up spewing complete and utter bullshit desperately attempting to capitalise on my assumed stupidity with their cookie cutter a-b tested "sales pitches". Most of the time I end up just going to alibaba or similar, finding vendors shipping actual large units with decent reviews, and then working backwards from there to what I'm looking for.

Watching google fall from something amazing to probably-worse-than-microsoft-all-things-considered tier was quite the eye opener.

dantyti3• 4 years ago

I guess another major barrier for higher quality search is the deep web (discord, fb, private forums, etc.)

madrox• 4 years ago

I think companies have tried, but it simply hasn't worked. Yahoo tried to do a lot of this, and simply failed. Arguably they could have done it better, but I don't think many will have a better shot than them for a while more to come.

lmg643• 4 years ago

Brave search is fantastic, haven't noticed a difference since moving

_yoqn3• 4 years ago

I'm going to second that. Since switching off Google a couple years ago I have had fewer and fewer "failed" searches which required me to go back to Google to try the search.

The more people who use Brave Search (they own their own index), the better it will become. And right now I'd say it's orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others.

dmw_ng• 4 years ago

I made an earnest effort to switch to Brave, but I'm back with Google for almost all searches because 1100ms+ result page loads are simply unworkable here.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

Am I the only person on earth who hasn't noticed any decline in Google results that everyone keeps talking about? To me it seems like people conflate the fact that there is now significantly more stuff on the internet (what's the data volume today compared to 2010, 100x? 1000x?) than there was years ago with the performance of search engines.

People say they now have to append "reddit" to their search and they didn't in 2008. Which is obvious because in 2008 there was only reddit and like 3 other sites, now there's dozens of relevant ones.

lazide• 4 years ago

Yes. There is massively more spam, and they’ve made it do a lot less direct search matching (many results don’t include the actual word that matters for instance)

google2341232• 4 years ago

I’ve noticed more spam and shit sites but I’m not sure if that’s entirely googles fault. There might just be 1000x more spam sites now then a few years ago.

AniseAbyss• 4 years ago

Honestly I use startpage and I'm blocking ads so aggressively I barely know what Google search is supposed to look like.

sidibe• 4 years ago

I've also not noticed. But this is the most common topic on HN so I probably had/have different search habits to have missed the wonderful experience of Google 10 years ago.

Google meets my expectations for a search engine but maybe I'm not expecting enough from search?

mooreds• 4 years ago

I think there's also some inertia. I know how to tweak google.

I have also used some competitors. They are fine for most things (finding the hours of a local store, a restaurant's menu).

However, when the going gets tough (troubleshooting a technical issue, looking for a recommendation) I fall back to google.

irrational• 4 years ago

I want to see something that organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text search (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever).

Yes, I would love this. I was recently looking for reviews of a certain woodworking tool. The vast majority of websites googled returned were clearly bot created sites. I came away thinking I wanted a curated list of a few sites actually created by humans.

mrjin4• 4 years ago

I really missed those days that I could write URLs I visited frequently on notebook. Unfortunately, we might never be no way back to the good old days. There is literally way too much info on the internet, and thus impossible to index contents manually.

andi999• 4 years ago

So you want the search engine to perform a turing test? Nice.

cloutchaser• 4 years ago

Youtube-style recommendations for websites

Reddit?

BeFlatXIII• 4 years ago

Only so long as old Reddit remains intact.

kauguste2812• 4 years ago

Reddit is heavily biased towards new content and you have to know what subreddits to look for to find the interesting stuff. The nice thing with Youtube recommendations (after recent updates) is that it pulls out a lot of older content and it also has a pretty good understanding of contexts and topics, even pretty niche stuff. Plain Google search really has no way of exploring the web in the same way you can just do with Youtube recommendations. Also helps that Youtube is extremely low on spam, you get ads and product placement, but not the bot generated filler that is cluttering up Google search.

y422• 4 years ago

Yeah well, that's what you want, and probably a decent couple of power users. And I totally agree.

But here is the thing:

My mom, dad and even my brother, they don't need that. They need the limitations aka borders, the "simplicity", the synchronisation and the search results. They still stick with Facebook, Google and Amazon because it's easy to use and their gate to the Internet, where all the smart people are living and the "future is real". They do not understand the drawbacks or they just don't care.

And I dare to assume that this pictures the vast majority of Internet users.

jackblemming• 4 years ago

Good thing there's more of a market than your mom, dad, and even your brother, or alternative search competitors like duckduckgo and others would be completely screwed.

ZeroGravitas2• 4 years ago

This is actually what I worry about more.

I'm browsing with Firefox on Mac with adblockers, and have some knowledge of what the potential scams are.

Is Google actually helping the average user more than a hypothetical alternative?

Don't know, tricky question to answer, but whatever the answer is it's likely a society wide change, involving regulation and new business models and ethical consumer choices, not just a new search engine.

glenstein3• 4 years ago

(e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever).

These are all truly excellent and refreshingly imaginative ideas, in a conversation too often starved of critical thinking (elsewhere in this thread commenters, unable to imagine any alternative at all, are incredulously asking "what would you even replace it with?").

I would just say that search in it's traditional form is valuable too, and highly efficient. Or at least it can be when done well. I think millionshort search results are a good example of what traditional search can be.

hwers• 4 years ago

It would be funny if some site with youtube-style recommendations got popular because that's basically what I believe google is using under the hood already and it would be so easy for them to pivot to that style and then take over all the momentum the recommendation-style site got.

mrkramer8• 4 years ago

Why would an average user use such service? I was thinking about creating such "internet recommendation engine" so to speak but as my hypothetical project was progressing I realized that it started looking more and more like internet search engine as and when I started adding more advanced features. But looking from costs point of view it is cheaper to create internet recommendation engine than internet search engine.

toshk• 4 years ago

Google works great for most daily tasks software questions, looking for a service/company etc

But when I want to do serious research on things like eczema, diet, backpain, exercise. Google absolutely fails (also Google scholar) I have to buy books, go through Reddit,listen to YouTube lectures etc that point to the correct literature and then you get to know the experts, different opinions etc.

All you find is these generic sites with basic advice which is common knowledge lik WebMD. Not bad, but they dominate the entire search.

I would think a heavy version of Google focused on in depth/experts would be great.

Ekaros• 4 years ago

It generally even fails when you are looking for a product. If you don't know certain brand. I have been hunting reasonably priced stainless steel meat grinder(the grinding parts, not the body), but with google due to all SEO spam it feels like impossible task...

jstummbillig3• 4 years ago

Google sucks compared to Google from years ago.

Sure, in the sense that someone who had their legs broken sucks at running. Compared to yesterdays, Google today has to deal with a whole new level of the entire world trying to game their search. It's easy to fetch good water when the well is clean and no one is trying to actively poison it.

mohanmcgeek6• 4 years ago

a whole new level of the entire world trying to game their search

I think their #1 problem is their product managers trying to do "something" to add said something to their resume and making the product horrible to use in the process

Examples include: - Grid view tab switcher in Chrome Android - Removing dislike count on YouTube

542458• 4 years ago

I partially agree with your comment, but it feels like in some/many cases the Google algorithm has large flaws that were not previously there and that (superficially) seem solvable. For example:

* If I search for recipes, the Google algorithm seems to heavily favour recipes with a short novel prepended to them. The “novel” does not have to be particularly relevant to the content - I’ve seen recipes with “novels” that I’m not convinced wasn’t partially algorithmically generated. Every human being I’ve ever spoken to hates this.

* Google will search for what it believes to be alternatives to terms, even when those terms are placed into quotes (which used to prevent this behaviour). This can be very irritating when Google’s alternative terms are incorrect.

Both of these are regressions over earlier behaviour, and don’t seem to have any obvious benefit to them.

SahAssar• 4 years ago

Different types of these strategies have been around since before google existed. Hell, even web directories (like early yahoo!) had to deal with spam, early google had to deal with keyword spam. Paid backlinks, spammed comment sections with backlinks, copied content sites as backlink farms, all of this existed at least as early as 2005-ish. For some sites (some of them with legitimate info) the meta keywords tag (even though google stopped using it very early) was the bulk of their size for just this reason.

What has so radically changed the last couple of years to make spam take top spots on the SERP?

dekhn• 4 years ago

As a xoogler, it was clear when the original search quality folks left and were replaced with people whose goal was to grow the product (and the company) without much care for quality.

CuriouslyC• 4 years ago

Honestly at this point I don't think bing sucks vs google. Bing has less random junk in SERPS for a lot of searches, and seems less gamed by SEO companies, but it isn't really better enough to make a point of switching my chrome url bar over and breaking my habit of just going to google. If things keep going like they have been I wouldn't be surprised if I switch in the near future though.

Spooky232• 4 years ago

Exactly. Google sucks because the internet that we remembered died long ago, hoovered up into social media.

The person passionate about beetles who would have a great website in 2002 now posts 38 post Twitter threads (at best) or Instagram/Facebook posts that are lost forever.

It’s sad as we had this amazing “long tail” effect where a company like Google could set out to organize the worlds information.

Unfortunately the economics drive new behavior, and the next cohort of big web companies sought to monopolize human attention. The more profitable ones like Facebook are masters of psychological manipulation, and the second string cohorts like Reddit who aren’t very smart/manipulative adopt a more hands off approach where undesirable content like porn juices engagement.

zapdrive• 4 years ago

Reddit isn't manipulative? Have you been there recently?

fils• 4 years ago

Untapped potential. exactly. To me the biggest problem isn't the results (even the ads) it's the lack of innovation. The lack of making search an experience and something that generates a value I can store and share.

I've been looking at several of the options talked about here. My favorite so far is Neeva (https://neeva.com) due to their "spaces" concept and how it provides a simple building block I can explore to address many of the use cases I have for search.

Search needs innovation and people trying new things.

masa331• 4 years ago

I wonder what do you mean by "vastly superior". For search i use Kagi, for a browser i use Firefox. For mail you can use Protonmail or i guess there are other alternatives also. Only thing i miss is Gmail message threading. Other than that nothing else. So i think people are only used to Google, that's all. I don't think it's vastly superior in any area anymore

buywarbonds• 4 years ago

I see the problem with Google search of today vs Google search of 10 years ago being that the first page of search has already become a "Youtube-style recommendations for websites". It's more like a curated list of "approved content" now.

peter303• 4 years ago

Plus I strongly suspect Google search no longer gives the most accurate answer, but the one most profitable for Google ads.

manx• 4 years ago

Yes, please bring web directories back!

Today we have more possibilities to manage that than in the early days. Many things can be automatically generated/crawled/MLed or crowdsourced. Browser extensions can help to categorize almost all important websites.

Data sources like Reddit, Stack Overflow or Wikipedia already have many websites categorized. We just need to combine the data.

I did a few experiments myself trying to drive hierarchies from tag data. It works surprisingly well. There is even some academic work in this direction.

dleslie• 4 years ago

It's the bad default of the devices that most people use.

This is basically the outcome that antitrust prosecutors were concerned for with Microsoft.

Imagine if Android couldn't bundle a browser, or integrate any of Google's SAAS products.

jeffbee2• 4 years ago

We have to have this discussion daily, apparently, but nobody, absolutely nobody in this thread and certainly not the article, has established an objective basis for "Google sucks". The most likely alternate theory, which the article doesn't bother discussing, is that Google does not in practice "suck" at all.

compiler-guy• 4 years ago

The web itself sucks more and more, and Google results reflect that. Much good discussion migrated to siloed locations like facebook groups. There are thousands of pages of technical content that are barely redone versions of each other. Each SEO'd to within an inch of its life. These are quite similar to the dozens of identical off-brand products one finds on amazon.

I would love to see Google results get better. But the web itself is a mess.

RSHEPP• 4 years ago

This has a what seems to be a positive effect in my life though. I use the library much more than I used to. Instead of finding blogs using Google like the first part of my career, I find books at the local library.

mountainriver• 4 years ago

The “google search sucks” rhetoric is getting a bit old. It works really really well and is free. I rarely ever have issues with it.

I think it’s just getting trendy to dog on

ikiris• 4 years ago

Its only even really trendy here on HN. This place is getting less and less useful over time.

syshum• 4 years ago

No it is far far far less useful than it was a few years ago, I routinely now have to use a couple different search engines to find solutions to technical problems because google tends to weight sources it thinks I should be using for and not the sources I would like.

For example one software platform I use all the time has community forum that is almost useless because every post to the forum is simply met with "open a ticket with support" with no actual resolution, these post flood the google search results, however other search engines bubble up blogs, other forums, reddit, or other sources not just the set of sites over and over again.

x86_64Ubuntu• 4 years ago

Only on HN. Virtually none of the "problems" described on HN at the intersection of tech and society are seen as problems out in the real world.

pixl974• 4 years ago

Oh, they are all the time, but they are posted here 5 to 10 years before we see them crop up in the world outside of here.

"DRM bad" was common here long before the days people were figuring out that getting their blue ray player working with their TV was going to be a pain in the ass.

Just wait and a few more years and it will be mainstream that Google actually sucks.

userbinator• 4 years ago

I know quite a few highly-non-technical people who have been talking about how Google's results are frequently omitting words from their queries for a few years now.

1_player2• 4 years ago

I disagree. There is bound to be more than a non-tech person that notices that Google has gone downhill, and is confused because it _feels_ like they were getting better results 10 years ago, but has no way and knowledge to confirm that. Regular people were using Google during its golden age in the 2000s already.

mrkramer8• 4 years ago

Thx I laughed. But nobody thought BlackBerry phone sucked except Jobs and his team that's why Apple is multi-trillion dollar company today. The same thing can be said for Gates, Page, Zuckerberg and other computer tech people who rejected conformism and status quo. This phenomena is called Innovator's Dilemma.

scotu• 4 years ago

google "sucks" because ads. It might have other problems, but when you can buy your competitor name as a keyword ad and on mobile you need to scroll 1+1/2 screens to get to maybe the 1st organic result and the ad is barely different from the organic, you end up with a sucky search engine, no matter the algorithm.

The competitor website is not a slightly suboptimal result for the query: it's literally the wrong result if I'm not adding "alternative" to the search query. I'm sorry.

theonemind• 4 years ago

Rhetoric aside completely, I can say with all honesty Google doesn't serve me as well as it did in 2014.

"google search sucks" message might lack finesse, but I think it conveys something real--like, a search engine completely optimized to the user using state-of-the-art algorithms, etc. does not exist, perhaps because Google hangs out around "good enough" and would kill anything on the way up.

massysett• 4 years ago

I don’t know what people are expecting of Google. I use it like the Yellow Pages was thirty years ago. I use it to find answers to interesting but ultimately inconsequential questions, like “when is Joe Biden’s birthday?” I crank computer error messages into it.

Google was never good for much else. Generating good content is expensive, so most of it is not on the free Web. Never has been. People are expecting it to provide buying advice, or intelligent counsel for their problems, or wisdom from experts. Google was never good for that.

skinnymuch5• 4 years ago

The last part of what you wrote isn’t what a lot of people are saying. At all. I don’t want any of that. I didn’t see many comments wanting that. Most want proper filtering and other older previously functioning features like more scopes and respecting plus sign, quotes, and so on.

lexandstuff• 4 years ago

I agree.

People have forgotten that Google searches for tech stuff 10 years ago used to exclusively returns results from sites like Experts Exchange with solutions behind paywalls. I'm glad Google did something about that. And, of course, thankful that sites like Stack Overflow came along.

cryptica• 4 years ago

I stopped using Google search. The only Google product I use now are Maps and Android. I used DuckDuckGo for a while and more recently I switched to Qwant. They're all approximately the same.

I don't think that PageRank or similar algorithms provide any competitive edge at this stage. The real advantage of PageRank in the past is that it was difficult to game, but nowadays, backlinks are all about money and SEO anyway.

GeekyBear• 4 years ago

For the same reason that Google pays Apple and Mozilla huge sums every year.

Most people won't change the default settings for their search engine.

scotty79• 4 years ago

I had trouble switching to DuckDuck Go search previously.

It changed when I installed DucDuckGo browser on my phone. It has really good internet decrapifying features and it uses ddg search by default and so far I didn't have a single reason to change that default.

I hope ddg will relese similar browser for desktop. Maybe I'll be able to switch to it then.

nyx_land• 4 years ago

Because there is effectively no alternative. Bing and engines that are different frontends for Bing results aren't alternatives, don't kid yourself; it only exists still because Microsoft is another company like Google that shoves their subpar product onto people (by making it the default search on their subpar OS that took over the world) and hopes they never seek out alternatives. Most people are too dumb and lazy to seek out better alternatives, so they stick with the default search engines for Edge or Chrome. For everyone else, there is no real alternative, so while Google's search results are getting objectively worse, it doesn't matter because it's at least a lesser of two evils. They don't need to worry about becoming more mediocre when they've made sure to put themselves in a position where they basically have no competition.

matheweis2• 4 years ago

Bing and engines that are different frontends for Bing results aren't alternatives, don't kid yourself; it only exists still because Microsoft is another company like Google that shoves their subpar product onto people
They don't need to worry about becoming more mediocre when they've made sure to put themselves in a position where they basically have no competition.

Two may not be ideal but there is still competition there…

If enough people use Bing/O365 instead of Google/Gsuite, that Google sees a significant shift in traffic, they should feel pressure to be less unfriendly and start innovating again.

gumby• 4 years ago

Is that a notion page? I couldn't use space to go to the next page (the oldest pagination system in the (computing) world).

So I stopped reading at the end of the page.

quantified2• 4 years ago

GSuite is poor compared with alternatives. Corporations make choices based on more criteria than just UI and functionality.

humanwhosits• 4 years ago

I've started using DDG for most searches, and a private email provider instead of gmail

paulpauper2• 4 years ago

duck duck outsources to bing, so you are really using bing

mostlysimilar• 4 years ago

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

> To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).

zanethomas2• 4 years ago

Everyone is not using it.

zanethomas2• 4 years ago

Everyone? Not me.

xlaacid• 4 years ago

oh, its an ad for their garbage extension. I see.

ipunchghosts• 4 years ago

I use yandex

narrator• 4 years ago

Yandex is nice because it acts like a normal search engine on controversial topics. Google search results are heavily curated on any politically controversial topic. This is all new since 2016, and especially the last 2 years. This is why forums are downranked. Someone could post wrongthink on a forum and google automatically identifies and downranks sites with wrongthink.

wly_cdgr• 4 years ago

Because everything else sucks way worse, obviously. I mean,...have you actually tried using Bing?

Next question...

asimpletune• 4 years ago

I would gladly pay for a really good search engine if anyone is listening.

phendrenad2• 4 years ago

Me too. There's https://neeva.com/, but their selling point is slightly different (I don't really care about ads per se, or privacy, I just want to get good search results (without paid promoted results or weird interstitial results modals, looking at you "people also clicked on" Google box!) and maybe be able to do advanced queries (search by file type, date, booleans, etc. I would also like to be able to ban sites from my results, for example, all of the spammy websites that scrape stackoverflow and mirror the pages, which Google somehow hasn't blocked themselves yet...

darinf• 4 years ago

With Neeva you can set preferred providers, more of this, less of that. See Site Preferences in Settings.

snielson• 4 years ago

Kagi is listening. Sign up and give it a shot. I've tried them all (Neeva, Brave, Bing, Yandex, etc.) and I like Kagi the best. They are planning to make it a paid service when it gets out of beta.

aghilmort3• 4 years ago

listening / founder of https://breezethat.com - best used on desktop atm; free is ad-based, premium is ad-free, both have curated topic filters with more on way

paulpauper2• 4 years ago

google needs better date filtering. old threads from reddit keep being marked as new.

aghilmort3• 4 years ago

where after: & before: filters aren't working? e.g., this comparable example of date-based query, https://twitter.com/DotDotJames/status/1504901028520640514

Lamad123• 4 years ago

you.com is amazing, I'm not shilling for them, but I managed to find a couple youtube videos and a few other tings I couldn't find with google or DDG and Bing.

Crash0v3rid3• 4 years ago

Some examples would be nice

grey_earthling• 4 years ago

I'm kind of surprised that HN hears “Google” and still thinks “web search” — I assumed the headline was about the company as a whole, and my mind first went to Gmail/Google Drive/their office stuff, Android/Chrome, and YouTube.

Are web search engines still “a thing” that people have opinions about? To me they're just kind of there and mediocre and unremarkable — the beige wallpaper of modern life, corporate blue and 12pt Arial; like a dreary shopping centre on a Tuesday; as exciting as a press release.

not2b2• 4 years ago

The author missed the most important reason that Google search results often suck: tens of thousands of people are working very hard to make it suck. They call themselves "SEO specialists", and their job is to get their shitty site to the top of the rankings. It's an ongoing battle. Sure, Google wants to make money, but to do that they need to protect their search moneymaker and keep it dominant, so their incentive is to make the users happy. They aren't sucking on purpose.

moistly3• 4 years ago

Search isn’t Google’s moneymaker, advertising is. And those shitty SEO’d sites are choc-a-bloc with advertising. Google has little incentive to downrank them.

asiachick2• 4 years ago

Google loses if people stop using it. Google has every incentive to downrank them.

Program_Install• 4 years ago

Search is their main gateway to the advertising dollars. "Google it" is synonymous with any search regardless of the engine being used.

Nextgrid5• 4 years ago

Google can trivially reduce the amount of spam by using the amount of ads, analytics, affiliate links, etc as a negative ranking signal.

Instead of targeting SEO per-se (as it's difficult to determine a good website with SEO vs a spam website with SEO), target how they're making money.

They're not doing so exactly because they have no incentive.

temp20160423• 4 years ago

This makes no sense. Google makes more money when users click on some crappy landing page filled with display ads?

BurningFrog• 4 years ago

The web has - as it inevitably would - adapted to being searched by Google.

This makes it much harder to be a good search engine.

I have no idea how to quantify how much the decline is because of that.

javchz• 4 years ago

I miss the days when SEO was only focusing on a decent HTML semantics, meta tags in order, organic backlinking, a good title that aligned with the content, and a good enough performance.

Right now SEO it's an arms race between google and every SEO agencies, with a keyword being attached to some company that may have 0 relevance to the user.

Doesn't help, that depending on the query, the first results are ads only superficially related. You can search for the name of a popular brand of a car/hotel/insurance, and the first results are the competitors. If you don't want to be below the fold, you need to pay, even if your website it's exactly what the user it's looking for.

y422• 4 years ago

That would not help. Those kind of effects are inherent in the system. As long as Visitsv lead to any kind of revenue, no matter if by Ad Impressions or Affiliate Programms or whatever, there exists a motivation and people will try to drag visitors to their sites. You will have to remove eCommerce from the Internet to fix that.

throw_m239339• 4 years ago

I miss the days when SEO was only focusing on a decent HTML semantics, meta tags in order, organic backlinking, a good title that aligned with the content, and a good enough performance.

It was never the case. As soon as google started to be popular, people were hired to manipulate its search results. "Natural" SEO was never a thing. You always had to use shady tactics in order to get a good ranking because everybody was doing the same.

elliekelly• 4 years ago

The author included with this “blog post” about their browser extension.

Gareth3212• 4 years ago

While true, this isn’t actually a complicated issue to solve: humans and a heavy hand. Get humans to review everything on page one of every search. Get caught massaging your site? Permanent ban.

Google refuses to hire humans to do stuff like this. Their service is terrible. Maps requires free labour of millions of users to get information updated.

jessriedel4• 4 years ago

142 comments so far and no one is has mentioned the actual punchline of the OP: the Hypersearch chrome extension the author is pitching. Personally, I find the pitch compelling, but am very interested to hear from anyone who has used it.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojag...

Note: This extension "can read and change all your data on all websites". Perhaps that's necessary for what they are offering, but it seems very dangerous, especially for a 1-week old extension with 24 users and 2 ratings.

Also, the "website" link (https://insight.space) on the Chrome extension page just says "The domain name insight.space is for sale!".

Do other folks have reason to trust this?

(General discussion of why Google Search is bad that does not actually engage with the specific details of the OP's arguments seems inappropriate in this thread; there have been innumerable HN threads about the general issue.)

gnicholas• 4 years ago

I can't speak to Hypersearch, but I've used their Hyperweb mobile extension and Insight Browser mobile app. They're great! I've even had the chance to chat/work with Abhinav a bit, and he's a nice and sincere guy.

I also like this concept — I once toyed with the idea of a search engine/extension that would run a search in one engine by default and then notify you if other search engines would have returned significantly different search results. I'm excited to try this out!

I agree that it's hard to trust an extension that runs on any website, and I guess one way you could work around this would be to manually limit it only to run on the domain where you do your primary web searching. It wouldn't have the full functionality, but it would provide the bulk of the functionality — without most of the risk.

gotaquestion• 4 years ago

I've been using DDG for several years and every once and a while I prefix my search with "g!" to search google, and it isn't any better, so I stopped doing that.

Maybe people don't know there are alternatives? How does OP expect them to switch to Hypersearch if they aren't even using DDG which has been around for a very long time?

ShinTakuya• 4 years ago

I find DDG is well optimised for software folks and geeks, because it's the main demographic that uses it. It's hard for me to recommend it to my friends though since often basic queries fail compared to Google, especially with relation to country specific queries like that I'd make here in Australia.

high_pathetic• 4 years ago

That's two blanket statements in one headline.

Google search is fast, accurate enough for the most users, very widely adopted.

GMail is fast, good with SPAM, free.

Google has some practices that might be considered as evil but this affects a relatively narrow list of people, it definitely doesn't "suck" for everyone. Lotus Notes, on the hand...

eevilspock2• 4 years ago

It is far, far, FAR from free.

Huge social costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706

Huge economic costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237

Its amoral/cynical/evil practices and business model affect everyone.

eevilspock2• 4 years ago

If the Earth's ecosystem is being destroyed, why are we, in particular those that are not poor, still consuming so much plastic, energy and stuff in general?

If Facebook is bad for Democracy, why do so many people, especially those who decry the state of democracy, still use it?

If sugar and processed foods are so bad for us, why do so many people consume so much?

If the education system is tilted incredibly against children born into disadvantage and for those with advantage, why do the parents of the later, including liberal ones who fly the flag of equality and justice, hoard as much of quality educational resources for their own children as they can?

(I'm sad that no one else is pointing this out)

russellbeattie• 4 years ago

There are so many websites, apps and media services that are slowly being affected by what I call "information ochlocracy", where those types of organizations which rely on large numbers of people for their existence, will naturally start to target the widest audience/viewership/user base, and the quality of the service as a whole suffer as a result.

Here's the law: "The value of information is inversely proportional to the size of its intended audience." And its correlary: "The wider the audience, the less valuable a piece of information will need to be." These both stem from the basic premise that accurate information is more valuable the more scarce it is.

What this creates basically is a situation in which the quality, depth and timeliness of a piece of information or media service will, over time, always tend towards the most broadly applicable content, despite being less and less specifically useful.

In Google's case we can use cars as an example. Ideally, depending on the exact search term, you might want results providing information about buying them or maybe fixing them. However, maybe more advertising money can be made from using that search term to sell Forza or Gran Turismo video games, so the algorithms will detect this and shift accordingly. And since these games are being talked about on social media a lot, the algorithms pick that up too. Maybe some news mentioned the car or a celebrity bought one. The result might be that you're scrolling through ads from Microsoft and Sony, online shopping results of all the related gaming products, summaries of tweets about it, news snippets, etc., and almost nothing about what you were originally looking for. Searches for historical events like Pearl Harbor could have you scrolling past movie reviews before you finally get to a Wikipedia link.

Ochlocracy is mob rule. It's the evil flip side of democracy, in which people actively make a choice based on considered opinions. In an ochlocracy, the choice is made by the whims of the mob as a whole, and they themselves don't even know the choices they're making. As Google and other companies optimize their services, the numbers will always lead to targeting the largest swath of people and as a result the overall quality naturally suffers.

There's more to this, but this is the general problem. In order to keep growing from now on, every year Google's overall quality will have to suffer in order to be more applicable to larger numbers of people.

crobertsbmw• 4 years ago

I use DuckDuckGo and it seems like it’s gotten worse on the last couple months. Whenever I search for programming questions I expect staovetflow to be on top bit lately I’ve been getting geeksforweeks blog or some BS showing at the top of the search results every time. I don’t get it. It’s not just google…

code2life• 4 years ago

Have you tried you.com? I use it for coding all the time and works great, SO results come pre-ranked based on most voted answers and honestly saves me so much time .https://you.com/search?q=how%20do%20I%20convert%20from%20int... . The best part - it's not google, so it has no ads or junk content

malwarebytess2• 4 years ago

I wonder what googlers think about discussions like this? It doesn't seem like a rare opinion among techies that Google search has been declining in usefulness. Honestly, Google obfuscates the internet instead of making it accessible.

tytso• 4 years ago

Googler here, so here's a sample size of one.

1) I personally use Google, because it works for me. I will admit freely that part of this may be that I've gotten used to framing queries such that it works with the search engine that I'm used to using, and that's probably true for many people commenting on HN.

2) Every so often, these posts will inspire me to do my own non-scientific experiments such as using the same query, say, "Dua Lipa Levitating" or "Go modules vs packages" on say, DDG, Bing, and Google. When I did this experiment most reently, I generally find that Bing and Google are both more personally useful for me and DDG is less useful (but as the old latin saying goes, "De gustibus non est disputandum"). I will note that DDG had the more obstrusive advertising at the top of the results (Stubhub and Urban outfitters), and Bing and Google did not have any adds that I could find for that first query.

Given my personal evaluations, it tends to cause me to discount what many of the DDG enthusiasts have to say about DDG being is way better, simply because it doesn't accord with my own quickie experiments. But hey --- maybe it's because they enter in search queries differently than I do.

3) Given the hyperbolic and/or highly emotive nature of some of the comments about "holding users hostage" and complete lack of nuance over "violating users' privacy", again, it causes me to have a hard time taking everything else that rhwy have to say seriously.

4) I sometimes suspect people are remembering the past with rose colored glasses. I remember the search quality of Alta Vista (and with all due respect to the people who worked on Alita Vista and having had friends who worked there), the results were pretty crappy, and Google's results were heads and shoulders above somoe of the other competitors that were available back in the day.

5) All of this is my personal opinion; and users should feel free to use whatever search engine they want, and competition is a good thing.

malwarebytess2• 4 years ago

thanks for your 2c.

rr808• 4 years ago

I use Bing. I dont know why everyone complains it finds anything I want, though I guess I dont really need anything too complicated. I like to encourage competition, the points are handy too.

FpUser• 4 years ago

Not sure about everyone but for my searches Google always gives me way better results that the competitors. So while I dislike google as a company I still do use their search and youtube for the lack of true alternative. Rest of their stuff I successfully avoid.

hyperpallium2• 4 years ago

It's trivial to switch search engines, so Google invests in PR to make it stickier. All those cool google projects that are constantly in the news? The ROI is PR.

It also made massive capital investment in server farms, for fast results, especially google suggest. A way of converting profit into economic moat.

tsian2• 4 years ago

I think normal people have just changed how they use it without much fanfare. If people want to quickly find a specific site they are looking for they know it's the place. But if they want to explore the world of cat memes they know it's not the place for something like that any more (it'll only show you 143 results, many with weak relevancy).

Guest19023892• 4 years ago

I'll toss out a crazy idea to compete with Google.

1. You buy StackOverflow for $2 billion and Reddit for $10 billion.

2. You block Google from indexing the sites.

3. You start a new search engine that only searches StackOverflow and Reddit.

4. As the new search engine gains traction, you invite other high quality sites to join your vision and search engine. One requirement is they must block Google. You can guarantee them decent traffic because they'll only be competing against a dozen sites on your search engine, instead of millions on Google.

5. A large number of respectable sites leave Google and are only available on your search engine. Businesses start becoming eager to join your exclusive network and ask to join your mission.

6. Google is left with blog and affiliate SEO spam, and you become the hero of the search engine world.

windex• 4 years ago

Doesn't google have something called the Google CSE where you specify which sites you will exclusively include in search results?

gowthamgts12• 4 years ago

yes, but it's limited in terms of number of searches you can do and also they'll run ads on free version.

samwestdev• 4 years ago

Great way to kill both Reddit and SO lol

derefr4• 4 years ago

If a site allows crawling by at least one public-Internet spider, is there any legal protection it has against other crawlers who choose to ignore robots.txt and crawl anyway? Because I feel like that's exactly what Google would do here, as long as it wasn't literally illegal for them to do so.

Sirened• 4 years ago

It's kinda unclear at the moment, but it's working its way through the courts! See HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn [1] in which HiQ was scraping public profiles and was blocked from doing so by LinkedIn. This made its way to court and the 9th circuit ruled they were allowed to scrape but SCOTUS later rejected the decision and sent it back. So—murky!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

sfe22• 4 years ago

You can still block googles ip’s manually

pyro123• 4 years ago

Couldn't that backfire though. Most people imo would find it it infuriating to jump between search engines at first leading to plenty new alternatives taking over ultimately leading to the demise of the above mentioned sites.

remus• 4 years ago

Don't forget step 4.5:

As your search engine tips in to popularity all sites on it are overrun with spammy SEO content as marketers search for the next way to get more eyeballs on their ads.

nsgi• 4 years ago

Both Reddit and Stack Overflow have plenty of sites scraping their content and hosting copies. People would just go to those sites from Google instead of the real ones.

Also, I can see the value of Stack Overflow to Google but what value does Reddit add? Isn't most of the content on there disposable?

OscarCunningham2• 4 years ago

So why is it that I can never find my old reddit comments if I want to refer back to them?

wccrawford• 4 years ago

A lot of people add "reddit" to their search results for certain types of searches, including product reviews. It provides a ton of information from real people and cuts a lot of the garbage out.

esperent• 4 years ago

So in the last couple of days I've ended up doing a lot of research into equipment that I wasn't familiar with - commercial coffee equipment - and what I quickly found is that standard Google results are pretty much all blogspam. Not terrible info but it all feels like advertising while what I want is shared experiences from people who have actually used the equipment, not blogs that are actually ads from people who are trying to sell it to me.

So far I've found two places with actual useful info: YouTube and reddit. YouTube has a reasonably working search engine so I just search directly there. Reddit doesn't so I end up adding site:reddit.com to all my Google searches.

Maybe there's some better forums than reddit that I haven't found yet, but this mirrors my experience from a couple of months ago when searching for new headphones, and a few months before that when researching a new laptop. All the interesting discussion is happening on reddit, and all the Google results are disguised sales pitches ("thanks for reading! Now click my affiliate link"). I'm close to automatically just adding reddit to all my Google searches when I'm researching something new.

Try an experiment. Think of a new product you might want to purchase, say, scuba diving masks . Search "best scuba diving masks" on Google. Now try adding "site: reddit.com" and check again. Which search do you think gives you more honest, useful info from people who are genuinely into scuba diving and not just trying to make a quick buck with a scuba blog?

Note: I don't know anything about diving and I haven't tested these terms, I'm just very sure it will be true for any random product you pick.

randomsilence• 4 years ago

Google has prepared counter-moves for every step of your path. E.g. can you guarantee (2) against all moves Google could make?

Even if you succeed in securing an island of quality content: How big is your audience? I don't remember the exact quote but somebody said that television is the way it is because that's what people want.

Yahoo should have chosen to become a media company. Now they would have all the knowledge to mix search results in a way that is rewarded by the market. It's the academics of the early internet who want the best results. Everybody else wants to be entertained.

glenstein3• 4 years ago

Huh? What counter moves? You buy Reddit, Google buys X? Why would that be inevitable, and why, if there is a counter move, would it function as a stopper or defeater rather than just as some separate thing that also exists? What even is the other reddit? Why wouldn't google's prospective counter acquisition just say no to their offer? And is it an acquisition, right, or does Google build something to compete? And why would that work, given googles history of abandoning it's own projects to the Google graveyard? And where even is the precedent for this kind of reactionary behavior as a strategic actor? Wouldn't Google just ignore it, focus on it's core products like it always does? This just sounds like a kid playing with action figures.

And that's just the first sentence!

It's also just kind of frustrating because it's the kind of response that comes from a place of refusing to engage with a hypothetical exercise. Failing to meet these exercises with the spirit of open-ended curiosity, as they loosen suspension of disbelief just enough to make it possible to canvas the space of strategic possibilities, is a misunderstanding of the exercise, and it's just the kind of sleepwalking response that turns potentially fruitful conversations into dreary dead ends.

tomp• 4 years ago

0. Incorporate a company called "WeSearch"

lvl102• 4 years ago

Reddit for $10B? It’s going to be worth more than $50B by June.

mrkramer8• 4 years ago

I think this would spark all out search engine war. It would further degrade quality of search engines actually their usability since web content would be fragmented between different search engines.

But theoretically speaking Reddit for example can say "We don't like Google" and change their robots.txt rules in order to block Google bots.

tluyben23• 4 years ago

Google is still the fastest way to find things. The rest, including ddg just is not as good.

xeromal• 4 years ago

My phone randomly searches on bing from time to time and it blows my mind how shitty the search is. Fault Google, but it either knows what my brain wants, or my brain expects what Google provides.

tluyben23• 4 years ago

I had to use Bing in China ; the things are search for are not censored, but it works as well as Altavista does begin 2000; 10 pages of spam and then maybe stack overflow. I downloaded actual manuals like in the 80s to cope. I created [0] just to be able to find things faster locally when in China (last time was December 2019 though).

It is shocking how competitors are that bad really.

[0] https://git2pdf.com/

pgt• 4 years ago

Your honour, leading the witness.

Everyone is not using Google.

DeathArrow• 4 years ago

1 changing is difficult

2 some people depend on Google services

3 there aren't too many alternatives

4 alternatives that exist are not integrated in the way Google services are

That being said, it amazes me how no good search engines exist. By good I mean relevant results and less poisoning with advertising. It shouldn't be an impossible undertaking. Probably no one could find business sense in a decent search engine. If that is the case, I wonder if is possible to make a community backed search engine, similar to how Wikipedia works.

t0bia_s• 4 years ago

-> People are increasingly asking the questions that really matter in their Facebook and WhatsApp groups, Twitter, Discord and Slack communities, etc.

That is true and make sense why it is so hard to search solutions nowdays. Especially software related.

yoyopa• 4 years ago

because stumbleupon is gone

octoberfranklin• 4 years ago

Because their crawler gets special privileges from cloudflare and the other CDNs.

Here, read about the problem from one of the very few remaining non-GoogleBingYandex crawlers remaining:

https://www.gigablast.com/blog.html#willneverhappen

https://www.gigablast.com/blog.html#stopevilcensorship

jokethrowaway• 4 years ago

Duckduckgo is vastly superior to Google in my experience.

Normal searches give me the same information, news results feel less biased (they present articles from both left.and right viewpoint), better code search (especially with the code snippet extractor), less DMCA removed content

The only things I reach out for google are: - Business hours of stores - Google maps

Also, I don't often search for images but duckduckgo safety filter still let a few nsfw pics to go through.

People are on Google because of habit

openfuture• 4 years ago

I'm not..

nathias• 4 years ago

Because they invested 20 years of majority of online capital into becoming the infrastructure of the web, much like Microsoft spent all of theirs to become the infrastructure of PC. These corporate strategies should be illegal.

cehrlich• 4 years ago

I have switched to Kagi for everything other than trying to find stuff that's on Google Maps. Search results are consistently better. I think their backend is mostly just Bing?

pictur• 4 years ago

It was ideas that mattered in the early 2000s. but nowadays marketing is much more important than ideas. In other words, an alternative that can work better than Google can of course be made, but its good work alone is never enough to compete with it. Or maybe I don't know.

Axien• 4 years ago

Google is already losing substantial market share. Let’s do an experiment. If you want to buy a blender, what is the first site you try? What about directions? Today’s weather?

My answers are Amazon, Siri, and Alexa. Not Google. Google will continue to lose as these assistants become more powerful.

JamesAdir• 4 years ago

I think people are forgetting that large portion of data once available for search engines in blogs and forums is now dead. This data is live only on closed Facebook groups - which you can't search even if you are on Facebook and blogs are dying slowly with Facebook and twitter, with Facebook as a closed garden and twitter is on the way to become one. I don't know why people so eager on Reddit content, since their push to more monetization, the algorithm is aimed to create more traffic and not quality discussions. You can see it on the front page with many posts are more flammatory in nature.

endisneigh• 4 years ago

The fact SEO wasn’t mentioned once makes this lose all credibility imho

scyzoryk_xyz• 4 years ago

This is a very complicated answer when the reason is very simple - monopoly power.

Would have been nice to know at the beginning of the article that this guy has something to sell with his own search product.

adipginting• 4 years ago

Google does not suck. It is the best search engine by far. Nobody else can compete. Our individual experience may vary though

simy• 4 years ago

site:Reddit.com

dhanna• 4 years ago

I don’t think you realize that web search is the largest computational problem in existence.

JohnFen7• 4 years ago

Not everyone is still using it. It's been a few years now since the quality of Google search had fallen to the point where I just stopped using it entirely.

mrkramer8• 4 years ago

I have plenty ideas on how to improve quality of search of Google but I figured out competing with Google would be akin to slow painful death so I wouldn't start my own search engine atm. If somehow we could influence the Google's management to listen to our suggestions. Maybe the root problem is indeed business model which eventually shapes how features are introduced and how UI/UX turns out to be.

Google is smart but sleepy and somewhat distracted from their core business with 99 other projects they have.

dwighttk• 4 years ago

I’m not

jbn_norse2• 4 years ago

What people, entrepreneurial subculture, and professionals don’t understand is that Google is in the business of delivering a crappy product because of how it relates to advertising psychology. It’s that simple. An example can be observed in SEO which doubles as a product framework in the context of performing a job for Google by altering content in the hopes of producing behavioral modification. This is almost always misunderstood by their best and brightest for lack of self awareness or actual intelligence. No one has ever been able to compete because quite frankly no one has any idea what the hell they’re doing. I do, however

mrkramer8• 4 years ago

Google's algorithms are blackbox; nobody knows how they work so webmasters are trying to game the Google one way or another, vicious cycle that never ends. I agree with you nobody actually knows wtf they are doing because information asymmetry and information overload in the 21st century are brutal. Mass communication freed us but at the same time it is easy to get caught in never ending echo chambers.

jbn_norse2• 4 years ago

Agreed. I blame it on the advertising media complex

adamlynch• 4 years ago

I kinda wish the opposite of hypersearch existed. Let me explain.

I set up multiple browser profiles recently; work and personal. For work, I need Google. I'm a software engineer and I find that alternatives just aren't good enough for those kinds of searches yet.

For personal, I'm trying to use an alternative. It's ok most of the time but sometimes the results aren't great so then I try searching again in Google.

I'd like if there was an extension that augmented the alternative with Google results in the sidebar. If possible, in a way that preserved privacy.

loonster2• 4 years ago

SEO ruined search.

kdazzle• 4 years ago

I use Ecosia, and the results are usually good enough. Google’s results are often better, but now there are only like 4 results on the first page.

OnlyMortal• 4 years ago

I don’t use it. DuckDuckGo for searching and a Mac or iOS.

Who is this “everyone”?

vivekraghunatha2• 4 years ago

(Founder of Neeva here) On OP's question -- don't underestimate the power of defaults. Google owns Chrome and Android. Google pays Apple to be the default on Safari. Google pays Firefox to be the default. Bing is default on Edge. And so on. All the platforms make it very hard to change the defaults. And on platforms like Safari, as a user, you can't even change the default search provider if you want to.

ratsmack• 4 years ago

I haven't used google for at least three years, because I started to use Bing. Compared to what Google had become, Bing is far superior in my experience.

rufus_foreman• 4 years ago

Everyone isn't still using it.

That's a lie.

gattis• 4 years ago

I'd ditch google if someone just built a way to grep the web.

kdot• 4 years ago

A domain block list would solve most of the search quality and spam problems, I don't understand why Google removed it.

xyzzy21• 4 years ago

Some of us DO NOT use Google or anything from them.

If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

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