Ask HN: Have your search results gotten worse recently?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40355759

by cauliflower99 • 2 years ago

12 20 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What's your search experience been like over the last couple of months?

I can no longer use Google, DuckDuckGo or any other search engine to find reliable information. Absolutely everything is click-bait, repeated information that provides absolutely no value to me.

To get anything of value, I have to append every search with keywords like reddit/medium/stackoverflow to get quick, useful, to the point information. Either that or I'm forced to spend all my time in the AI's like Bing or ChatGPT.

As far as I can tell though, search isn't dying - I think it's dead.

antinone• 2 years ago

i thought so, too, a while ago. it was horrible. but then i simply started to phrase the question much much longer (on google, don't know about the duck) and got much better results again. a lot of weird, fun stuff, too.

barfbagginus• 2 years ago

Can you give us some examples?

arromatic• 2 years ago

It has gotten really terrible , some examples :

1. Site diversity is non existant . Nearly every term results same handful sites. Proof [0]

2. Actual blogs are not shown in serps . I have to use blogger and wordpress in search term to find blogs but it exculdes all the blogs that are not blogger or wordpress .

3. Way too much focus on reddit compared to all other forums. Its like both people and google both forgot forums other than reddit exist.

4. Too many non related articles .

5. Got too many seo optimized junk ? Just go to page ten or twenty . Turns out google now capped search results to a few hundred . And bing ? The pages become irrelevant at the later pages.

Workarounds I use :

1. Adding hackernews does improve my serp that are related to to tech .

2. limiting my search results to a old date/month improves the serp .

3. Marginalia [1] and kagi occasionally helps .

4. Sometimes I use absurdly long keywords .

5. Sometimes i use a search engine from here [2] to see if it gives better results or not which usually turn out to be not .

6. Yandex sometimes work but not always .

In short : The current search quality is terrible and finding smallweb ,forums and blogs are even more difficult .

[0] https://detailed.com/google-control/

[1] https://search.marginalia.nu/

[2] https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

cauliflower992• 2 years ago

Thanks for the response! I'm going to try some of your workarounds, particularly the search results date.

It would be cool to have a search engine that folks specifically on public forum results.

cauliflower992• 2 years ago

That google-control article shines a big light on the problem. If all the companies are own by the same parent, they'll naturally follow the same strategy to maximise clicks.

Have I finally found the reason this why all recipe sites operate the same dysfunctional way??

theGeatZhopa• 2 years ago

Not recently, but since 2013 or so it declines constantly. Still, I'm able to get what I need, but it became so cumbersome. Someone did search engine optimization, I guess :)

solardev• 2 years ago

I almost never use Google Search for real queries anymore. ChatGPT is where I get most info these days. For businesses it's Google Maps. For everything else it's usually Wikipedia or reddit. A generic query on Google with no qualifiers is just going to get you SEO spam -- and that's after I manually blacklisted many sites (quora, etc.)

manuelmagic• 2 years ago

DDG started to ignore the country preference (the slide button) I set.

I keep it in the off position, that should mean "all countries" but it still shows me results in Italian language, even if I search in English.

Google started doing that years ago, and it's quite annoying since I usually want international results.

cpach• 2 years ago

The man who killed Google Search https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 (2024)

It's not SEO: something is fundamentally broken in Google Search https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113007 (2021)

The internet is an SEO landfill https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764 (2019)

sujayk_33• 2 years ago

True ;)

But the current situation is like "Out of the frying pan and into the fire"

I was using ChatGPT first then when Bing Copilot was released, I turned to it only to find out, it was even dumber and needed more prompting and there comes the prompt length

I prefer using the HN search engine instead..

JohnFen• 2 years ago

My searching has become better than it has been in many years (although not as good as it was before Google started to degrade), but I also actively use Kagi's ability to weight websites so that some are deemphasized and others are emphasized. That alone has made a world of difference.

prashant541• 2 years ago

Yes, the new changes have effected things a lot.

nothercastle2• 2 years ago

If it’s not on Reddit I can’t find it might as well not exist. I can’t find any info elsewhere

interbased• 2 years ago

The auto-complete on Google often has "reddit" at the end of the query. It usually is the most reliable result from a query.

nothercastle2• 2 years ago

It’s unfortunate because the rest of the internet might as well be dark because its flooded with spam and gated content that can’t be searched

eajr• 2 years ago

I switched to Kagi a few months ago and pay for it -- it's worth every penny. I never go back to google/ddg (unless im looking at maps).

sandwichukulele• 2 years ago

My search experience has been the same always, just fine. I exclusively use Google and will switch my default search to Google even if it isn't (such as on raspberry pi OS where the default is DDG). To get anything of value, I have always first looked towards physical books and I spend most of my time at the public library. If I want the news, I turn to the physical printed editions of the newspaper that are updated each day at the library. For example, my last Google search a few minutes ago I looked for the iPhone 7 MSRP and release date and had no issues getting this information from google. I am left confused about these posts because they lack specific examples to better understand where you're coming from. I've always seen the comments about how people do site:reddit.com but I've never felt the need to do so either

YaBa• 2 years ago

Yup, Google keeps getting worse everyday. Some queries return 90% crap/spam/AI blogs and 10% useful information. Bing is not an option, DuckDuckGo it's a little better, but still... a lot of garbage. I've been noticing this since 2023, but now it's completly weird. How did spammers won the SEO battle?

tanaylakhani• 2 years ago

We are building Stacked Search: Beyond the first - https://stackedsearch.com

We index the links that are curated resources from people all over the world. We have already indexed 1M+ links on a wide variety of subjects.

potta_coffee• 2 years ago

Google is essentially useless. If I really want to find something, I'll try Yandex nowadays. For the most part, I don't even search anymore. I just suffer with sites I've had bookmarked for years. Most of my potential searches are for programming language documentation / APIs etc.

Ask HN: Have your search results gotten worse recently?

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