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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46507934

by areoform • 7 months ago

32 19 7 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

Doing research is extremely frustrating these days. I feel like either I'm going nuts or search has been nerfed.

My search queries are frequently misinterpreted. Google, bing, duckduckgo have a strong recency bias and don't surface older webpages.

These problems get worse for niche and technical topics. I can't even find existing webpages that I know I've found / read about in the past.

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

RJ000• 7 months ago

Yup. Feels like we're being dissed.

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

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

faidit• 7 months ago

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

rurban2• 7 months ago

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

metalman• 7 months ago

https://seek.ninja/

nice! it works, but the rest of the internet is broken due to scraping and ddos, bot's, dns blocking by isp's and others for indipendent vendors the hurdles are even greater. LLM's are just another thing in a long list of technologies that I have rejected, mostly due to connections with advertising, pushing 60 now, and have never owned a TV, been on line since day 2 when images had to be hand coded, pixel by pixel, and have watched the internet fail to settle into something representitive of humanity and different societies and cultures , and become a fearsome machine to promote power, consumption,inanity,perversion, hate and fear to the unwary or weak, and yes there is a little good stuff surviving, one or two layers down, but it is all embattled and struggling to be seen. The only up side is that due to the algorythmic suppression of dissent, outrage, and legitimate problems and dissatisfaction, those in power have blinded themselves from any ability to build something sustainable, and so hasten a real demand collapse under the pressure of people struggling to provide for there own basic needs. There must be a saturation limit where indivuals and societies begin to toggle over in the search for alternatives, but it is set very high by natural forces, such that phenominon like the waffle iron(and sneeker) riots where people died struggling to get into stores for limited time supper sales, proves how effective and powerfull advertising realy can be, but that the line between a "great promotion" and a riot, and total demand collapse seem to be alomost on top of each other, and locked in some kind of doom loop, that may be central to what happens during civilisational collapse. not good right now, not good at all.

rurban2• 7 months ago

I rather think it's getting better and better. LLM's great, almost AGI already. Big search is unusable, so alternatives will be taking over. But Google services are still free. Much better than when we started with the internet in 1994, 1995.

timothyduong• 7 months ago

Have you tried Kagi?

Sytten• 7 months ago

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

smt88• 7 months ago

I gave up entirely and use LLMs unfortunately

entropyie• 7 months ago

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

nicbou• 7 months ago

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

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

andyjohnson0• 7 months ago

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

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

Lord_Zero• 7 months ago

Paid Kagi user here, its like having OG google back. Its awesome.

n1xis10t• 7 months ago

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

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

cdvonstinkpot• 7 months ago

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

keepamovin• 7 months ago

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

hulitu• 7 months ago

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

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

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

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

al_borland• 7 months ago

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

csomar• 6 months ago

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

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

gethly• 6 months ago

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

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

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