Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902999Yesterday I was surprised to find myself trying Yahoo search because I couldn't get satisfactory search results in Google. It was the first time in years. I started thinking about this, and I realized that in the past few months I haven't been getting particularly good results from Google. I don't get spam or anything, but a lot of times I don't get useful results.
The thing is, I'm not sure if it's because I do a lot of very specialized stuff these days, or because the search quality really has gone down. Consider these two examples:
Search for "Linux asynchronous IO". You'll get a lot of articles, but most are four years old (which is an eternity in the Linux world). These results aren't very good - posix AIO is implemented in userspace threads, and io_submit and friends don't work in many cases. Which cases? Hard to tell - I couldn't find any information in the results no matter how long I searched. I couldn't find any benchmarks either.
Perhaps it's because there is no good info on this on the web (hard to believe). So let's try something else - search for "concurrent hashmap in C". After hours of searching and playing with keywords, I got almost no useful results (other than Intel's libs, but not too much info on that either). It's difficult to believe that there are no good implementations out there.
So, is it the specialized nature of my searches, or is it Google? What do you think?