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I pretty much throw everything at google (like grammar, quotes, places, trivia in general, tech questions - reddit still isn't as good as stack-overflow for developers), Brave browser will take the ads out, and I get to choose my result. It's quite a nice experience.

(And no, I don't recommend Duck Duck Go either. It fails to show obvious results every now and then. I learned that the hard way.)

We're back to the Web needing a search engine.

[EDIT] I should add that the ads Google was showing me didn't even do a very good job of showing me the very specific kind of thing I was looking for, even though there must be thousands of stores around the world selling pieces that fit the keywords. The ads were for jewelry, but most of them weren't anything like what I was trying to find. In this case an entire page of ads but all from different sites and mostly the thing I was looking for would have been better than nothing, but it couldn't even do that.

- "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust."

This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretly paid ads. The "best" recipe for pancakes is only what's trending on instagram right now. The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being shared inside communities like Reddit but not on the web. The same for trending programmer tools.

- "It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines..."

What I'm shocked by is that Google somehow maintained a balance on this for so long. Well, at least a good enough balance that people still use it primarily.

- "Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant" ..."

This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write.

- "There’s a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory..."

I hadn't heard of this. Now that's some sci-fi level of conspiracy but in today's world it seems totally plausible.

There just seems to be a load of imitation sites now, like 6 different wrapper sites for GitHub, 8 for StackOverflow, a couple for GitLab, something aggregating a load of forums - so the first couple of pages are the exact same content - just from 15 different sites that copy the originals.

At least going with a community site there tends to be actual discussion and or useful links to the relevant content

Their management has historically lacked focus, but if Reddit ever builds a half-competent search index, and positions itself as a search-first, discovery-second destination, they will be in the FANG tier of stocks.

They have the data. They have the dedicated, active user base. They have free moderation. The hard parts are solved. If only they get someone like Satya at the helm. (Also a big reason for me to believe that an acquisition may also be a good play for a AMZN/MSFT)

It's better than it was in the past!

Google says it shows zero ads on 80% of searches. So the whole "ads now take up entire screen" thing is based on the qualitative ramblings of twitter accounts who don't know what they are talking about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730

And you hope the rest will get fixed?

For other stuff, yeah, Google is in pretty sad shape. I remember how exciting Google was when it was first created, those days are long gone.

And the author is right about appending the site name to the query (reddit etc). Sometimes, it is the only way to avoid the crap that the search engine would otherwise provide.

What's really happening: Google is strangling the golden search goose for a quick meal.

At a certain point, good is good enough. At that point, it's a matter of time before the competition catches up.

Also, they let their algorithm degrade, making it even easier for the competition.

Here's a billion dollar idea if anyone has the time and ability. Build a search interface that indexes tiktok videos and makes them searchable. To do it really well you might have to transcribe the videos.

Here's my VC pitch. Tiktok answers questions you never thought to ask, but if you can find a way for it to answer questions you do have, you have provided access to an obscene amount of interesting information.

But on the other hand I am thinking - Google is not stupid, they know what they doing. Maybe this kind of search is a good fit for the majority of the less-tech-savvy people, and only audience here on HN think it's bad.

(For example, the article proposes the explanation that "The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust", which is about the web itself, not specific to Google.)

Can people suggest good alternatives or search patterns for certain categories of information or search types?

Some of the search patterns I currently I use:

* Youtube for product reviews and demos, entertainment, music and educational material.

* Google with site:reddit.com at the start for questions best answered by other humans; crowd-sourced answers, authentic replies from mostly real people.

* Google with site:news.ycombinator.com if I want to find "forum-like" discussion on topics I'm interested in.

* Google Image search with site:amazon.co.uk when looking for niche products I need to buy, because Amazon's search is so incredibly broken and game-ified.

What I'm having a heck of a time finding is technical content; long-form programming tutorials, deep dives into academic concepts (I do a lot of signal/audio processing and search for blog posts related to these topics), circuit schematics, electronic engineering content. These used to exist on enthusiast forums 10-15 years ago, but Google often no longer surfaces hits from these forums, both because the content is old and the forum model is dying. Reddit is the "replacement" but it plagued with low-effort "look at my thing" posts that help nobody.

And agree on the reddit thing. Their search engine sucks, and you're stuck with using search engines like google to find anything decent.

Edit: Should be mentioned that google still yields decent results if you're using quotation marks and logic operators - but for free text, it took a nosedive.

As for reddit - it is the last place I look for things.

The whole article reads as someone advancing the agenda without any real substance

> Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying.

What’s the connection between Reddit being searched for and Google dying? Read the article, doesn’t make sense.

Might as well say that GitHub is dying because Discord is where many projects have community discussions.

People are always saying Google is dying or search results are getting worse. How many sites existed in 2010? How many in 2022? How prevalent was SEO and content marketing then vs now.

The fact of the matter is that the web itself is becoming more littered with spam. Literally on HN there was a thread on how to make 50K a year and one person proudly stated they did so by using GPT-3 to create spam related to content they were selling.

Inherently any search engine with programmatic results can be gamed programmatically.

The chart in the article is easily explained by the fact that it’s hard to search those platforms using Google and that the internal search is more useful.

Reddit search has always sucked.

It used to use the actual image and be able to provide context from where that image was found elsewhere. Now it seems to throw the image at AI and the AI will go "Oh that's a street" then they will just show you streets with similar colors as the image you put in.

Completely useless for trying to locate what movie a screenshot is from, or even similar images because the category searching is too general. Yandex image search completely blows it out of the water by being nothing more than a modern version of 2010 era Google Image Search.

Each thread has had some common themes, but what's surprising is how different the problems discussed are. Here are a few of the best recent discussions:

Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories (twitter.com/mwseibel):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136

Search engines and SEO spam (twitter.com/paulg):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29782186

Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794372

DuckDuckGo Traffic - with spam discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29852783

Is Google Search Deteriorating?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29886423

Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30031672

Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30130535

For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30213110

Disclaimer: I'm working on a search startup, so I have a clear bias, but one of the main reasons I am working on a search startup is because Google's results are clearly getting worse.

I share OP's pain though. I wish there was a search engine that actively filtered affiliate link laden/spammy/SEO'd/etc content.

SEO seems to be a big problem. Just saying Google is big and they should fix it ignores the nuance and the whole cat and mouse game that goes on. Eg: I am based in India, and am looking for which cable channel/streaming service is broadcasting a game of my favorite soccer team. The first 10 results would not have the answer, but as a user you would only know that after opening the link and reading through 500 or so words introducing teams, opposition, competition, form etc. but not what I am looking for. Most of these are news websites, who would make a loud noise if their results do not come on top. For a search engine relying on signals (even with AI), it's an incredibly hard problem to know if those 500 words would have the exact answer. [1]

Reddit is good for searches where things are in flux, or when it's a user centric thing. Because they have done the SEO well. Similarly the results leading to Stack Overflow for developers are equally important. Yet, when you want to research on some topic, or learn more, you would inevitably start with Google.

If I were to predict, Google would start identifying trends and slowly start ranking reddit higher for user centric queries. In my limited dev experience, that is already happening for Stack overflow. I love how the results are clubbed together under the first result.

[1] The result which surfaces often include the direct question: "How to watch team A v team B game in India?". How do you design algos to combat that and yet include legitimate results. Have a lot of text on the page is often the most given advice on SEO.

It's doesn't suffer _as much_ from the deluge of garbage on there dead internet, and the search is good enough to discover what you're looking for while remaining bad enough to provide compelling surprises.

They are even going as far as deleting Google Drive documents that contain things they don't like: https://twitter.com/lionel_trolling/status/14908008941574676...

I hadn't really noticed that my own search habits had slowly changed until this article. Appending "reddit" is now a fairly regular habit for me, for exactly the trust issue mentioned.

What I would find useful is to be able to whitelist a bunch of sites on DDG, so that it prioritises results from them first, when I search.. basically most of the sites with ! operators I guess.

That way I wouldn't get all the SO clone-sites returning their rubbish.

It is a platform for finding and sharing recommendations within your own trusted network. I'd love to hear your feedback!

You can read more about it on the home page[0], from its inspiration, comparisons with existing solutions, to a down-the-road monetization model that aligns with the network.

It is being built by Kujo - a brand in the lawn care industry, and so is seeded with products and brands for that community. The initial launch will be within the lawn care community. However, the platform is community-agnostic and supports creating communities for any groups.

[0] https://www.unfluence.app

I would seriously pay $10 a month for a search engine that worked really well and wasn't in the ad game. But I guess that's not a common stance.

Ironically, only a moment later I noticed on an IRC channel I've been on for nearly two thirds of my life that someone just complained about Google giving nothing but SEO trash.

Anyone else tried it?

https://kagi.com/

Hahaha. This has legitimately made me laugh.

The article is sadly quite on point. I'd add that Google is increasingly deteriorating for me during the last several months. It was actually still little better than now, a year ago.

Answers are more-and-more provided on what used to be SERPs, but now is too often dominated by answers on the page, ads, and big marketing budget SEO optimised landing pages.

We still believe in the value and power of discovery; call us old-fashioned but we focus on 10 blue links using an independent index. Your vanity search maydisappoint, and our ranking needs improving, but you will find often hidden gems and information rich sources. Plus we send you to those rather than demanding your eyeballs.

Informational diverity is vital. So we provide one click to get results from Brave, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Gigablast, Google, Startpage, Yandex too, as explained here: https://blog.mojeek.com/2022/02/search-choices-enable-freedo...

You need extra extension to block these sites from the search result.

Time to move on and use something else, but not google anymore.

I'm not a native English speaker, so at one point I was trying to find an authoritative source for an old idiom... and the entire first page were all different websites regurgitating the same inaccurate text! They did no independent verification of their own.

When you start your post with "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine" you are already well outside the realm of fact.

People who used to make high quality web content have moved to youtube instead because you can make more money there and it's probably easier.

Add to that, I think because of the move to smartphones, google tries to give you a direct answer to your question rather than directing you to sources where you could educate yourself to answer your own question which it did more in the past.

But yeah google search is noticeably worse and I don't know that google can do anything to fix it.

This is the source of many people's frustration, and the source of forced synonyms. A dumb tool that adapts to humans as they use it and tries to be "smart" prohibits us from getting more skilled in the usage of the tool. It becomes unpredictable, and it introduces significant friction each time it does something dumb.

Even if the tool is correct 90% of the time, it is wrong 100% of the time on an emotional/ux level. The successes are invisible in aggregate, but each mistake sticks out like a sore thumb. I guess why this is: modern understanding of our brains (as I, a lay man, understand it) is that they attempt to continuously predict what's going to happen next in their environment. When all predictions are correct it feels good, and there's no tension. A tool that adapts and changes makes our brains predictions turn out wrong, and our brains punish us with tension and attention each time the tool does not do what we want, since it failed to predict the desired behavior.

Previous versions of google felt so nice precisely because our brains, or at least those of hackers, could adapt to its various tricks and shortcuts.

"Call me crazy, but I've been using Yandex a lot more recently. Political FUD aside, the results are pretty good, and completely unfiltered.

It reminds me of how wild and unfiltered the internet was back in 2007. However, I wouldn't recommend it to "casual" users. Using Yandex requires a bit more common sense than Google, because malicious domains show up every now & then. For power users (99.99% of HN), this isn't a problem.

With all things considered, it's totally worth it. I never realized how censored Google Search was until I stepped away. As a grown ass man, I don't want anyone telling me what I "cant see" or attempting to define what's "acceptable" - The freedom to choose is intoxicating almost."

You can select a filter to hide any Russian results.

Google search is simply an indexed representation of the indexable web. If you’re seeing SEO spam, that’s a reflection of how the web has evolved thanks to the most popular monetization mechanisms available today.

Reddit is simply a great site for user generated (mostly) textual content. It is not comparable to a search engine . . The popularity of “+Reddit” strings appended to the ends of search queries likely pales in comparison to the volume of overall search queries. One can investigate the differences through Google trends where one would see the string “tiktoks” beats Reddit this past year.

Articles like these full of self validating biases such as “My Opinion of Google search is everyone’s opinion and here are some selective quotes to show I’m right” are childish.

Niche communities with valuable insights and anecdotes that cannot be found elsewhere.

Now I wish they do well with their upcoming IPO and beyond.

There are a lot of good points here about why power users (i.e. HN types, technologists, scholars/researchers, etc) find Google Search frustrating, but it doesn't really provide a balanced perspective which would acknowledge that Google Search for the average, billions-scale user is an incredibly optimized, positive experience. For those users, Google Search is doing exactly what they want: providing instant answers to trillions of queries without making the user click or read anywhere else while making Google an absurd amount of money through ads. I'm not being facetious when I say that if you find Google Search frustrating, then you are no longer the target user of Google Search.

I've noticed that Google Search also provides too much weight on recently added/updated content than actual valuable content. A great example, while anecdotal, is Paul Graham noting that searching his quote on Google--`"Prestige is just fossilized inspiration."`--the first result is typically a third-party blog that is quoting him, not his own website where the quote was originally published. (Though he refuses to add SSL, which is why Google may be dinging his site.)

I, too, find Google Search frustrating for a lot of technical topics. The content ripping spam is overwhelming, even with technical topics. The past couple years, the proliferation of scraping sites that rip information from GitHub Issues/PRs/Discussions and StackOverflow information makes me incredibly angry and frustrated, and that is directly Google's fault for not identifying that spam and removing it. There is also nothing we as consumers can do because of Google's near monopoly on Search. We can switch to competitors, but it doesn't hurt Google's bottom line.

I have absolutely done the `${search query} "reddit"` 'hack' to find reading for my more niche queries--technical or non-technical. Reddit is a wealth of user-generated information, but it is typically a densely written answer and requires a user to comprehend that information. It can be easy to forget that the average reading level of a US adult is middle school level. That average user with a low reading level isn't going to spend their time trying to read paragraphs of text in order to both discover and understand an answer.

tl;dr Google Search is only dying for "us," not for the more profitable "everyone."

I've always been a fan of technical books, but would almost never buy classic reference texts because if I just needed to look up an idea or concept real quick I could usually find an adequate explanation online.

The problem is that content marketing in my domain (stats/data science) has gotten so bad that nearly all of the results are Towards Data Science and similar garbage articles, written by relative amateurs that were rushed out to get ranking for a longer tail of search terms. The number of times I've researched a topic I know well but want to understand some nuance of only to find results that are at best naive in their understanding and at worse outright wrong is astounding.

Now whenever I see any recommendations for good books I buy them, even if I don't have time or immediate interest in reading them right now because I know that if in 6 months I have some relevant question I'm likely to find the wrong answer online.

For example: searched something that "didn't have many results" - this is indicated (but somewhat hidden) at the top of the results, but isn't made visually obvious - well, I don't go looking for that to know if the results were actually what I searched for; if it gave me results, it's natural to assume the results were actually relevant.

But instead, Google decides to be absolutely less than useless by giving me back a bunch of irrelevant results, instead of simply returning NO results because there were none.

This is the main reason I've completely given up on Google.

Edit: another annoyance is Google altering your search terms - "searching for YXZ instead", or even worse, excluding some terms in the results (and having to later click "must include YXZ" which, again, is hidden within the results). This is particularly infuriating when looking up API terms.

I search about how to do X in python, the top result will have a paragraph or 2 on "What is X in python " "Why do people use X in python"

You can see its being done to stuff more keywords into the headers

But why just google? Like I said, duck.com results are similar-ish

Although I've yet to evaluate Kagi (though I did get a beta invite the other day), the only search engine that seems to be not totally nerf'd today is Yandex, and even that one has problems (lots of foreign language content). I still primarily use DDG a lot, but often times I have to go to Yandex if I want a more exact match.

I do have to wonder exactly how Gen Z and Gen Alpha are using search engines, if at all? This isn't to say I think they're not bothering with search... but that I just don't actually know. Might it be that the use patterns of the youth are influencing how Google and the rest of the search engines are tailoring their algorithms?

Also, the idea that reddit will replace it seems unlikely to me. As much as there is decent content on reddit, it exists side-by-side with junk, jokes, trolling, memes, shills, and straight up misinformation. This doesn't stop people from using and enjoying reddit - much of the silliness is all in good fun, but it will become a serious barrier to trying to become the search engine for online content.

Just so long as ads are clearly labelled as such I'm completely fine with it.

But the whole content farming thing is much worse and it explains the "reddit" thing. Searching for reviews is now impossible because of all the astroturfed affiliate link spam. Adding "site:reddit.com" is one of the few remaining ways to find real people talking about something. That woo will probably end at some point.

But this is a good example of how a metric that becomes a target ceases to be valuable as a metric. In this case, the links between pages became a goal so those links, the content on the pages and the SEO became a game and it doesn't matter if it's Google or someone else. If anything, affiliate links are a much bigger problem because they fund this "industry".

There will always be a need for search. Google search isn't going anywhere.

It's no longer the same WWW I am familiar with anymore. Reddit is just one of the few sites still had higher text condensity (old UI, to be exact)

As the internet (and Google) reach out more and more, we get closer and closer to everyone and their opinion being online. And so the average answer online gets closer to the average opinion in the planet.

I know Google thought PageRanknwas the answer for that but they now rely as much (?) on people looking for X and moving on. Which means looking for "what is calculus" "most" people will hit a maths dense page and bounce for a less complex / demanding explanation.

All of which is a long winded way of saying if we want an Oracle to pick Truth from all the pages of the Web, we are not going to find that Oracle.

Humans and human science and curation can only do that.

Odd that essential Librarians is what we need

Edited

The problem is not ads, it is not even capitalism, is the requirement of our western capitalism to require constant growth. Doing what Google did 5 years ago, with the profits of 5 of years ago, should have been fine - but the markets demand growth, so companies have to pull into unsustainable territory and that wrecks the company.

Boeing is a great modern example.

No one ever really expected much of reddit. It could just do its thing. But now, spun off, it will have to relentlessly seek growth, and the counter is ticking for its destruction.

Every time you search for "best X" you'll find a page with low-effort copied or write-for-hire content design to get you to click on Amazon affiliate links as opposed to what you are looking for, which is an actual review by someone who is an X enthusiast, personally bought and tested all the options and is eager to share their findings.

I’ve (finally) come to the realization that most websites are trying to sell me something. It’s usually affiliate link spam, or the articles provide just enough info and then ask you to sign up for their newsletter or buy their ebook or subscribe to their service or whatever other predatory monetization bullshit they’ve implemented.

I get it, websites cost money to run and providing useful information for free is a bad business model. My issue here is that Google search rewards this spammy behavior in order to maximize cash flow. And this type of thing works very well on normal non-tech-inclined people so it won’t ever go away.

I dislike Reddit’s current browsing experience, but the value of the platform has always been its smaller interest-focused communities and the ability to access the opinions of actual real humans instead of content marketers.

It's probable that a huge amount of useful information will soon become much more difficult to access, and/or diluted by stealth advertising, as Reddit looks to aggressively monetise its position. I'm interested to see if a credible alternative emerges and if there is any effort to move some of the existing useful data off the platform.

The problem is trust vs the appeal of corruption—that is, some people will always want to deceive the masses for profit.

At scale, reliable human trust only exists in democratically-policed communities, where authentic users control corruptible owners—something few platforms want.

Pretty much all of my customers come from the isolated communities I'm active in.

this is enforcing that fact that it’s more worth my time to be active in more communities, rather than push for ads and seo.

Resulting more information rich communities. so is this just pushing for information silos or adding more?

Google serves you an entire page about carbon monoxide poisoning, and recent news stories about carbon monoxide poisoning. You have to scroll through a lot of junk to get to Wikipedia's entry on "carbon monoxide". Bing and DuckDuckGo do a serviceable job telling you about the substance CO.

You cannot search "carbon monoxide" to learn about carbon monoxide, and that is the issue.

The only thing Google still does better for me is provide "Stack Overflow" results.

DDG/Bing might not be perfect but it works for 90% of my web searches.

Then Google came along and worked well, for a while.

But then I found Delicious.com - and those curated bookmarks were better than anything Google provided.

Reddit is the new delicious. Fairly saavy Internet users that aren't afraid to try new things, so they seem to know about cool stuff first.

> 1. Ads

> 2. SEO

> 3. AI

4. Censorship

I got so sick of Google's useless results that I started out on a fool's errand. I'm using publicly available, curated or moderated link sources to build my own STEM focused search engine. It'll probably end in tears, but I intend to give it a shot.

Even searching for a particular blog, having forgotten it's name, I tried every single keyword and couldn't find it.

I also find it funny that I am doing exactly what the author of the blog post argues about. Every single time I look up something about trading, ADHD or disabilities, I append reddit or even prepend it.

I miss Alta Vista. You had to provide your own thinking. I'd construct searches like: (word OR Word) AND (word NEAR word). I loved the NEAR command.

If the users can't trust Google to return relevant results, would they simply trust brand power and go directly to the websites they trust? (e.g. go directly to nike.com instead of searching for "running shoes"?)

Product recommendations on reddit usually boil down to a couple of products for each type, the hivemind keeps recommending them and the process kind of self sustains without any chance for other valuable products to be even considered/reviewed/recommended or pass the upvote threshold to be noticed.

Technical questions sometimes have an answer much more times get you to a dead thread that didn't lead anywhere because the attention span on reddit is way too short.

Also reddit users are mostly US based, local communities aren't usually big enough to lead to something useful on localized searches.

Likewise, I wonder how long appending "Reddit" will work. As others have pointed out, Reddit shills are already relatively common, and it's becoming increasingly common for bot accounts to create lots of random comments to appear to be human (such as finding a thread with thousands of comments, then copying and pasting the comment to another place in the thread or to another thread, or auto-generating a simple sentence based on other comments in the thread).

Sometimes the advertising hordes move so fast they kill something before it even takes off, like what happened with Clubhouse.

That gave me a good chuckle, it's a daily habbit for me.

Seriously though: the search used to be even worse. I remember when they re-implemented it and made a bit thing about it. Wasn't it in collaboration with some third party?

When I search Google Maps for hotels or restaurants, it offers filters to apply to the results (price, quality, stars, etc).

If I apply the filters I want (4.5+ review, $$ price), the map continues to show other non-filter-passing businesses, cluttering the screen. The reason (given by the side panel list) is: "Here are some businesses that don't quite match your search".

*Well if I wanted to see those, Google, I wouldn't have applied the filters!*

All you've done is cluttered up the map which was the main thing I wanted to be able to see the location and distance of things exactly matching my criteria. If I wanted to get all the rest I would've removed my filters.

Makes me feel that Google is trying to apply too much suggestive content for reasons other than what users want, and that someone is causing Google to lose its way. (I know, it's just a small example.)

Just like the gmail effect, teams internally have been pushing to integrate AI into search results. Not necessarily because it's the best thing to do, but because someone needs to get promoted. They can't just leave search as it is.

Of course, "best thing to do" is meaningless. What are the metrics? Getting reliable metrics and running big A/B tests is really hard if you have to measure fuzzy things like user satisfaction instead of concrete metrics like CTR. But that's really what's going on here. Initially, users may have been clicking and interacting with results more, but after realizing that those results are not actually what they wanted, or are SEO spam (hello Medium), they become disillusioned and append reddit to their query.

One anecdote in the book stuck with me: In the early days of the business, Jim kept getting pestered by salespeople from the Yellow Pages, who told Jim he would benefit from advertising in the Yellow Pages to attract new customers.[b] Jim decided to run a test. He ordered and installed a new red phone in the office, ordered a new phone number just for the red phone, and bought a big ad in the Yellow Pages listing only the line that rang the red phone. The ad ran for a year. No one ever called the red phone. Jim never again spent a cent advertising on the Yellow Pages.

By then, the only consumers and businesses who actually searched the Yellow Pages for products and services were those who didn't have a choice, e.g., out-of-towners needing a plumber who couldn't get the name of a trustworthy plumber from a trusted neighbor.

As regards Google, as its search results and rankings become less trustworthy, more and more people will stop using them to find products and services. Other platforms will benefit, like Reddit. And advertisers will follow, as always.

--

[a] https://www.amazon.com/First-Dream-Jim-Clayton/dp/0972638903...

[b] The Yellow Pages were in essence a low-tech printed-paper version of the search business. Businesses paid to advertise in a thick yellow book, and consumers and businesses searched the index of that book to find products and services. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages

After you search for something; select `Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim`

This will get google to actually search the way power users expect. I am surprised how little known this feature is. It should be default, but once known it completely removed my frustration with google search.

Two types of sites I see popping up are:

1) "shims", which generate the bare minimum static content required to get listed on Google, usually for obscure or long-tail queries

2) "skins", which make exact copies of sites with publicly available context (like Wikipedia or npmjs.org).

Both are enabled by tools like NextJS which allow you to take data and convert it to a static site which does well with SEO.

I wrote about this in depth here: https://zestyrx.com/blog/nextjs-ssg

I'll usually see Stack Overflow results, but the entire page is then filled with sites that basically just copy-paste SO content.

Also, I think that author should have mentioned the new crop of AI writing tools that have been coming out in troves. And, honestly, some of them do a pretty convincing job of writing things like blog post intros or specific paragraphs.

And, best of all, all this "progress" is driven solely by monetary interest. Google has made millions of people rich, and for a while will continue to do so.

Lastly, I'm bit of a digital marketer myself. I have been in the game for a loooong time, too long. And, I can say from personal experience - a lot of the top 1 results on Google are still being gamed. You can, technically, report blackhat spam[0], but who knows how proactive Google is to listen to those reports.

[0]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

You cannot bring up a relevant result. The minute you add the athletes name and snowboard to the query, no matter the surrounding terms, it just brings up the media dump of articles about the snowboarding event, not the equipment.

I ended up giving up, I couldn’t believe I couldn’t find anything relevant no matter how hard I racked my brain coming up with different terms for my query. What a frustrating experience when the tool you’ve relied on for 20 years has stopped proving itself to be reliable.

If you search for "What countries are using ivermectin" on Google, you get the second link being a broken spam site (the kitchen sisters) and pages of results saying Ivermectin doesn't work. I wonder if the broken spam site figured something out to get ranked that high.

If you use duckduckgo or Yandex you get a whole page of relevant results that actually answer the question. The number of topics where Google refuses to return relevant results and instead focuses on talking points is very large at this point.

Google is still around. It is a third-rate search engine but a first-rate reputation engine. Boomers (we still call them that, even though they haven't been actual Baby Boomers for a long time) still use it to vet people before making hiring decisions.

For $159 per month (everything is on a subscription model) you can get the "personalized reputation" treatment by Google, so that when said Boomers are deciding whether to hire you, they see the unreliable material you paid for them to see--rather than, as under the old system, the unreliable material that emerged organically. It's a steep fee (these are the deflationary "new dollars") but it's a small price to be able to get a job and not be picked up by one of the "sweepers" and put into one of the performance improvement camps.

I wish I had overthrown capitalism in the 2020s when it was still possible.

My only concern with Kagi is it requires you to create an account. I don't like Google tracking me and the idea of Kagi knowing what all my search terms are isn't appealing. At least they aren't planning on selling it.

https://kagi.com/privacy

Unfortunately, only a matter of time until Reddit is gamed to hell unless they take steps to prevent moderator corruption (which is already happening and severe for many popular subreddits). And so the cycle continues. Avoiding people who want to sell you stuff is a sisyphean task…

Searching for "good restaurants in <city I'm visiting>" is useless. Entire real companies exist to fill the top few slots on that search for any given city. My workaround is, as the article says, to search Reddit instead. Look for the subreddit dedicated to that city, then find their most recent thread on good places to eat - you find much better results.

That said, I strongly suspect this only works because it's not a widely-known strategy. As soon as a critical mass of people start going to reddit instead of google, the same enormous weight of effort people put into SEO will instead go to finding ways to subvert Reddit's authenticity. Sock puppet accounts, astroturfing, generating spammy subreddits, voting rings - there are plenty of strategies, and dedicated experts will have a huge incentive to invent more. Reddit will put up countermeasures, just like Google tries to prevent SEO spam. I don't have any reason to believe Reddit will be more successful in the long term than Google is.

So... enjoy it while it lasts. :)

Well, some things are (reverse image search, ease of accessing 'Cached' pages -- now I have to go to archive.org Wayback, etc), but forum search has always been bad.

Long before Reddit was big, USENET/DejaNews and forum software like PHPbb/UBB ruled supreme (and before Markdown there was UBB Code). Google, despite owning DejaNews, did not often surface links into USENET content, and a lot of forums, for whatever reason, were not indexed by Google. For example, I used to spend a lot of time reading the latest on PC/3D Hardware stuff on Beyond3D, Overclockers, Rage3D, etc and I almost always had either use site specific search (dejanews.com or say, PHP BB's built in local search), or I had to add site:beyond3d.com for example.

And is a large amount of confirmation bias going on in these Google threads that appear. Some people make assumptions that their search patterns are representative of the billions of searchers ("argh, I searched for pytorch k-means and a GitHub wrapper site appeared!") and that their experience is a representative sample, while others focus only on what has gotten worse, and not what has gotten better.

What's clearly gotten worse is webspam. But while it has degraded the Googlee experience, it's not clear any of the other search engines are any better at filtering it out, except by luck because perhaps they don't crawl as many sites as often.

What are they using now?

I'd check Amazon reviews. When was Google ever the first tool of choice for product reviews? I don't remember that era.

I also tried googling an answer to (an apparently common bug) in Windows relating to Bluetooth connections and I have not found any non generic answers anywhere in the search results no patter what I quoted or whichever term I added. Just generic crap, that same crap copy and pasted over and over and over again and non-specific bullshit answers from Microsoft itself.

For every single search, I have to consistently scroll one page down to skip ads and product matches ala "google shopping" belt. It's just insane.

But Google being Google, it didn't see the potential because Orkut didn't achieve global dominance (despite being the social media platform in places like Brazil and India at the time). Google's obsession with AI-fying the crap out of its business will likely end up being its downfall now that it's proving to be increasingly ineffective against the SEO-motivated players, who now have an enormously diverse toolkit to game the coveted first SERPs, from black hat to downright paying right into Google's pockets to get their way.

It was so astrotufed. I could not find anything other than blogspam.

Where when i would post a simple question previously, I would almost always get a SE/SO answer that was 80-90% correct, now I only get a bunch of copy cat 'learn coding' web pages that really aren't ever the question I'm asking.

I use duckduckgo as a browser and the !SO bang is effectively broken due to cookies so I don't know what to do.

It contains a lot of memes/junk but it also contains a wealth of people's knowledge.

Reddit should steal 1-3 top search engineers from Google and build out a much better search. And might as well steal a few ads engineers from Google too.

In my experience turning this on substantially increases the quality of Google's search results. It stops ignoring half the words in your query and seemingly parses "quoted" phases as you'd expect. The biggest problem is that there is no ability to turn this on all the time for your account and turning it on is intentionally a hassle.

Google still has a lot of other problems even with Verbatim enabled, but this makes Google like 30% less terrible even if just using it for site:reddit.com-like searches.

In case anyone else does this and is tired of typing `site:reddit` all the time, checkout the Mycroft project for search engine plugins. I use one in particular[1] and alias it to `.r` in Firefox.

[1] https://mycroftproject.com/install.html?id=33343&basename=go...

I've been using Google Search since it was a cool beta site announced on Slashdot. Over the years I've built a career based on my ability to effectively search. I remember about ten years ago, people thought I had some kind of insane gift because I could immediately find ANYTHING. Not really, I just had an instinctive skill for creating effective queries.

Good search has been a huge part of my ability to develop software. I don't mean StackOverflow either. I learned to use Google to search Microsoft APIs and forums, as well as to dig up long obscure posts on the almost-dead languages and technologies I found myself supporting. Day by day, this is less and less possible. I'm losing a critical tool that has helped me be productive.

As an Autistic one of my strengths is feeling patterns in systems, and in the past few years, I've definitely noticed the garbage results described in this article.

Yesterday, my wife asked me if we have any cold meds. I said, "we have several, but let's look up interactions with your new antidepressant." I know from experience that all kinds of unpleasant side effects can arise from mixing these.

On her phone search results, there were none of the quality sites I expected, such as Drugs.com. Instead I had to crawl through a bunch of SEO garbage and psuedo-health to find what I needed. If she was doing this on her own, she might have clicked on something dangerously erroneous. The web is becoming increasingly hostile. (And don't get me started about the infinitely scrollable boomer ads that come up below a local news story)

They're not dying if the people are still using Google for their searches.

Reddit search is awful. They could try to make a Google alternative but search is very hard. #1 query on Bing is "Google" for a reason.

I don't think it's sustainable in the long run and the barrier of entry to make a solid search engine is lowering every year - there are several solid alternatives where before it was a unfunny joke to assert there would be a proper google competitor 5 short years ago.

I don't think Google is going to fix this, the fact that it has evolved to where it is today is a result of concerted and persistent product focus in that direction.

High hopes that we'll see a better-than-google alternative break out in the near future.

People use Google to search Reddit, not Reddit.

I have found Google to be the absolute best way to search for tweets on Twitter. Twitter search is attrocious.

I do search for things on YouTube directly, but that's still Google Search.

Google will need to start taking tough, manual decisions on which sites to depritoritise in both what is shown and in what is considered in its algorithms in order to fix its search. And this is not a task you can outsource to whoever is the currently poorest native speaker is.

I'm fed up of Google returning blog spam, ads, and shamelessly rehosted content. I want real information by real people, not automated blog posts with titles covering every common search term.

Perhaps this is where the entry point opportunity is...build a search engine for power users that effectively filters results to "authentic" content from reputable UGC platforms.

As an aside: the advent of GPT-3 is going to make it really hard for reddit mods to keep doing as wonderful of a job as they do today.

Google is my second to third search engine choice at this point - never my default. Google search has, in effect, become the 2nd or 3rd page of Google Search results; you only resort to it when you are truly desperate, and have very little hope of it doing any good.

So, it is a mistake to assume that the quantity of the searches can be shared between the different graphs. Unless there is another data source that shows Reddit has the most searches, this is not meaningful. Actually, the graph is a Google graph, so everything on the graph is from a Google Search.

Sales 2019 161m 2020 182m 2021 257m

>If you’ve tried to search for a recipe or product review recently, I don’t need to tell you that Google search results have gone to shit.

Not that I usually do but I tried for macbook M1 and apple pie and it gave me ok results - Tom's Guides and a BBC recipe

Competition - I don't really know anyone who uses Bing or DDG though I believe they are out there somewhere

Ok I sometimes stick reddit on the search which is fine because I like Reddit. I guess the ads are probably annoying but I don't see any due to uBlock.

I'm not sure why I'm the only one saying it's not dying when that seems to be what the facts suggest? Nostalgia for some mythical past when you got unbiased results for "best laptop" or something? Not sure really.

It only works as a fact machine now. For example search for "Who is the father of the president of USA?"

I think majority of this problem arises from academia/industry disconnect as well as greed.

1. Greed: Ad revenue.

2. Academic people + research = Let's create a general solution for all. They never bother to understand what problems users are facing.

You may wonder, why would any one care to ask stupid facts? Turns out people don't need internet for finding relevant information. They are already bubbled up, so they search for "facts" to verify or argue against their belief. Eg. "Kanye west and Kim Kardashian". And for these examples, google works best.

It's really HCI problem. It doesn't take for them to tune down on the ads, but why would they? If you search for niche, they just show ads because they get $$$. But if you search for facts they just give the highlight. And this small highlights create positive reinforcements among it's users. It manifest to common users that google works.

So google basically is fact machine to find clues for an argument or bubble up belief. It is utterly useless for anything else.

Product reviews. Nah

Technical topics: Nah

DIY: Nah

Hobbies: Nah

It's either facts or ads.

Such is modern search engine.

Exactly the problem search is supposed to solve. Google doesn’t seem to be very interested in solving it.

Lately I've noticed another breaking change. Typically I phrase my queries in English despite being from Poland, due to higher quality content. Over the past month I've been getting more and more Polish results despite the query language. Case in point for anyone who wants to test - "garmin fenix 6 vs 945 comparison".

Search seems a bit off on other Google services as well. Most notably YouTube, which interweaves results with ads and recommendations. Video discovery is becoming increasingly more difficult and it feels like I'm stuck in an information bubble. Which surprisingly works, as I use the website longer, despite it being less entertaining than beforehand.

The complaints given in the article feel a little bit like observing that and steering it in the direction of the same old complaints about Google not being good for technical search, something that just doesn't matter to most users. I'm not going to Reddit to get answers to those questions either.

When I connect from a VPN exit point in Brazil it only shows me results in Portuguese (even when I'm logged in). When I connect from my hometown in Chile it's mostly fine but I think it's still not the same as if I connected from a US exit point, even though I have US English as my preferred language everywhere.

What I like about the website, it's you can find a huge amount of subreddits, every one of them dedicated to a niche topic that people there are willing to discuss. They share opinions, actively engage in discussions, and help in moderating good content. Is there any other place like this? There are many situations when one still be preferring Google, but as for niche discussions I don't see any other good place to visit. Maybe it was Quora before, but now it's a spam place.

[1] https://olwi.xyz

1. I searched a term, and there were not many exact results for it, with the suggestion to try verbatim search - clicked it, quotes where added, and then the _same suggestion_ appeared with added quotes. I kept clicking until I got a few hundred quotes in a row and google thought I was a bot. 2. Just today I searched for a camera related term, any many results appeared from one website with the suggestion to search for more results only from the site. For some reason, that search returned only a single result.

I was skeptical at first, but it really does seem to work for most queries, especially queries about products. I tried standing desks, streaming setup stuff, keyboards, linux desktop configurations, it's all there, all mostly ad free, definitely SEO free.

The solution on a technical level seems so trivial. Lower the score for pages with affiliate links and ads!

There may have been a moment when enough people were willing to put up their writing/images/videos for free such that Google's search engine appeared helpful in "organizing the world's information". But that mission statement was is a smoke screen. Google didn't organize. The company, as a gatekeeper, profiteered off of the writing/images/videos of others.

The problem isn't that Google search algorithms are low-quality, nor that Google has been gamed by SEO. The problem is that Google has engaged in a scorched-earth policy of capitalizing on the work of others. Google created a secondary market in information, without funding the primary market -- which then withered. And now there is a tertiary market of SEO spammers capitalizing on the propensity people still have to think that a Google search will return the truth to them, gratis.

The DDG results aren't superb, but they also don't invoke the feelings of communicating with a distracted child or poorly-trained pet.

I will say as an academic, google scholar is still superior. I just search with the !scholar bang on in DDG.

I’m struggling to follow. Can anyone give an example of a query, and then the ideal result that Google is not delivering?

PS I also do the kind of searching in the article with hacker news, e.g. ‘JavaScript testing site:news.ycombinator.com’

The process involved finding a set of search terms which might be expected to appear in more substantive discussions, or at least, the sort of discussion I'd tend to be interested in, and then see how many such occurrences there were across various sites, domains, TLDs, and the like.

The result was "Tracking the Conversation: FP Global 100 Thinkers on the Web".

The title comes from the list of terms I'd used, the Foreign Policy Global 100 Thinkers list, contributed by readers of that magazine (and I suspect curated by editors). That is, it's generated by a third party, reflects a largely refined audience, reflects a range of political and ideological viewpoints, and are mostly reasonably distinctive.

I approximated total page hits on a site (in English at least) with a search for the word "this".

And to proxy for more mundane comment, I chose to search for the arbitrarily selected string "Kim Kardashian".

This of course gave rise to the now-world-famouse FP:KK ratio. That is, the ratio of hits for the FP 100 Global Thinkers vs. "Kim Kardashian" on a given web property.

Another metric was FP/1000, which is mentions of the FP 100 names per 1,000 web pages (based on the "this" search results).

I chose roughly 100 websites and/or domains to search. This meant performing 30,000 cumulative web searches, a practice Google apparently take a dim view of, though performing one query roughly every 45 seconds or so seemed to work at the time. (Google's anti-bot defences have since become far more rigorous.)

The results were interesting and occasionally surprising.

Facebook had by far the most detected pages, 2.6 million at the time. Again, this isn't a precise count but a relative proxy.

Wordpress had the 2nd most FP100 results, and a density 10x greater than Facebook. This was when I realised that Wordpress in fact ran the sites behind a great many other organisations and publications, many of which are fairly high quality.

Metafilter had by far the highest FP:KK ratio at 32.75. (Compare Facebook at 2.10, and Twitter at 0.96.)

Google+, supposedly where smart people tended to hang out, rated only an FP:KK of 0.39.

I also looked at a number of mainstream and alternative media sites (the New York Times scored abnormally high, but that was largely through having one of the FP100 members as a columnist, mentioned not only on his own articles but in many others, Paul Krugman). Fox News scored predictably low (and many instances referenced the then Pope), but still higher than the BBC and Reuters.

Alternative media tended to rate higher than mainstream, but often focusing on a relatively small number of liberal thinkers, Noam Chomsky standing out in particular, also Krugman and Lawrence Lessig.

In education, what struck me was how much more content results appeared for leading private universities (Harvard, MIT, Stanford) than flagship public schools, with UC Berkeley especially paltry page count, though a higher FP/1000 ratio. University of Michigan represents better. I included a few European universities as well, which had modest results.

I don't recall why I threw Federal Reserve domains into the search, but this was when I realised that St. Louis is effectively the research arm of the system.

And I threw in generic and cc TLDs for good measure.

As mentioned, the reseach as conducted would be virtually impossible today, though there are now several quantitative searchable archives which report on the number of results across hosts and/or domains for various terms. I'd really like to be able to make use of those.

In the context of the past few years, refining searches to terms of more recent interest and relevance to information quality would also be fascinating.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...

I wonder if this isn't because most people don't think of quotes as being the "exact match" operator, and so expect fuzzy matches. The former exact match operator (plus) didn't have that issue, and was a better match for the exclude operator (minus).

but probably not.

Less and less is being written in blogs, sites and publicly indexable content.

However, I've been using site:reddit.com in google searches for years after leaving reddit as a user, mostly when I want to find more realistic opinions about certain products or solutions and I want to filter out marketing. It's served me very well.

Can anyone share what they are using?

This strikes me as one of those explanations that gets very close to the truth, but then sharply veers off into fictional territory, which also makes is then trivial for the article to handwave it away with;

> This isn’t true (yet), but it reflects some general sense that the authentic web is gone.

What's true is that too many Google results are just aggregator bots reposting content from the largest news organizations. There are no "artificial intelligence networks" involved for any of that, that would probably even be an improvement by adding a bit of flavor to the samey content.

But it's very much just copy&paste, to such a degree that it feels like there's only a hand-full of news-outlets in existence, and everybody else just copies their headlines and articles.

In practice this leads to quite the extreme mono-culture when looking up certain hot topics, as the first page will be dominated by the same few articles, with slightly different headlines.

> reddit

somehow these two terms don't go well with each other

As in: I have this concrete metric (that anybody can inspect / replicate) and I saw it declining from 201X to 2022 etc.

I don't dispute that it is a true fact. The comments reveal both ways that this manifests, inventive workarounds and possible causes. But without having read through the 765 comments(!) (at time of posting) I don't see something that can be quoted as a measured reality.

NB: It would be really useful to have such an independent quality index, also for future reference when invariably somebody provides a "better" search engine.

Yeah, fuck that fascist noise.

But I for one haven't, if a recall, correctly, ever done a search with "reddit" at the end.

Put in a search term.

E.g. "fat wallet"

"About 22,100,000 results" it says.

Click through to the last page.

"Page 6 of about 198 results (1.03 seconds)"

So out of 22 million results, I can really only see 198?? That can't be right. Wait, it says, "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 198 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

Yeah, that's what I'd like, I want to see all the results. CLICK.

OK, it takes me back to "About 22,100,000 results," so far, so good.

Click through again to the last one.

"Page 10 of about 22,100,000 results"

Ok ok. Let's keep going. CLICK.

"Page 11 of about 415 results."

That's it.

No more results shown.

What happened to the other 22,099,585 results????

Site-filtered Google is basically the only way I search the web now. As many others have expressed on here, Google used to be such a good "gateway" to the informational web. Now the most relevant results are almost always auto-generated content.

I resort to searching specific sites like HN and Reddit as a safe place to get human content, but I feel this to be limiting in it's own way, almost like echo chambers. Are we past the Wild West days of the internet? It now feels like a dystopian reality where I'm constrained to certain pockets that seem relatively safe.

I believe Google used to allow a "discussions" filter on queries, which would limit your search to forums. I'm not sure why the functionality stopped being supported. The "Dead Internet Theory" is very real. Given the amount of bots and resulting distrust in information, there's an urgent need for some sort of conversational search.

A forum-only search filter is an easy place to start. This could also potentially be a good use case for some decentralized, blockchain-based trust network. If anyone knows of any ongoing projects in this arena, I'd be very interested in contributing.

use site: operators, like site:reddit.com or site:news.ycombinator.com, et cetera.

edit:looks like I'm not alone here.

for all the reasons enumerated.

Wow.

“This [AI-created content being widespread] isn’t true (yet), but it reflects some general sense that the authentic web is gone.”

It isn’t gone, but it is different. Reddit is essentially a site of blogs turned inside out. Each post produces individual comments that are often really blog posts tied to commentary/chat discourse. Problem is, each post and it’s daughter discussion/blog posts isn’t useful for continuous coverage of a topic (e.g. cooking). Thus the subreddits exist with quality control through mods that curate content.

Yet, something is missing when there is a single umbrella organization with power over these fief post blog chats. I don’t want to read archives from 2005, but it is the last time it feels like the kind of personal blogs I find here on HN were prevalent and searchable through places like Google. Each article is presented in the context of the user/owners wider work and enriched and enriching for being presented that way.

The ‘authentic web’ of 15 years ago was better, more pluralistic, and more diverse in literary and artistic design when there were more ‘online magazines’ in this way.

This death of Google feels unlike the way Usenet died. I was less broken up about that death when it happened precisely because the web offered a broader, richer landscape. What I Think we are being taught, though, is that perhaps USENET and the web should’ve existed together and been supported, since Reddit is just Usenet, after all, in many ways.

Google is like a former ritzy neighborhood that has been corporatized, had the blood sucked from it, is falling into disrepair, and now is ghettoized and awaiting gentrification, which will probably mean a return to the walled gardens of yore when they start charging for improvements (as in Youtube Premium).

> This isn’t true (yet)

It's at least partially true:

https://www.jasper.ai

Increasingly it doesn't. I posted a similar finding earlier yesterday: Google search relevance fail: result for “Africa longitude” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30337563.

- For that query, Bing's image results are much better, but the #1 site hit is still the exact same SEO-manipulated auto-generated e-ecommerce page, not any reputable reference source like we might expect. And that is a basic query.

- I tried the query on Reddit, the results are a disorganized jumble.

- So, the surprise winner on that query is... Bing. Or "none of the above". Back to atlases and encyclopedias.

"We cannot meet shareholder expectations by selling milk alone. We need to slaughter some cows and sell some beef."

YouTube ads are getting worse. Google results are getting worse. They're cannibalizing long term value for short term gains.

When looking up "the best <product>" on Google, the results are utterly useless. It's always some site with a financial incentive to buy their particular product. Increasingly, that's low quality Chinese clones of products (and you'll find the same effect is true on amazon).

At least with reddit you can click on a user's post history and spot if something is obviously suspicious. On more popular threads you also get way more signal about whether something is sketchy.

All it does is force 'Verbatim' searches and sort news results by date which makes things better (but still not that great)

* Google - shopping, consumer oriented, up-to-date local content on restaurants and venues

* Google reddit - product reviews, product issues, programming, local "issues"

* Kagi - for informational, programming help, research, politics, anything controversial

* Bing - for video

Google is absolutely terrible for anything even closely controversial. Their algo is too bias towards approved sources and recency.

Another crazy thing, I'm starting to use Microsoft Edge because the feature set and performance is actually really good! I've even convinced other devs at work to use edge, and we're all mac users. The read aloud feature has changed how I consume information completely - mostly because microsoft has text to speech voices that I can actually stand. It's an absolute game changer.

The answer: “Yellow”.

Now you have the Battery.

Reddit is so friggin user-hostile that I don’t read most of the comments anymore: because I literally can’t. You can do a little browsing but the minute you’re trying to pay actual attention you get slammed with the dark patterns about installing the app or linking your gmail or both.

I hope it’s the management team that gets weeded out of the gene pool and not the whole site, because it was fucking cool at one time and could be again.

"Find an opinion popular on hackernews, restate it in a blog post, refer to previous discussion on hackernews as evidence" may be a lucrative strategy for accruing internet points!

They found, just like TV executives, that there's more money in shoveling drivel to masses, than actual information to a few.

I think we're well on the way ...

Was recently pretty shocked, searched for "gas heating repair" and got back at the top some sites with my suburb name in the title. Naturally I thought, wow, if there is a local place I should go there. Clicking into it, it has everything about my suburb - a picture of the local park, and whole paragraphs of random text containing bits and pieces about the local area interspersed with odd sentences about gas heating ("Cold mornings in XXX can be confronting without effective heating" etc). The text kind of makes sense but also reads like it was generated by GPT3.

Of course, then I realise, this is all SEO. They have generated a page like this for every suburb in my city. There are tens of thousands of such pages they are hosting. The most shocking thing is this is a small time gas repair dealer. They clearly don't know how to do this, they've gone with a low budget to an SEO firm who has effectively generated a giant plume of toxic content into the web atmosphere, all to create a marginal benefit for this one small company.

If a small time low budget unsophisticated company can do this, then I have to assume it's happening everywhere. On a mass scale we have giant smoke stacks all over the internet spewing toxic plumes into the atmosphere. And the humans are gasping trying to find the small bits of remaining breathable air.

Google's search engine is, without a doubt, superior to all alternatives. The fact that it's full of ads and junk is a conscious choice. Google could turn all that crap off tomorrow, and it would go back to being the best search results. Nobody has invested as much money in accurate results as Google has, and nobody will get close for years.

Search is, itself, dying. Search is probably one of the hardest things you can do with technology. We've gotten to the point that there's just too much shit to search through in too many ways. We need to stop relying on search, and start curating knowledge. "That's impossible", you say; I direct you to Wikipedia.org.

But, as the author mentioned, a lot of the problem is the inauthentic content on the internet that Google must sift through and filter. What makes Reddit still not half-bad (although this quality is under direct attack by brigading and troll farms) is that you have user-generated, user-curated content and a not-too-bad voting system.

In this context, I think a future iteration on search engines will be hand-curated results, under actual human-curated topics (rather than fuzzy machine-learning-inferred ones). Think of a huge directed acyclic graph of topics that goes down twelve levels or more in some cases. If you have enough people involved in this kind of crowd-sourcing, I think it can be made to work.

A challenge that arises in this context is how to prioritize content added to the wiki search engine by good contributors, and deprioritize content added by the content farms. I think this can be managed with a combination of well-conceived reputation management and providing users the ability to specify other users (people who seem trustworthy and whose tastes are solid) whose preferences will then be used to weight search results.

Hmmm.....

Doing the reddit trick also for the reviews, but at some point it would also get broken as some marketing people will ruin it by buying reviews etc. Authentic reviews on products/services looks like unsolved problem :) (startup idea).

I too am guilty of trusting the Reddit concencus when searching, and if there were a few legitimate looking threads that had been planted I probably would have eaten them up.

Sure you get the occassional comment or link share, but I'm talking like 300+ comment thread carefully executed.

I'm pretty happy with the other search engines, but I do miss having a google profile that would feed me the correct kinds of search results. I refuse to believe that nobody knows how to do this (I don't) as Google was doing their indexing with commodity hardware on bread racks in the beginning. There have been scores and scores of swe in and out of that company.

I know that web crawling is hard, but we could use a few more options.

Is it inevitable that spam SEO and even legitimate applications like quora, stackoverflow, will dominate every search result?

Is it because of the "Deep Web" of content and information locked behind commercial, login required, and Web2.0 UIs?

Is it really over?

It's feels silly to wish there could be an open version of reddit because that's what the internet is. It's just that there's so much noise now that it's impossible to find the signal. At one time google was that filter to find the diamonds in the rough. But now they have no incentive to filter that stuff out, because 9/10 times, the rough is THEIR ads. We need a new filter that's not funded by advertising.

Also programming related searches have now started giving me results of random shady websites which are copying results from stackoverflow and Google puts them at the top for some reason.

I remember the days of AskJeeves when your query literally had to be a question - that was very tedious. I am not anxious to go back to that if thats what a decentralized internet looks like.

But I do think we are on a precipice where the size of the company plays a huge role in getting noticed. If you want to stop this don't click on the 'ad' links in the search results. Scroll down until you see the page you want to go to.

@fxtentacle It occurred to me that Microsoft may have blocked the Google Crawler so that people have to switch to Bing. I am really not a fan of how much Microsoft is trying to force people into their ecosystem and are rapidly closing the doors. Took me two hours to figure out how to remove Windows Defender from a VM.

There are adversaries gaming the algorithm and pushing low quality results as alsways and they seem to be thoroughly winning on Youtube. While search isn't working as well as it did for me I am not sure it is entirely a search problem. It used to be that a well selected query would almost magically bring up the desired answer as the first result. Even adding search params to exclude low quality sites like quora there is often nothing in pages of results now, if you even get more than a page or two. I remember when results sets used to be massive. But is it the search that is lacking or the content?

IMO Google deserves a large share of the blame. Killing Google Reader inflicted a huge blow on distributed self-published content and helped drive people towards a bunch of walled gardens and systems that promote low quality content.

Where once the blog reigned supreme now content is in the hands of companies like Facebook and Twitter where ephemeral, low effort writing is either behind a wall or drowned in noise. A lot of blog content is now dripping in blatant promotion of people, products and service.

I'm not sure if that's because most opinions like this are shared on social media like reddit (and in rather unstructured form) instead of on blogs/websites that Google mostly indexes, or if it's just really difficult machine learning problem to formulate something resembling a non-spammy consensus opinion from experts by just crawling shitloads of websites that all try to SEO spam the crawler

The logged out views of reddit only show a couple comments from each thread, and then the pages are full of hidden comments from other unrelated threads.

So if I search for some exact text on reddit, google will often present an unrelated page that doesn't contain the queried text-- yet it does contain it: hidden. Actually finding the real thread with the text is a nightmare unless you know of some of the few reddit full text searches out there.

Sadly, even the broken logged out reddit interface is still often a better thing to search than google... but only in the sense that southpark's "IT" (spoof of the segway announcement) beat dealing with the airlines. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK362RLHXGY )

But the main topic, has google search peaked. Yes it has. The amounts of ads vs great relevant search results peaked some time ago.

The coup de grâce for me came with a cell carrier switch, after which Google began constantly nagging me to complete captchas when I searched. That annoyance started amplifying all of the other piques I'd had with Google (including progressively less-relevant results as time went on).

I found myself constantly using quotes and minuses to get the results I wanted from Google, and appending keywords like "wiki" to prefer specific sources.

The day that the realization hit me- that I was really just using Google as an unnecessary entry point for other search engines, all of which had their own perfectly good search interfaces- was the day Google ceased to be my default across all of my platforms.

My default "generic" search engine is now Qwant, and if I specifically want Wikipedia or Amazon or eBay or Reddit or anything else, why, it's just a simple drop down away. Level of abstraction removed, and as a bonus, the blasted captchas are gone.

Why not make this optional. Why not recognise that there are some people who may want to do searches using exact match.

Google could still provide exact match but default to "smart"/"assisted"/whatever search. Nope. No can do.

Because how would that support online advertising.

The web that Google promotes and encourages is not the best one, IMO.

Google search has become so clogged up with shit. It's time I switch to DuckDuckGo.

Search for a plant species. You'll have the hardest time finding anything about the plant itself, results are dominated by parties selling the plant. Quite often not even the plant you searched for.

Search for a species of insect. Results are dominated by products on how to kill it or sensationalist misinformed articles about their danger.

Search for a species + location/country. Results include all kinds of stuff about the species (which is already poor, see above) but also simply forgets about the location parameter.

The above is a massive problem, because it leads people to believe that a species occurs in a country, whilst it may not. They then incorrectly identify the species on their photo. This error is then infinitely copied by others as it surfaces in search results, which many see as authoritative.

This still pales in comparison to the problem that is Google image search. You search for a species name but the photos returned more often than not are not the actual species. It's a photo from the same page as which the species name occurred on.

Not to mention the Pinterest problem, which absolutely grinds my gears. They get all the free search traffic for stealing people's original works. How the fuck can Pinterest rank so highly, it has no content and is never the original source.

It's hard to put my finger on the timeline, but all of the above has gotten dramatically worse during the last 3-4 years. It was definitely not always this bad. It used to kind of work.

You know what Google should do? They should directly feed from authoritative sources rather than scraping crappy content from bad actors. They do it with Wikipedia and I see no reason why they can't do it for other niches where high quality information is publicly available.

For the above niche, it's entirely solvable. Academics have open databases with species information that is trustworthy, not gamed, and authoritative. How about using it?

Anyway when I need to decide what to buy, or find an advice on something about certain country I'm gonna visit for the first time, or just want to learn near-scientific knowledge I do append said "site:reddit.com" more often than not.

I literally only use Google itself for some programming documentation or to find a picture of something. In all other cases it's results are awfully bad.

We are the only search engine that allows you to set that Reddit preference once and then whenever relevant - the reddit search app will come up. Same goes for Stackoverflow and other apps.

It's changed the way I search.

Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder of you.com

Once commercialization of personal information and site tracking became a norm, it has been downhill since then. I don't begrudge making money from the internet. It's the commoditization of user data that has corrupted everything.

However, it is encouraging to see the responses here. Perhaps the tide changes to something more equitable in terms of network value. Hopefully, something that rewards people and companies for their contributions to the network (content, inventions, knowledge, etc.) rather than mining their clicks.

Copying Stack Overflow questions and answers to your site? Entire domain is banned, no appeal process, nobody using "uBlock Origin for Search" will ever see your site again. Boom, done.

Maybe it could be done as an extension? It puts a little ban button next to a search result on google.com, that instantly bans the domain locally for you, and also nominates the site for the global ban list.

I feel like there's a lot of low hanging fruit here, like completely banning just the top 1000 SEO sites would already dramatically improve the results.

It's only a matter of time before a new Search engine comes along and takes over the lead.

I resort to Bing and Yandex more than Google these days due to all the reasons mentioned in the article. It's not just search though, Im consistently finding Bing Maps has newer satellite images and streets that Google doesnt know about ( thanks to OSM )

I'm not sure how anyone can come to that conclusion unless they were very new to it - people must b looking for something that's very different than what I look for.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/st9ri1/google_s...

Possibly related?

[0] https://www.unfluence.app

Me: Google for "quotes don't give":

Top result, does not contain the given phrase

Second result, does not contain that phrase

This is literally the first thing I tried and I did a view source to be sure. They are lying to us and/or themselves.

Looking at the result, I would say 1/2 the results don't include that phrase including results for products on Amazon.

Clearly Search does not work they way this Google Rep believes it to work.

"cheese bacon bread" seems to match "cheesy bacon bread", "cheese & bacon bread", etc. I'd link some example results but don't want to feed the SEO beast. I visited the sites, I viewed sources, and did not find that string. I assumed what is happening in the 2nd case is that "and" is treated like "&" and both are "punctuation" in their model. And in the first, cheesy=cheese.

While it's a trivial example and might be what most people want, it doesn't help with more technical topics. And recipe blog spam is a particularly sore point for many searchers.

Some search results are poor, but they can be very easily changed by Google. Recipes, for example, are only poor because of Google's own published recipe metadata HTML format. Their results prioritize matches that include that format, and 99.999% of matches are pages from a single WordPress plugin that uses the format.

I've lost all faith in most search results. SO MUCH CONTENT is designed and tailored to rank and drive ad traffic, not to inform. This isn't the case with Reddit, since the capitalistic factor isn't there.

Yeah, there's a risk of misinformation from results from bigger subs, but posts from smaller subs almost always produce factual, high-quality content from actual people with no hidden agendas.

Example. I was looking for a french toast recipe some time ago. Searching "french toast recipe" on Google on mobile (in Houston, TX) yields four pinned results, one of which is from the Food Network (which might be okay, but they're also a huge content aggregator), amongst a bunch of recipes, each of which has a marathon of words before the actual recipe because ads gotta ad.

Instead, searching for "french toast recipe site:reddit.com" gives you a bunch of posts from people who asked the same question along with answers from several people, some of which contain links to recipes that didn't rank before (or are ONLY on Reddit).

Their search results however are getting worse, whilst also being exploitative. I'm a big believer in an open, free internet, but ripping off content to display on the home page isn't justifiable except for a monopoly, wanting to consolidate as many impressions onto their ad laden serps.

Google Flights imo was the start of Google's greed in unfairly competing against content platforms & aggregators. Pretty big conflict of interest there.

They're really stuck with Google Ads and dependent on it for a lot of their revenue. This will only get worse.

The web was originally very social in nature. By linking to another page you spent some social currency to lift up others who were worthy. You, the other author and the audience all understood the social contract enshrined in a link. Google rejected that model and successfully changed the web to be a place where Google simply directed people to their final destination.

SEO became first possible and then necessary. The audience for hobbyists and anyone who can't pour money into optimising their Google results has dried up. The nature of Google search results undermines whatever opportunity the author had to build a relationship with their audience. Google reminds you that this is all an impersonal transaction: this page has the recipe you want, it lets you buy a product, or it answers your question. The value of this connection can by quantified as unique visitors, bounce rate and time on page.

Intertwined webs of relationships between pages have been replaced by a graph where the only edge that matters is the one that connects you to Google.

With the social dimension of the web undermined, and the audience siphoned off to the big, commercial, operations, it makes sense that creators migrate to platforms that will give them an audience. It is not that Google results are getting worse, it's that Google has accidentally killed the web as a source of valuable data for them to mine.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20190627113146/https://www.proje...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190627121520/https://www.theep...

Haven't found a better search engine for my problem solving. Yes, a lot of answers point to Stack Exchange but it's not the only place where you can solve issues.

https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/websites/google-search/...

Aside from the ads, the results are interesting and they stoke curiosity. Contrast that to now if you were to search "flight"...

Sure, I can use the instead, but how about I get what I did type?

In the mean time just learn how to google. I google obscure questions about Flutter and specific flutter packages and google does fine. If not then I switch to duck duck go.

AWS docs have a LOT of content and words but they feel numb and almost meaningless, they say so much yet you read for hours and have no clue of how to solve the problem. It feels like reading a dictionary on *hammer* when you want to learn to use a hammer.

Did not realize Google shows these many ads!

With the rush to ML and AI in search and recommendation systems, I think there are huge opportunities in curation.

Curation is the opposite of where tech has been heading. Why? “Curation doesn’t scale!” People cry, but this ignores two important points: (1) it can scale via the crowd, and (2) it doesn’t necessarily need to scale to be valuable.

Regarding (1), others in this thread have suggested website up/down votes. Just one example of a scalable system. There are so many sites I’d tag as spam for my friends to avoid if I could. It’d be great if we could work together to eliminate the code spam sites, for example.

Regarding (2), I would happily take book recommendations from someone like PG even though he’s only read a tiny tiny tiny fraction of all books written. Critics don’t read everything, but they use their experience and social graph to find great culture. I’d value a domain expert’s opinion on great books over any number of Google queries.

I feel like there’s a massive opportunity here to “take a step backwards” towards curation and the high quality content it has traditionally provided. There are dozens of huge curation startup opportunities waiting for those willing to go against the wind.

https://www.austintexas.gov/department/police

But when I ctrl+f "email" I get no results. How does this sort of thing happen?

So now I'm using Stack Overflow search directly for programming related questions, which has eliminated 75% of my search needs in general.

Google Search no longer is a Search Engine. It's now aiming to be an answer engine.

That may sound like a distinction without a difference, but in practice the changes are profound.

With an answer engine, your goal is to find THE 1 correct answer. So your algorithm consistently refines and eliminate low "accuracy" results. If you reliably knew that only 5% of users found a certain response useful to their query, in an answer engine you get rid of that response because it's clearly "wrong".

In a search engine, however, you retain that response. In fact, you signal boost it, because it clearly shows that even though there is another answer that is chosen by say 90% of users, the 5% usage for the 2nd response indicates that even if it may not be the correct "answer" to the query, it's of value to folks, and is related to the query being searched.

An answer engine eliminates serendipitous connections, because almost by definition those connections are not the answer to the query being asked. A search engine not only doesn't punish a serendipitous connection, it seeks to surface it.

This is so on-point.

Join live stream (4PM-6PM Pacific 2/16/2022)

https://ee380.stanford.edu

Speakers: Dmitri Kyle Brereton, Danny Sullivan

EE380 will meet online today, 16 February 2022 at 4PM Pacific

Speakers: Dimitri Kyle Brereton, Danny Sullivan Title: Google Search Is Dying

Yesterday, February 15th, Dimitri Brereton blog link was posted to Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com). The comment, Google Search is Dying, garnered a large number of comments and responses.

http://dbr.io made #1 on Hacker News frontpage. http://news.ycombinator.com as of 0:21 Pacific 2/16/2022 Google Search Is Dying (dkb.io) 3428 points by dbrereton 23 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 1489 comments

Today's EE380 is to discuss Dimitri's observations about Google Search. Danny Sullivan, Google's Public Liaison for Search will address Dimitri's concerns. Some additional panelists have been invited but are not yet confirmed.

Speaker Bios:

     Dmitri Kyle Brereton is a software engineer at Gem, and the founder of BlogSurf – a directory of personal blogs. He graduated from UCLA in 2019 with a B.S. in Computer Science. He has been doing independent research on the question of how to organize information on the internet since 2020. He is currently working on a search engine for blogs.


    Danny Sullivan is Google’s Public Liaison for Search. His role is to help the public better understand how Google Search works and to engage with the outside community to hear feedback on how search can be improved.

A second type of website exists, which I learnt of from searching tweets in google, and finding that algorithmic spinning (replacing words to avoid plagiarism detection) was clearly being employed. The grammar is often laughably bad, but clearly in terms of google is either the best content available (as their algos see it), or the only content available.

One more Note: Google Trends data is 'deflated' to the number of searches (you can verify this by using Google Ads which gives numbers of searches and comparing to trends data). I assume the method is similar to what is in use for the transparency report's "censorship / outage" feature (explained here: https://transparencyreport.google.com/traffic/overview?hl=en)

A product that fundamentally breaks the misaligned incentives between serving results for you and serving advertisers. I have been at this for a long time and the freedom to innovate that comes out of removing ad-revenue is liberating.

Our team is constantly creating new and better features to push what can/should be expected in search such as FastTap that gets you results without sending you to a SERP, or enabling you to search across third party apps like Dropbox, or more useful info about the page you are on.

We recently launched a free and paid premium version with the goal of making it available for anyone to try it.

Are we at parity yet with Google? On some things I would say yes, on others no, but is anyone else? What I can say since joining is that the product and deeper query results get better everyday.

Barely six months out of beta and we are running fast, feeling like the old days when building Chrome...

https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1494076266508537858

(This is with its Noncommercial Lens, which is an innovative feature that lets you use and define filters of results.)

Screenshot of the error code: https://imgur.com/URyK4N2

Probably / most likely too much traffic (1st result on Hacker News with 3503 points which is pretty high)

Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220215203539/https://dkb.io/po...

What sucks is that they're spinning off traffic to their own services. But then again, nothing wrong with that. They own their traffic.

I've gotten huge gains from google alone in the past year, many going to my site (https://avsanpuru.com)

Nope, definitely not dying.

In simpler words: it behaves like an assumer, and as an assumer it's prone to vomit stupid shit. Should we start treating it as an assumer then?

A shame that the "Google + “site:reddit.com”" lazy hack doesn't work for me. I care about accuracy, not authenticity.

- When they became ad obsessed where entire search results are filled with ads or YouTube recommendations

- Developed recency bias, aka if it's new it must be better, which has incentivized frequent content regurgitation rather than originality

- They became Woke, disappearing results that apparently aren't passing the Woke Filter and/or that don't align with political ideology/objectives

As for reddit, does anyone really trust reddit? Reddit is absolutely inundated with crap, spam, blatant marketing campaigns, political bias, and all sorts of screwy stuff. It's also highly manipulated, and no more trustworthy than Yelp, slightly more than Yahoo Answers.

Search is ripe for disruption but it's a tall order, and user/marketer generated crap like reddit certainly isn't it.

From my point of view, there's wayyyy too many blog sites out there full of crap content, meanwhile forum posts on these sites often yield results that are something I can actually do/use.

That is highly questionable and subjective.