Originally, Google was very effective at looking at the interconnections of content people had put online and using that to infer which pages were most relevant. SEO tactics immediately started gaming this system to create false signals of relevance, but for many years Google did an impressive job of staying ahead of that game.

I think what finally killed their search quality is the fact that there's no longer a public human-curated network of websites to draw meaning from. Most content on the web is bulk-generated crap, personal blogs and websites are rare, and many passionate hobbyist communities are hidden from crawlers in places like closed Facebook groups.

I wonder what the next search engine algorithm will be... I've been thinking about up-votes/down-votes. And I could swear Google experimented with Random ranking a few years back, which gave very good results, but it was a bit annoying when you forget to bookmark a site, and not finding it when searching for it again the next day. But I'm thinking random plus voting, so if you find a good site, you upvote it, if you find spam you downvote it. If you want to find that good site again, you just check your upvote history. Random sorting give small interesting web sites a chance to get found. When doing a search you can use sliders to fine-tune the order using popularity (upvote/downvote ratio), last updated, first found, region, and a checkbox to only show links you haven't already clicked on, or haven't already voted on. And there could be an option to discover sites you would probably like, based on which links you have upvoted, and what people that upvote sites simlar to you also up-voted - but you have not yet clicked on. The problem with upvote bots have already been solved by social networks like Facebook, where using like-farms, follower-farms etc are not very effective. You should not be too baised on the votes though, or you would end up with echo-chamber loops like with Spotify and Youtube. The key is randomness! A random brute force-like algorithm is often just as good and sometimes better then a sophisticated system. It would be hard to game/cheat a random algorithm.

Google already has the equivalent of upvoting without requiring anything from the users.

If you click into a site and you don't return to your search, they consider that an upvote. If you continue clicking different search results they consider that a downvote for the site you visited.

Then that's not great, based on the way I (and, from observation, many others) use search results. I often middle-click (or control+click) several links which look promising, loading them in new tabs in the background. When I have a decent number, I then go visit the sites themselves.

In addition, the best Google searches result in finding the answer directly in the preview of the page from the search results. Unfortunately there's not a clear signal to Google which site preview provided the answer in this case, or even if none of them did and I just gave up searching.

In reality, I'm sure Google's determination of which site was relevant is much more sophisticated, likely involving some machine learning.

Since google's spying on you, you'd think they'd be able to link the page you're reading to the search that triggered it, and filter the analytics back to the search. But google won't use their spying to our benefit...

This is a really noisy signal.

All of this almost has me wishing for a human curated list of high quality sites for each topic, though that would obviously have its problems, too.

Yeah, I remember talking to a student over at our local college a few years back who had started doing that with a classmate. They called it Yet Another Hierarchical... something or other. Jerry, I think his name was. I probably should have joined them. It turned out to be quite an experience.

I'm building https://learnawesome.org for this. Started by collecting various awesome lists and then adding search, reviews, related items etc. For eg, when looking up a book, you can easily discover the TED talk or podcast given by the author which has the same ideas.

It's early days though. I imported around 10,000 MOOCs from various platforms and organized them by topics. The webapp is open-source so fixes/features are always welcome. :)

I remember dmoz! Nowadays any curated list would need to have the properties of (a) being publicly editable and (b) being prose, because for the time being it's sufficiently difficult for machines to write prose. Or at least, I assume so, since everything popular except wikipedia has been gamed.

That's what search engines used to be in the early days of the internet.

How do you stop the bots from upvoting? If you make people fill out a recaptcha every time to upvote they just won't bother.

Maybe make only people logged into their google accounts be able to vote? Surely that should stop most bots

An anonymous, decentralized reputation system which any service could hook into.

Days later, the HN post "a virus ruined my virtual reputation and I'm now banned from the internet".

That's the secret sauce behind decentralization. Damage from any one actor, including yourself, is limited both temporally and in scope. Each service would get a unique hash relevant only to them and giving them access to only their scope, and you would keep your private keys safe just like you would SSH keys, crypto wallet keys, or any other sensitive data. If you can't be bothered to do that, then a minor hit to your reputation is deserved from a philosophical standpoint, even if we work to make the system robust and resilient.

Including the spammers?

The idea is that it would take a long time and lots of effort to build a credible reputation.

Someone just beginning to use the internet would either need to slowly build reputation in the most open spaces, or get one or more people to vouch for them through an API.

I want to make it fiscally infeasible to run a mass persona farm.

> I've been thinking about up-votes/down-votes.

I don't have proof but I'm sure the amount of votes on eg. reddit (or perhaps how long it was on the front page) has an effect on search results; see the Comcast swastika[0] and Trump showing up when searching 'Idiot'[1].

0: https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/403brr/10_months_lat...

1: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/397920-activists-manip...

I don't think it actually has anything to do with upvotes, but is just an indirect effect since highly upvoted pages are generally more trafficked, and it's the high traffic that really matters.

I would agree with this if not for my recent experience with duckduckgo. While Google's search result quality has sharply deteriorated in recent months, duckduckgo's results have stayed flat for the most part, to the point where ddg's result quality is more often superior to Google. If it were a matter of SEO manipulation, wouldn't ddg's quality decline too?

Duckduckgo has an inherent advantage- nobody cares

They have a tiny percentage of the market, so there will be a tiny percentage of money invested in gaming their algorithms.

And also, why doesn't DDG grow in market share if Google's results are worse?

My hypothesis is that Google's results aren't bad - they are actually serving a set of results which satisfies the laymen, and it's only the technical, highly niche users with whom the results don't align.

DDG is growing exponentially, Google is just massive and it takes a while to grow big enough to notice https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

> human-curated network

I'm surprised they haven't brought this in with an option so people can rate or at the least flag sites. Source users feedback directly which would probably help wipe out results like Pintrest that dominate so many searches but people find unhelpful.

It would be great if they had an option where they have the drop-down for cache to say something like 'dont show this domain' or something that would let people flag sites that dont seem to offer value against search terms

Also on the 'computer' search I was amazed how everything was now in a left column and how much blank space on the right there was: http://prntscr.com/pw5iav - is that mobile optimisation overtaking desktop experience?

What are the business reasons against this? I so wanted the ability to hide specific domains from Google search, that I installed an extension, and then it stopped working. Luckily I was able to find a Tampermonkey script that does the same job.

Exactly. Almost three years ago, I wrote this:

[…]

What do I mean with “the threat of Facebook”? In the old days, before today’s large “social media” sites, people made their own web pages on places like GeoCities or on simpler social-media-like sites like LiveJournal, etc. Those sites all had content and linked to each other. This is the web which the Google search engine and its algorithm was meant to find things in, and it worked very nicely, as it took advantage of the links other people had made to your site as a proxy for relevance in search results for your site. People making small web pages about their favorite topics (with lots of links to other people’s pages, since information was hard to find) could slowly and easily transition into making larger and larger reference web sites with lots of information, thereby attracting lots of incoming links from others, which in turn enabled people to find the information using Google’s search engine.

Compare this to now. Firstly, people having a Facebook account have no place to simply place information, no incentive to simply make a web page about, say, tacos or model trains, because that’s not what Facebook is about. Facebook is about the here-and-now, and whatever is yesterday is forgotten. As I understand it, there is no real way, in Facebook, to make a continuously updated page with a fixed address for people to go to as a reference point about some subject, or at least people are not directed towards doing this as part of their online activity (as opposed to in the past, when it was basically the only thing which people could do). Secondly, this makes it so that people have no natural path going from using Facebook to creating a larger web site with information, and there are no smaller model train or taco Facebook “pages” which could have links to your larger site and thereby validate its relevance. Thirdly, even if this second point was false, Google could not use these Facebook pages, because Google cannot crawl them. These pages are all internal to Facebook, and Facebook has every incentive to not allow Google to crawl and search this information. Facebook would much rather people used their own site to search, and thereby gaining all of Google’s sources of income: User monitoring and advertising.

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295456

Facebook isn't the only one that killed it. Wikipedia did too, since there's a huge incentive to centralise all the information in one place. If you write one sentence in a wiki article, it'll be read by many, many more people than if you write ten pages on your own site. So now, if you want to write information that doesn't sit well in wikipedia, or express a perspective that is not mainstream enough to fit in wikipedia, then you can just do it in the facebook-hackernews-reddit "click and it's gone" osphere.

I'm increasingly of a mind to create an old school pre-blogging web page. That was the ideal of the web. I have enough content, it's just the time.

You’re too kind.

Google could penetrate all of that, if they wanted to.

When I search for a fairly specific thing and the first page of results don’t even include half the search terms, that indicates quite clearly they don’t give a fuck about anything other than ad revenue.

Set ya default search engine to DuckDuckGo.

Google isn't "becoming" useless. Google, and every other search engine, has always been relatively useless at generic queries. The fact that they're building out structured experiences for some of these queries is helpful, but the ones they haven't built out structured experiences for aren't any worse than they used to be.

If you can form a sufficiently specific query, Google is still exceptionally good at returning useful information, with few ads or infoboxes or anything else other than organic search results. If your search terms are too generic, Google essentially gives up and just serves you ads instead.

> has always been relatively useless at generic queries

I beg to differ here. Years ago I felt like I could discover useful information about a topic through Google with relative ease.

Results would contain informational links that let me explore the subject.

This basically impossible now; with Google Search at least.

I guess the question is: Is it harder now because of changes google made or harder now because of changes to the internet (There is so much more content now to search and filter).

Part of the problem is a huge part of that "content" is ultra SEO'd low quality copy pasted crap crammed with ads, specifically designed to harvest clicks from Google, and little else.

The best open source mailing list archive is unquestionably https://marc.info . yet when you search things that are open source relevant, you get https://nabble.com which goes as far as to fake being a forum and fills content from mailing lists, is nearly useless feature wise, and is crammed with all sorts of nasty obnoxious advertising.

marc.info doesn't even crack page 10 with typical queries, because they don't play the SEO optimization game, and doesn't run ads.

This is a great example of Google becoming totally useless.

The last time I remember this being mentioned on HN, a few days later marc.info was at the top of search results for mailing list type posts, but it seems whatever manual tweak they applied has since been invalidated by the Googletron...

Yes it is harder because of the death of the + operator and the insistence on aggressive stemming and autocorrecting that applies even when you “really” “mean” “what” “you” “say”.

Interesting that the + operator doesn't work but the - operator still works just fine.

I don't know how many times I've had to add -nodejs to things I'm trying to search to eliminate irrelevant garbage from some of my searches.

They removed the + operator because they wanted people to be able to search "G+", "Google+" and "Google +" in addition to Google Plus. Interesting that they haven't reverted it yet, though, considering that Google Plus is now utterly defunct.

You can just put the single word in quotes. As far as I can tell, it works the same way as the + used to.

It is harder because of both, and the fact that so much of the more content is lower quality. In the past it was not just that you could build up an understanding of a subject but often that understanding came from high quality experts on the subject. Nowadays the understanding of a subject you can build up often comes from a content mill or something providing a lower quality overview of the subject.

Searches you do now on basically any subject you are not an expert in already give you the same subject matter level of expertise you can expect from a 5 minute segment on the nightly news, whereas before you could expect at least the quality of a 30 minute show hosted by James Burke.

Both? Google helped shape the internet by connecting customers to businesses. The internet helped shape Google because it’s Google’s primary data source.

How can you tell whether or not this is a google search issue or an internet landscape issue?

By comparison to other search engines. Duckduckgo seems to give me better search results and is less influenced by advertisements and trends.

What finally pushed me away from Google was its incorrect assumption of equivalence between different terms. I'd search something like "printer scaling draftsight" and it would return results with "printer" "scaling" and "autocad" all in bold. Because autocad and draftsight are 2D CAD programs, and autocad is more popular, so suuurely that's what I wanted.

> Because autocad and draftsight are 2D CAD programs, and autocad is more popular, so suuurely that's what I wanted.

Yeah I've noticed this a lot in recent months/years. Have been finding myself putting most of the keywords of the query in quotation marks to get any kind of results relevant to my actual query. Like 'printer "scaling" "draftsight"' just so that G wouldn't make some stupid assumptions.

Which has started working as good as Amazon internal search...

One page of results with 8 of 10 completely unrelated.

Unfortunately, DDG has a close relationships with the kgb's outlet yandex (and trying not to mention that anywhere unless asked directly), which is absolute showstopper for me

This is the first time I'm hearing this. Can you provide more information please?

There is a useful edge case to this. In my case I was searching for a specific bit of content that had too few results in English so Google started returning results based on similar search terms in another language. It took a bunch of quotes and some specific strings to get into that state in the first place though.

This is the larger problem... Google thinks it's making our search easier by force feeding us what we obviously don't want.

It interprets what it thinks I meant instead of listening to the actual words that came out of my mouth.

I have the same problem with my wife... :-)

You're right; right on multiple levels...heh

Language is used to convey meaning. The difference between my wife and Google is that Google tries to interpret language in the lowest common denominator which leaves all people who try to use language properly feeling like they need to learn a new one just to be understood by their search engine.

...maybe that's not so different.

I was not able to replicate your issues and did not notice any similar said results from my end. Have you tried searching under another account or with a different machine perhaps? Just for testing purposes.

Isn't that irrelevant as far as Google's usefulness is concerned?

The internet is always going to be in constant flux: SEO trickery, the rise and fall of sites which contain the most relevant data, context of the search (browser -> phone), etc.

Google's main job is to make it as easy as possible for a user to find what they want. For example, as a techie, 15 years ago that might have meant making sure to constantly index usenet and various mailing lists. Today most of that content is at StackExchange, Github, Reddit, etc.

And it's not just tech searches - everyone will have their own niche which Google once got right and often returned as the very first result (when was the last time you were confident in using the 'lucky' result?), and now, not only do they not return relevant results, whatever they do return is mixed with tons of ads and (probably) paid results that aren't marked as ads.

The fact that Google doesn't yet pay dividends while the MBAs there are apparently intent on destroying the company's main product as fast as they can, doesn't bode well for their share price going forward.

For some searches, it's as easy as tacking on an extra word, and seeing how different the results are. Especially true for blacklisted and censored Google searches, which for whatever reason don't seem to be wildcarded terms.

Try searching for just the name of a supposed whistleblower, then add another term, and get all the censored results. Even more true in the news tab, which initially returned -0- results.

If you're not going to link or at least screenshot some examples to support a claim like this, it would be better to not post at all.

From news search on Android:

https://ibb.co/fGW6Cm8

https://ibb.co/ZmSJRwc

For most intents and purposes, Google is the internet landscape. They are the dominant browser, search engine, email system, and mobile operating system.

Curious - do you allow them to track your browsing history and/or are you logged in or do you block and stay anonymous-ish?

I’m in the latter camp and wondering if their inferences are just getting better if they have more of your data. Still not willing to give it to them willingly to get better results, but it would at least explain a few things.

Not the person you originally asked, but I can share a relevant experience.

I definitely have concerns with the amount of data Google has about me and, in particular, the idea of Chrome monopolizing the browser landscape. As a result, a few months ago I tried switching to Firefox, complete with container tabs and scripts which removed Google analytics from everywhere. The difference in search results was very noticeable. Most notable was that my Google news feed (on my Android phone) and YouTube recommendations quickly became filled with generic junk, whereas before it was so relevant I would often find the answer to something I had been researching earlier mixed in with my news feed.

I ended up going back to Chrome, mostly due to battery issues with Firefox, however even if I hadn't switched back I think I would have voluntarily turned off all the anti-tracking stuff. It is a data privacy concern, and moreover I hate the idea of giving Google all this data, but the benefits for me were very palpable.

Do you feel that your queries now are approximately similar to those you used to get good results on?

I can see a world in which the parent comment is correct, and we've "dumbed down" our queries because it gets us good enough answers most of the time. For example, perhaps I used to google "halo game walkthrough OR tutorial" and now I would type "halo tips."

It's true that I can get decent results with bad queries but the problem is that when you try being more specific, the results don't get much better.

The results are more oriented to the bulk appeal, with the result that the long tail gets little attention. If I want what is high in the rankings, it is easy to get with minimal effort. If I want something niche, any specific queries are directed back to the general answer.

Froogle was once great because it used Google’s search algorithm and index to return the best results across the web. Putting a sku was like magic and extremely useful. I bought so much equipment, at a better price because of it.

Shopping.google.com was much less useful because it only returned advertisers. I was able to find better matches at lower prices by entering really precise searches and using organic results.

It’s harder to find things for sale through Google now than 10 years ago.

If you do a search with several more general terms and one specialized term: for several of the search results they will drop the specialized term.

Not true. Recently I found myself using duckduckgo more. Partially because they added ddg.gg and it's not such a pain to type.... but mostly when I just can't find stuff on Google. That was never the case a few years ago, if I didn't find it on Google, I couldn't find it on any other search engine.

tbh, i think you are right in a certain sense. i think the search reflects what is going on online or perhaps what people are looking for online. i mean, i remember the days when searching for python would give you the snake on the front page! i was surprised the other day that it didn't anymore even though i never told google i meant the programming language... is it me or something?

I'm so glad to see others having this same opinion. I was just chatting with a friend about google search results and how, recently, they have become much worse than they used to be.

It seems that if you don't tailor your search terms perfectly all you get is ads, clickbait youtube videos, and review sites built to push a product.

Look at the DDG hockey stick graph. No other search provider has that sort of growth. It's not just you that's tired of poor search results from Google.

It's going to need to sustain that growth for a decade to be of any reasonable size. Google gets approximately the same number of search queries per day as DDG has in its entire lifetime (~11 years).

Edit: The problem in sustaining this growth isn't just marketing either. With increased traffic come increased server, maintenance, and engineering costs which may not be possible to support with untargeted ads as advertisers won't pay big money to show ads that have poor conversions.

I'm curious how untargetted they are - if I'm searching for python, how untargetted is a python book ad? I'd be more inclined to purchase that rather than a remarketing adroll targetted ad that's just spewing me the same item that I purchased 30 minutes ago

Sounds interesting. Got a link for that? And I’m saying that as a DDG user.

The dumb thing is that you can get the original search, but it’s buried in the advanced search as “verbatim” results.

Why would I not want verbatim results?

You, I, and most people posting here probably already know how to phrase searches with exactly the terms that are relevant. Most people in the world probably don't. I too dislike how Google performs worse for my queries now than it used to.

But I look at my non-technical relatives using Google and it's now magical how relevant the results are for vague queries regarding common information. Making precise queries for technical information work worse while vague queries for commonly referenced information work better is probably the right trade-off for a business that wants to make money. As much as I loath it for my own use cases.

I feel the same way. I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few years, and when I started, I was prepending !g to about half my searches. Now I find myself rarely using !g, and telling friends "try DDG" when they can't find results on Google.

Not surprisingly, Google is still better for shopping searches.

edit- DDG bangs for those who were unaware: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I've been using DDG exclusively for a while. Honestly I find the results better when I'm searching for things like information about programming, etc.

Yeah, I've been giving DDG a try for the last few weeks again. For "I want to look for keywords" I use DDG and find it does well. For "I want to search a structured database", Google still wins because of its above-the-fold no-article "this is what you're looking for" results.

Like, if I type a math formula or "what's the population of Alberta", the Google result is just the number, not a link to the result.

Or if I want to search for a product or local business.

Just tried this.

I get the answer plus a ton of highly relevant links relating to population, StanCan sources, etc.

I think this is exactly what most users want: Show me the answer quickly without making wade through links - but provide me the links if I want to do more research on my own.

These featured snippets are great for Google, because they keep you on their search pages longer. But they're bad for the websites because they can completely lose your visit, even though they're the ones who created the content.

These snippets also take up more space on top of the page and along with more ads, it means fewer organic links are appearing on the first page.

>Like, if I type a math formula or "what's the population of Alberta", the Google result is just the number, not a link to the result.

I prefer to use WolframAlpha for such things.

I found that even DDG isn't that good. It especially doesn't work when trying the usual [query] + " reddit" part. It practically ignores the reddit part. I've found that I'm going back to using Google constantly now - which is frustrating. Most of the results I've been getting are very spammy SEO articles too with DDG. I wish it wasn't the case but for what I've tried - it just isn't working as I'd like.

Try "site:reddit.com"

Thanks for the tip about !g.

They also many other very useful shortcuts. For example !gm is google maps, !gsch is google scholar, !arx is arxiv.org, !w is wikipedia.

There’s a lot that I don’t know: DuckDuckGo.com/bang should have others

Google is indeed the seed if its own "death" (being overly dramatic). The web has changed because of it and searching is now both annoying and irrelevant since websites have a lot less value now that everything is rigged.

They’ve become the ultimate rent seeker, which wants me to believe it is signaling their demise in the near-term, but it probably means the opposite, they have the ability to leverage their monopoly.

Your comment really nails the issue. There's a vicious feedback loop in place.

it really is kind of startling -- to quote old Hamlet - "oh, what a falling-off was there!"

90s web : content good, looks rubbish

2019 web : content rubbish, looks good

trying to help my kid with research reports &etc is a nasty chore these days -- for the amount of effort it takes to find a decent informative non-wikipedia page these days, may as well go to the physical library

One thing I've noticed myself doing is that when I (increasingly rarely) stumble across a good, high-useful-information density website on anything I have even a passing interest in (typically either some sort of obscure fora, or a personal blog/website), I carefully bookmark and tag it on the spot, because I'll never be able to find it again otherwise.

It’s funny I remember reading an article maybe 15 years ago saying bookmarking was dead because search had gotten so good.

It was kind of believable at the time.

:)

I'll add some other factor: emitional.

Old web was a mess of people making things as expression, excitment. I think it matters to feel being 'connected' to someone rather than parsing a rendered data structure.

I felt the same reading old encyclopedias, you can feel the author way of thinking a bit. It feels a bit more enjoyable.

>2019 web : content rubbish, looks good

Or at least it would have looked good, if it wasn't covered in "SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER" and "ACCEPT OUR COOKIES" light boxes.

Which is only slightly less rubbish than having it covered in the semi-pornographic pop-over ads of yore.

An "accept our cookies" window blocker would be so incredible. I mean how are they even getting informed consent when I can't tell what's going to happen when I deny the request? I want to read an article, not judge whether you're trying to invade my privacy.

Firefox, please treat "can set cookies" as a permission and allow me to set it to "ask" by default, and allow it to be toggled by clicking on the site permissions lock box. The existing user interface does not give me any control.

I guess I'm getting old but I really miss the 90's web. Also, libraries are just rooms with computers these days, at least in my town. I miss 90's libraries more than I miss the 90's internet.

Bingo. There are still some websites which have a tenacious grip on the 90's style and are chock full of information. However, you aren't going to find them with G and the like.

I've been meaning to set up YaCy for a while and see if the P-t-P search structure works better for finding non-scroller web pages. I fear that I'll find those results also tainted by shills.

[edit: Forgot to mention Gigablast, which works fairly well. Definitely not for the faint of heart]

> Is Google just not able to compete with SEO tactics? Or are they over-excited about/reliant on ML/"AI" techniques that don't work well in practice?

Those SEO'd pages are optimized for generating revenue, so they're packed to the brim with Google ads and referral links.

Prioritizing such pages generates revenue for Google, too.

They started moving on from being a general purpose search engine years ago, when they started "knowing best". Round about the brand and recency updates, which must be 7 or 8 years ago, maybe more. No longer did you need to search "buy camera" rather than "camera" to show you wanted to spend money, it was now presumed. Your +term (broken with arrival of G+) or quoted "term" would be varied as much as optional terms.

Nearly all the changes since have been along those lines. Google thinks the only reason to use the net is to shop. The results you get, that are prioritised make some sense in that context.

It's just made it useless for all those times you don't want to book a hotel, buy a phone etc.

The ai incentive isn't searcher satisfaction, it's revenue maximization. The longer it takes you to find a good result the more likely you area to click an ad. The more often they show you adwords supported sites like ehow and YouTube the more likely you'll click an ad.

Consider the trend in ads for ad supported sites as an indicator.

The customer is the ad buyer. They want more of those. They have maximized product supply. They can't produce more product, they can only resell existing products by more ads in search results as a ratio plus more ads on the organic links.

There is no measurable financial incentive for them to show you organic results without adwords.

There's a loosey goosey replacement of words with synonyms. It took me three times to google how to turn off 'smart replies' from Signal on my Android phone. I kept getting, turn off word suggestion, autocorrect and so forth, and signal I had to make an additional effort to quote. Personalized search, they call it?

Some of those I like - the autocorrect is excellent, for example. But the "synonyms" I find often frustrating.

I tried a Reddit search today. I do a few from time to time to gauge subreddit activity.

I know 80 to 90 percent of the results.

Google was useless. It is as if some subreddits, like one of mine, no longer exist.

Duck returned great results. And some new, unexpected results.

This kind of thing, along with hidden result links has forced me off Google search.

For fun, in my own head, they are Noogle now. NO Google.

Search Noogle for Nosults.

> Search Noogle for Nosults.

After searching both Google and Duck, I still don't know what "Nosults" is supposed to be.

I think it's a joke about "no results" smashed together

It is. Nothing more than a personal coined word.

The only link for "nosults" may well be this thread. Interesting index depth and speed test.

I coined that phrase just today.

Ah. OK. In that case, I'd still like to know for which query DDG was much better than Google, if you can share.

Google Scholar is still quite useful for general information, but it's also generally pretty dense and hard to parse so it will take a bit of work. The days of just having a question and being able to find an easy layman-level answer about it are gone (outside of Wikipedia).

There was an economics paper published recently making an argument that we have more to fear from shitty AI/robots than good ones and I think it's spot on. (In other words, they're good enough to justify firing the person who used to do the job, but they're objectively worse at the job. What ends up happening is aggregate wealth goes down because not only are the jobs gone, but the job itself is being done less efficiently than before.)

The point where Google (and Yelp and a bunch of other services) started to turn was when they stopped just being a thing you go to when you need them to being things that get in your face to anticipate your needs. They're bad at anticipating our needs in any way that's actually useful for us a lot of the time, so it ends up putting a lot of cognitive load on us to make sure the apps/services are working as intended. Instead of just using technology as a tool as we need it, we end up needing to babysit technology that's being fussy, opaque, and unpredictable. And babysitting is the best case scenario, in other cases it's being outright hostile.

A problem with Google Scholar is that 75% or so of the results are behind paywalls.

And the quality of results there seems to have gone downhill now too. I can turn to Scholar to find a lost article, only to have to go through pages. Again, I think it's also geared towards the common and the popular at the expense of the detailed and the idiosyncratic - it's just using a different definition of common and popular.

Ten years ago, I gave up subject specific databases for Google Scholar. For most of that time, I was happy. Nowadays I wish I had access to a subject specific db.

As for paywalls: I sometimes find better results by adding filetype:pdf to the title of an article in DDG than I do in scholar. They're both completely hit and miss. I think they're trying to respect copyright more nowadays than before. Unfortunately, of all the unreasonable copyrights in the world, journals and academic books are the most unreasonable, since they're trying to get libraries to buy them.

It's "too" general purpose.

They're aiming for the "80" part of the "80/20 rule", and in the process are really good at answering natural-language queries but very bad at keyword-ified queries. So many people use their service for answering otherwise basic questions that it's become a basic-question-answering system. I suspect also, under the hood, that when the user leaves the search page and never returns they consider that a successful serve and reinforce that sort of behavior more. Whereas I leave to search the same thing on other engines because Google became useless for my job, which requires specific answers to technical questions. So I think there might be some built-in positive-feedback loops that are reinforcing this sort of behavior. Either that or peoples' queries really are that boring, all the time.

Google has the technology, they've just diluted its usefulness with tampering / interfering with the results. They're killing the golden goose.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but could it be that structured days is generally what people are looking for? It might feel like search results are low quality because... most of them are. Google has commoditized search and delivers extremely high quality results for specific types of data. Now, anything that doesn't fit into that box feels like it's relatively low quality.

I wonder if they could just flip a sign and penalize seo tactics and make search good again.

I mean all the seo’d sites have self labeled themselves as having worthless content. You really just need a search that filters them out.

(This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515498.)

> The interesting question is why!

You get what you measure. Google grew this monster themselves with pagerank and monetizing links.

> This is extremely ironic, since Google originally rose to popularity because it was much better at "real" search than the competitors.

Here's a thought I had while reading your comment...

what about a hybrid of HN/lobste.rs/reddit and old-school hierarchical lists. Basically, a place where people can upload websites and such that are relevant to a search term.

Say you wanted to know about "how to make bread". You would first check if this query is already defined, creating it if not. Then, you could comment/post links on the topic, and see other's links sorted by some hybrid of upvotes/downvotes and human moderation/curation. The point would less be about having a discussion, but more crowd-sourcing "what pages are most relevant to this query".

From the perspective of a user who doesn't participate, this looks like a hierarchically sorted collection of queries/topics and links relevant thereto, sorted by relevance.

usually I need to append "reddit" to the end of my search string in order to find something that is not blogspam or autogenerated-seo-optimized content