Even worse, sometimes instead of striking them out, it substitutes them with "synonyms" that are anything but. For example, if you search for FreeBSD, you sometimes get results where "linux" is highlighted as a keyword. I'm pretty sure that this is some ML crap doing this, because the more obscure the term, the more likely it is to get it not just wrong, but hilariously wrong, even to the point of meaning the opposite.
Maybe they changed that stance at some point?
It sounds like what you're saying is that it acts more like a typical full-text index now? I suppose it's better than nothing, but still not what I would like to see happen.
I don't believe that it's the masses looking for e-commerce sites. I think it's that Google wants people to click on e-commerce sites because it makes money off of those ads. And even if someone doesn't click on a sponsored link to an e-commerce site, that click still reinforces in their mind that Google is the place to start shopping.
There was a comment on HN yesterday where someone wrote something like, "Did you know there are countries where people who want to buy things just go to amazon.com directly and don't search for their item in Google?" I was floored. It never occurred to me that if I want to buy something at amazon.com that I would involve Google in any way. But there must be legions of people who do this, or that person wouldn't have made that statement.
At the same time, I think that Google falls down at this kind of lead generation because it allows so much automation that it can't be trusted.
I just put "rocket to mars" in Google and the top results are ads for Wal-Mart and Michael's.
To be fair, the duck isn't much better. I just put "f-14 fighter jet" into Duck and got an ad for "Fighter Jets For Sale near you" with a link to an auto repair shop.
Oh, I tried an alternate approach and it didn't work... Search bing for Google and you just get a second bing. https://imgur.com/a/YntBiYc
I don’t even notice that it’s not Google anymore.
Not necessarily. The great unwashed masses may not be searching for ecommerce, but people not searching for ecommerce may not be monetizable.
Let's say we run a basketball web site that has a search engine. People sometimes type the word "travel" into the search bar.
We can show them results related to the rules violation of "travelling," and/or results related to physical travel such as "trusted partners" who provide charter trips to playoff games.
It could be that we know that 90% of the searches for the word "travel" are for the rules violation. But the remaining 10% are the ones that click on ads. And we get a kickback when someone clicks on an ad on our site.
If all we care about is the web site's revenue, we might choose to prioritize showing travel to basketball games, even though we know it's only relevant for 10% of the users who query the word "travel."
It may only be 10% of our users, but it's 100% of our revenue from keyword searches for "travel." So we show the monetizable results, and maybe--if we are feeling generous--we'll show a little line, "Showing results for travel to games. Click here to search for travel (violation)."
--
TL;DR: We don't need to assume that Google is trying to provide good search results for everyone. They might be trying to provide the results that maximize their immediate revenue.
It wouldn't be so terrible, except that Google is extraordinarily bad at geolocation.
Right now, Google thinks my work computer is in southern New Mexico. Google thinks my personal computer, right next to it, is in northern Nevada. Google thinks my mobile phone, in between the two, is in Los Angeles. All of those locations are hundreds of miles wrong.
But it gets even worse when you want to know about something in a place other than where you're standing right now. It's like nobody inside Google has ever done any trip planning in their entire lives.
Apple Maps has the opposite problem, though. If I want to search for a German restaurant near my location in the United States, it will show me places in Germany.
When I search for "peking duck recipe" show me a recipe for peking duck, and don't show me "local" restaurants which are 300 miles away.
Pretty good for me. Gives me Battle Royale.
"whos the african warlord who has that laughing gif"
Top result is video of "Idi Amin laughing on a boat". Just the thing I was thinking of.
Pretty good.
"whats the name of the principle that two particles csnt have the same characteristics"
Pauli's Exclusion Principle as the top result. Great.
Google has always worked really well for me.
It's a must if you're a developer searching for some obscure error message, yet still most people don't know about it.
That hasn't worked for me for a long time.
This isn't always honored. Google has been inconsistent with this for at least two years. It's noted on HN every time someone brings this up.
I just noticed that with "Verbatim mode" enabled, Google doesn't even try to estimate the number of results available. I find that curious.
This is IMO very power-user-hostile.
> I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically.
Agreed. It also reminds me that the old engines weren't so much bad or that Google was better as the quality of the old engines degraded with time (may that be from the index being poisoned, paid inclusion of results, or something else).
Switched to DuckDuckGo a few months ago and haven't looked back, the results pages are much cleaner, like the old Google results.
One blatant issue with Google (& DDG still often does not get right) is the search for a specific busines - using the exact business name and sometimes even town - I expect their listing to be at the top. Instead there's piles of Yelp & listing pages, and I often cannot even find the actual Item for which I'm searching - sometimes have to go to the indexers, hunt for their posting of the intended [website], and go that way.
Opportunity for someone to get it actually right...
Please search engine, listen to this: it's ok if you don't have any results for what I'm searching. I want to know fast when there are no results, so I can try other queries. I don't want to open a dozen of pages before realizing you didn't had any results so only gave me garbage.
I switched to Duck Duck Go a few months back, at first for privacy reasons, but now find myself preferring that search engine's results for most things.
[0] https://searchengineland.com/8-major-google-algorithm-update...
I've seen people say this, but it still seems to work for me, and is even documented here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?visit_id...
I don't know if this is because SEO has poisoned their index, or if I'm not googling "correctly" anymore.