I've been noticing it for a while, the search quality gets worse and worse every year. For me, the red line was the Panda update in 2011. That update completely destroyed the search quality by bringing dubious quality news articles and ecommerce websites on the top of search, it never really recovered since then.

At this point, I basically have to append "reddit" to every search if I want to get quality answers.

That's exactly what I've been doing almost unconsciously, I'm adding "wiki" or "reddit" at the end of every query except for programming ones.

The only time I'm using the search as intended is for programming error queries where it's way too niche for Google to append low quality news farms / ecommerce websites. That's the only type of query I still get good results.

Even programming questions. If it's something considered popular, you get awful results. Take javascript, I always append "mdn" when I'm trying to look up a language/api detail. Otherwise I'd be sifting through the top ten garbage Q&A or tutorial sites. In the glory days, Page Rank would return reference material first since it was so heavily referenced. But clearly that no longer works in the real world of SEO optimization.

Finding good Angular content is damn near impossible on Google, with the immense amount of regurgitated blog spam trying to sell templates via blog posts disguised as guides/tutorials.

It really is unfortunate.

I loved how Google used to find high quality discussions on all sorts of niche topics (tech, gardening, science, diy...) on sites like MetaFilter and Reddit.

Now those queries seem to lead to mostly videos, low quality sites, and shopping sites.

What? Reddit.com is essentially unusable since the update a few years(?) ago.

I love how people totally ignore the million of daily users based on their personal experience. If it was essentialy unusable, there wouldn’t be millions of people on it.

Yeah, it's the age old "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded".

True. But you can still use old.reddit.com. The content is still there, it's just not accessible. So my process has been to search for 'keyword + reddit', click the best search result, then manually type in 'old' in place of 'www' in the url.

That sounds tedious. You should at least be able to skip that last step with one of the various browser extensions to redirect to old.reddit.com automatically, e.g. this thing for Chrome:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

It is kind of tedious. Thanks for the link to the extension. I have used that extension at times, but in my case there are gaps where I'm either at work, on a different browser or device, where this has sometimes come up. But I agree, an extension is best.

Open your browser dev tools and put this in the console:

  document.cookie = "redesign_optout=true; domain=.reddit.com; path=/; expires=Tue, 01 Jan 2030 00:00:00 GMT";

  document.cookie = "listingsignupbar_dismiss=1; domain=.reddit.com; path=/; expires=Tue, 01 Jan 2030 00:00:00 GMT";

This reverts to old reddit without having an account, and without using old.reddit.com

Don't you think 'essentially unusable' is quite an overstatement?

old.reddit.com still works

You can also permanently turn off the new look while you're logged in.

Third party apps link Sync for Android still work

Yeah but panda also killed ehow which, despite also killing all my stock value, was a huge win for anyone that hated seeing seo spam in every search.

Unfortunately it seems the problem is back, especially with Pinterest, Sfgate, the spruce, etc.

Pinterest is a horror, there are Google searches where half the results visible at first are Pinterest links with various TLDs (pinterest.com, .fr, .de etc.)

If you have Firefox I would suggest that you go on Wikipedia.org, right-click the search box, click "Add keyword to this search", and pick a keyword. This makes it faster to find information that you know is on Wikipedia.

Chrome has had custom search engine keywords since day one (yes, I actually went to locate a day-one article on this feature[1]). Not sure why every time this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if it’s some sort of Firefox secret sauce, complete with weird replies like if you are “stuck on Chromium” you can emulate this with a pointless round trip to DuckDuckGo.

[1] https://searchengineland.com/searching-with-google-chrome-om...

> Not sure why every time this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if it’s some sort of Firefox secret sauce

If you're not sure I can clarify that for you. I was responding to someone talknig about ddg, and I was showing a better way of doing it. I didn't know that it's possible with Chrome because I don't use it.

In this case I can totally believe it’s innocuous. But as I said, it happens a lot. It happens on Firefox evangelism threads, Chrome bashing threads, DDG evangelism threads, Google bashing threads, etc. where a direct comparison is made. Imagine reading “hey C++ programmers, check out Rust, we have this amazing feature called zero cost abstractions!” over and over. Just really tiring.

Notice that we still have decent overlap: we both get annoyed when someone mentions ddg when doing it on the browser is obviously better :-)

Yeah, thank god some people still learn their tools. When I was younger I thought one of the defining characteristics of "techies" is that we open settings/preferences (followed by the advanced version) as soon as we get our hands on a piece of software. Unfortunately it seems the overall techie population is just getting lazier and lazier (not lazy in a good way), and now the norm is, or is sliding towards open the box -> whine about things not working out-of-box when the feature is right there -> find suboptimal workarounds on StackOverflow or random blogs posted by lazy people.

The fact that I like configuration is the reason that I ditched Chrome at home and moved from it to Firefox to Waterfox to Palemoon, where I can use Pentadactyl to customize far beyond the limits of any browser I'd used before.

At work I have to use Chrome (and worse, Chrome OS), and I used the settings to disable syncing between the devices I switch between (because I don't want Google to have any extra excuses to handle my data). Some of them I only use for an hour, so I optimize my customizations to be made quickly. I switch the default search engine to get thousands of keywords in seconds, then load AdNauseum for ads, then depending on how long and what I'll use the browser for, I'll get Surfingkeys or a similar extension for general vim-bindings (I've switched between more of these than I have fingers on one hand because they're all inferior to Pentadactyl in somewhat different ways) and wasavi for more extensive vi-like bindings in text fields.

Worth pointing out then that DDG has a number of shortcuts built-in. If you don't care about passing a query through them, it already works.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

The most-used is probably !g, which sends your query to google. For wikipedia, it's !w.

> weird replies like if you are “stuck on Chromium”

My bad. I saw the parent and forgot I'd seen keywords on Chromium. To be fair, Chrome buries this deeper than Firefox, whose payment for pushing Google is presumably smaller (and IIRC has a few built in). It's enough of a hassle to set up that I personally used bangs (there are thousands of them already set up for you) when I was stuck on Chrome on a variety of unsynced devices daily at work before the nCov.

Agreed. I've had "en" as my keyword for Wikipedia searches on Chrome since 2008...

This, but also, when you're stuck on Chromium, change the default search to DuckDuckGo or Searx and use !w or !wp to search Wikipedia (and !s !sp if you want Google results for some reason, and !g or !go if you want Google results with a filter bubble).

Addendum: sorry to imply you can't also use keywords there, thanks to oefhra for reminding me you can https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478553

yah, keywords are such a great but probably underutilized feature of firefox. i set up 'wiki' and a bunch of others when i started using firefox over a decade ago. i still use most today, although i've pointedly replaced google with duckduckgo ('g') long ago as well.

Once you get used to keyword searches, here are some other handy ones. It's like having a CLI to the Internet.

gm Google Maps

t thesaurus.com

u YouTube (for music)

pron for porn (after setting up a Google custom search engine that searches your favorite tube sites -- https://developers.google.com/custom-search)

gi for Google Images

r for Reddit (the site search has gotten better -- I used to use Google "site:reddit.com %s" instead).

My only problem with these is somehow the Wayback Machine doesn't work when I put https://web.archive.org/form-submit.jsp?url=%s.

In chrome you can type en.wikipedia.org and hit tab. For me it will autocomplete if you just type en.

The default is the whole domain (and it also works with other sites, like "amazon.com query"), but you can also change the keyword for it. For several years I've had "wp" as the keyword for wikipedia searches, and it works in both Firefox and Chrome. I just type "wp whatever my query is", no tab needed, and it will take me directly to the result.

If DDG is your default search, use the Wikipedia searchbang[0].

    !w X

will directly search Wikipedia for X.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Even easier, if Firefox is your browser, you can add a search keyword 'w' for Wikipedia and type:

     w X

to directly search Wikipedia for X.

> Now, I'm finding Google shows a bunch of articles from dubious sources and whereas DDG will pull Wikipedia articles closer to the top.

In my (limited) experience, I dislike using DDG because it gets confused by less important words in the search query. For example, for "who coined the term faux pas" Google simply gives a bunch of links to webpages that define and elucidate the term "faux pas". DDG, however, gives a wide variety of results, many being totally irrelevant. The first article is on parapraxis, the second is the wiki article for microaggression (?).

http://archive.is/jv0qd (notice how DDG bolds the phrase "coined the term" in the first link, thinking that this is the relevant part of the query).

It's stuff like this that will prevent DDG from catching on with the general population who have been spoiled by Google.

Is Google breaking the "Attribution" requirement of CC-BY-SA?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

Use duckduckgo and type "!w blah" to go straight to the article for blah.