Re:Ask HN: Is Google Search Dying?
by ChrisLTD on Wednesday May 05, 2021 @10:21AM
(#27050200)
For the past few years I've spent extensive time using Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Google. I've found that Google is still the best when searching for answers to technical questions during my work day, or searching for information about local businesses and events. Outside of those topics, the first page of results is usually a collection of posts from content farms with titles like "The best ___ for ____ in 2021". As a workaround, I also find myself appending "reddit" to the end of my queries, but I'm sure that will be gamed by blackhat marketers soon enough.
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This might be a different Ask HN, but does anyone have suggestions on avoiding the content farm stuff? Searching reddit works, but amounts to being trapped in a walled garden.
I've found a lot of great stuff on random independent websites (i.e. https://woodgears.ca/, http://gizmology.net/) that have no Reddit presence. Filtering those out is a great loss.
Something like the Yahoo Directory (hierarchical tree of hand-sorted topics) could work, but that's long gone.
Thoughts?
Re:Ask HN: Is Google Search Dying?
by mitchdoogle on Wednesday May 05, 2021 @12:37PM
(#27052169)
Sometimes I visit miilionshort.com to search for something when google isn't cutting it. They have options to leave out the top 100/1000/100000/1000000 websites (By Alexa rank I believe), so I will try playing with the options to get something useful. It's not always fruitful, but I've found many nice things this way that would've been buried on google.
I've started going directly to page 4 on Google searches if I don't see Google's scraped answer at the top.
Starting at 4 seems to cut a lot of the SEO and content farms.
Google used to offer the ability to filter out domains from your results, but they haven't for years now.
I suppose a client side extension could do the trick. It might be a good option for a side project if anyone is feeling generous with their time.
There are browser extensions that bring back the "Discussions" filter that Google removed a few years ago. Unfortunately niche forums aren't really popular these days so you end up with older results.