As far as I am concerned google already dropped the ball. For 2 years I am getting useless results immediately when I am not searching for something very generic. I am leaving shadow of a doubt that there might be a reason that I am never logged in and I am cleaning all the tracking cookies. I have skipped to self-hosted searx instance and I get much better results when they are aggregated.

I believe that the whole problem comes from their AI. Since most of people on planet are searching for things that are highly non-technical, the AI is learned to give them priority over the technical documentation etc. which almost nobody uses. I am also experiencing that the sites that I know are there, are not returned at all (or somewhere on 100th page).

I would really love to see the google search as it was 20 years back. At that time it was far more useful, quite frankly I didn't see any improvement in precision of search results from those times, it only went to the worse.

As a counterpoint, I feel like Google's results are far better than they used to be. What's more, I find Google ridiculously good for technical queries compared to the competition, and I'm often surprised at how Google will know the intent behind my search even if my query is vague. For example "cat pipe" gives me a bunch of answers related to the shell (as well as some pictures of cats dressed like Sherlock Holmes). They still aren't perfect, but most of the time the result I want is in the first page of the first query.

Twenty years ago, I had an actual advantage over others due to knowing how to write a good query and find the appropriate result (Google-fu). Nowadays that skill is largely obsolete.

This site cloning has always been an issue. Before the current iteration of SO/GH SEO clone farms, you had sites doing the same thing with expertsexchange and cloned forum pages. I do find it odd that Google won't just block the big ones, but perhaps they internally don't like doing one off hacks and prefer to find a cleaner algorithmic solution?

The counterpoint is that it's now actually useless to craft a query that tries to match exact terms, because there's this extra layer on top of it.

So you might be lucky if the inferred intent of the engine was correct, but good luck steering it away. It doesn't help pretty much all query logic operators are merely hints nowadays, more often ignored than not.

I very much preferred a dumber engine for this reason, since it was way easier to search precisely and avoid SEO, even as the SEO game changed.

I'm also using a local searx instance now. I'm not terribly happy about it as bing/ddg also have very similar issues, so searching for exact terms still doesn't work the way it should. But it's much easier to blackhole SEO silos, pre-filter queries NOT matching my exact queries, as well as yielding more obscure content.

+1

I want pure keywords-based search engine back [1]. If the keywords verbatim are not there, give me zero results back. It will be less time consuming to refine my query, or conclude that the stuff I am looking for is just not there. It's much better than sifting through low-precision results.

Google has 'verbatim' mode as such, which used to work well. I can't figure what they are doing to it, and why.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24609881

For me (both logged in and not), for many short & simple tech queries Google fares better than competition (for example, googling some package name or API method shows GitHub repo or official docs as first link, while in DDG it's often not the case).

On the other hand, for slightly more complex queries, in last months there's been an enormous flood of low quality GitHub / StackOverflow / blog post copy-pasta spam pages.

And overall Google quality is really getting worse for discoverability of internet gems or interesting pages with good writing; unless you use specific unique keywords (site's unique name etc.) and/or heavily use double-quotes, it will find SEO-optimized pages with low quality.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel that there's almost a counter-Google-fu these days. Finding something that isn't on the front page, or even just trying to use an older search style often leads to Google showing the weirdest results.

I use Searx or DuckDuckGo for these searches. While their results are often worse at the top, they provide a wealth of understanding and documentation that Google seems to just.. skip? To me, finding things is more difficult when there are two opposing sides trying to outsmart one another.

I have just tried. For `cat pipe` I get zero results related to `cat |`. On first 5 pages only cats, I didnt try to go beyond.

I dare you, remove all google cookies, logout (like - dont use chrome*) and try again. I think you will get to the same results as I did.

And regarding google spying on me - I will rather not use it at all. Even without the searx, there are viable alternatives like qwant.com.

As I have said, I believe the results are based on your queries from past (AI based) and if you are not using the google spyware ecosystem, the results are horrible.

Remember, the e commerce industry is $500bn a year in the US, and a huge proportion of those purchases started ultimately at Google searches. That isn't even including other online revenue like banner ads which aren't aiming to have you buy something, or online purchasing decisions that aren't e commerce (like when you choose a restaurant or real life activity based on Google and the websites it sends you to).

That $500bn is what makes the bad parts of the internet so resourceful. It funds all the blogspam and content mills and malware when you look for recipes, cleaning/DIY/repair content, advice on purchasing products, lyrics and guitar tabs, tourist advice, investment advice, health advice, error messages. It funds the scam "local" locksmiths and repairmen in Google Maps search too. By comparison, Google's revenue is $170bn and that's global. So could anybody "fix search" on Google's budget?

I agree. As a German I'm even getting some odd results of a auto-translated Stack Overflow Q/A. There's one site which is doing this automatic copying+translating and when I land on it it drives me absolutely mad, I get angry that this is even a thing and even more so that Google is indexing and offering me their pages in the results.

Other than that, I prefer to search on google because I know that I will get a couple of good links from which I can then first open a couple in background tabs (mmb-click), then close the search tab and start looking at the pages.

Diese Seiten gehen mir auch extrem auf die Nerven!

Wütendes hochwähl.

Allein deshalb klicke ich auf deutschsprachige Suchergebnisse schon gar nicht mehr drauf.

I've also noticed a lot of sites that now scrape GitHub Issues and the discussions on there that are increasingly spamming search results.

GithubMemory, GitMemory and Giters are the domains that come to mind immediately, but there's loads of other non-obvious ones as well.

Domain denylisting can't come soon enough as a feature from search results, urgh.

> Domain denylisting can't come soon enough as a feature from search results, urgh.

Crude solution: At least in Firefox you can assign keyword shortcuts to search engines. Since you control the requested url you can -site:w3schools.com the offending domains.

Also there's an addon for hiding results from specific sites: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/

The uBlacklist browser extension lets you blacklist domains from Google Search. See if that helps you.

It came and went, sadly.

https://searchengineland.com/google-finally-discontinues-the...

I’ve been using Kagi for the last month. I’ve made a point of trying out every upstart search engine I can get access too and so far this one has been great. A good sign is that I think very little about it. It tends to hit canonical sources more often than scraper sites like gitmemory dot com or the stackoverflow scrapers you mentioned. I’m a little annoyed that I have to be logged in because my default search engine doesn’t work in private windows, other Firefox containers, etc.

Something I noticed with Brave (my last experiment) was that it was awesome at first and then started to slide. It feels like restaurants that are great when their first open and become meh after a year or so. I wonder if popularity hurts search quality so I’m almost reluctant to share Kagi. I hope they can continue to delivery this quality.

This is basically the case for every search I make now. Recipes, how to guides, DIY, programming, you name it. The SEO spammers have taken over the world.

Perhaps controversial but I feel that we reached a saturation point with google's insistence on AI/natural language queries, where ddg is now giving me better search results than google for technical queries.

I think the only area where google is still able to outcompete other engines is searching for regional results in Google Shopping, apart from that SEO's are effectively eating google for breakfast.

This is about my experience as well. Google has just about become useless for a ton of searches I had no problem with a few years ago.

The results take so much longer to find relevant results for just about anything

The only way Google could claw me back from DDG at this point is finding a way of eliminating the endless SEO spam and useless content mills from their results. It plagues both of them but at least DDG makes a point of being less insufferably nosy.

I bet they make more money by not fixing the problem.

Google could pretty easily drop scraping sites hard to the bottom of the list and prioritize fresh content. But it probably pays not to. So sadly you're not worth the effort.

I think DDG, being somewhat privacy focused has a more traditional index, whereas I strongly suspect google would be profiling the devices and people making queries based around time of day and device used to determine what type of results to favor. I actually get good results with google. But my technical queries are all done from my work laptop, so i expect there's a profiling, fingerprinitng going on on the google side that's shaping the index I use. or its magic.

Could you ever see yourself paying for search? How bad is google, what would you pay to change it?

I’d pay a subscription for searches that effectively removed cruft and heavily SEO’d listings. The classic example is looking for a recipe and getting an essay of SEO bullshit about how these cabbage leaves were grown by the Mad Monks of Machynlleth and remind the author of the their childhood frolicking around the depths of Mordor or whatever, but also things like stackoverflow or GitHub cut-and-pastes, blog spam, empty posts with nothing but trigger words to get the ranking higher, literally any link to things like Pinterest, and other annoyances which push actually useful results down the page.

Essentially I want a search engine that can differentiate results that exist to solve a problem I have and results which offer nothing and just want to divert my eyes from a problem to show me ads. That’s the difference, I don’t mind seeing ads next to things that are actually useful but many of Google’s results exist for no other reason but to show me ads and offer nothing useful. I’d happily pay £20 a month for a search engine that removes these pervasive annoyances reliably.

A little off topic but I've recently started seeing duplicate search results on the same page, one after the other. Not sure if this is a bug or if it's yet another SEO loophole that's being actively exploited.

> I find a lot of sites in the top results that have simply scraped Stack Overflow and reposted their content verbatim.

Since last year I get very often results from websites that scraped GitHub issues and just reposted them, often with no easy-to-find reference to the source. For some reasons they seem to have extremely good SEO.

Edit: commented too quickly, that's already mentioned by 2 other comments...

For the SEO, the content in the issues is still good.

The real question is why GitHub itself isn't higher, and the most obvious answer is that it's owned by Microsoft. User generated content is only prioritized if it's from a Google run community

Yep.

There's also lots of sites that copy/paste GitHub issues.

Just bring be directly to the GitHub issue, not to these clones.