so that's what I mean by "informal thinking" vs "explicit query"
it's also easy to explain this one case, but it is true in general, she just finds things much more quickly than I do, and when I ask her what was her query I'm always "why tf did you type that in?" If we used a formal language for search, I'd beat her, but she throws in a lot of extraneous terms that make me think either or both "you are overspecifying" or "you are ambiguating" with those extra terms, but she gets answers I don't get, I think because many other people are typing things in the way she does.
I had been trying to find it before I saw her, and since I knew the general neighborhood I was actually trying to "walk" around with streetview to find it, then I was wracking my brain for architectural terms I could use.
Google does a great job of shepherding you towards information and at the very least gives you additional context that you can use to corroborate or tune your search.
Well... the subreddit caught on, and started trolling the shit out of the site by making up fake things "fans were excited about."
https://www.engadget.com/redditors-troll-an-ai-content-farm-...
This is going to get so much worse...
> "How to get: After beating Buck in the fight in Arroyo, along with fighting off all of his friends, you can find this weapon lying on some barrels by where you first spoke with him"
Unfortunately Search is a hard problem to solve, considering how much the internet has grown from 90s or early 2000s to now.
I don't see how any of that qualifies as "advertising"; it's just a business directory. It certainly isn't "unsolicited advertising". The same goes for the old Yellow Pages: it was a business directory (though it had ads too). Businesses had to pay to be listed in it, but that's the cost of doing business: if people can't find you, you're not going to make any money.
I think when people say they hate advertising, what they really mean is unsolicited ads. If you're looking for a particular business, why wouldn't you want some info about them, or about the choices available?
In fact, when i am at home, and i need a phone number, i go to google maps. But i do use the maps as maps when i am not in my car.
The google we grew up with was a tool that allowed you to precisely retrieve authoritative writings related to a subject, but today's google is a lot more like ChatGPT than that.
I just give an example in another HN thread on a different context [1].
I am open for a 30' session showing a lot more examples.
Regarding less experienced people searching for information, try looking for health data and see what is in the top.
At Google, they recommend to go to https://www.google.com/advanced_search so you can write all the keywords you want. In this case I searched for: kvt reverse exploit [1] you can quickly see that google search results are inaccurate and it shows first my HN post because it was very recent. Also the recent article where it is also mentioned and added after I post it here in HN [2] and the following results doesn't end in some correct previous post. I then try again [3] with a more precise search adding kconsole and only found three results without all the keywords while the advanced search says explicitly that all these keywords should be there.
Am I missing something?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?as_q=kvt+reverse+exploit&as_ep...
[2] https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security
[3] https://www.google.com/search?as_q=kvt+reverse+exploit+kcons...
So it's not that Google doesn't work, it's that you're using the wrong tool for your use case. If you want highly technical content or precise keyword search you shouldn't use Google. It's like you're going on Tinder to find a marriage partner.
You are saying one day you use your mobile phone for calling and the next day the device only work for calling 0800-*?
I hate the new Google as much as others, but if you don't adapt your search habits for 20 years when the whole ecosystem around you has been obviously changing, that's kind of on you. Just use another search engine that fits your use case. Personally I use Kagi and I haven't touched Google for the last year at all.
These are worth paying for.
That tells me that the main problem may simply be that the BugTraq post on seclists.org isn’t indexed by Google at all.
While that’d be annoying, I think it’d more likely be a specific configuration or robots.txt issue with that site than being a general issue with how searches are performed.
FWIW, the same query in Kagi found the original as the second result, just under a blog mirror of your 10/20 comment and above the comment itself. Since Kagi sources from Bing (along with Google) results, that reinforces the theory that it’s an issue specific to Google’s crawl.
Contrary to your other replies, I do think your style of query continues to work well on Google (where indexed of course)—-and so do full sentences.
I honestly think the issues when there are problems finding things usually come more down to 25-plus years of searchable internet history accreting a lot of clutter (especially in spaces like tech where old info ages out but never gets deleted), along with cynical SEO from low value sites deliberately skewing results for as long as the site remains indexed.
Neither is a Google problem, and the recency bias you observed is arguably the best way to combat both. Ads and site promotion are another story, and the reason I’m on Kagi, but I don’t think that hits tech as hard as consumer spaces.
You could not have chose a more affirming counterpoint of an example.
"site:docs.python.org/3/ term" gets much better results. (You have to add the site: qualifier, due to SEO it's no longer just enough to say "Python docs". Hence "If I wanted the docs, I would get the docs." is not as trivial to do as you suggest. Things actually went beyond annoying to downright dangerous when searches for "Python 3.10 <topic>" were drowned out by older e.g. (3.6-3.8) version SEO stuff, instead of the latest Python docs.)
Queries like "awk by example" or "egrep by example" or "jq by example" seem to hit the sweetspot between completeness and working example: they give you third-party non-commercial unaffiliated expert bloggers not stuffed with upsell links to a bootcamp. Just pure information sites.
Having mentioned all this, now I've probably inadvertently cursed those sites...
Unfortunately even before anyone started talking about "semantic web" or whatever, substring-match was declining in utility due to spam, so a substring-matcher was only as useful as it's ranking algorithm. So some cleverness in ranking is necessary, but when ranking becomes too clever, or irrelevant due to the arms race with spam, it's an almost inevitable slide from necessary rankers to mediators.
Since all the search/spam arms race is pretty much played out with giants like twitter/google anyway at this point, it is kind of hard to understand why we can't get and keep a separate and truly basic internet search engine that just works. I don't have a handy example, but in my experience even DDG & friends seem to routinely fail the "exact substring match" test for unusual phrases that I know I read verbatim last week.
What I (and I think others) really want is just substring-match tool plus a very minimal amount of extra cleverness for basic stuff like spelling variations, some fuzzing for dates/digits, directly adjacent stuff according to a simple thesaurus. Not my area of expertise, but I would guess that there's a combination of problems that prevent this tool from existing.
a) Other search companies are all trying to do fancy-but-fuzzy "semantic distance" searches to emulate Google b) It's still true in 2023 that just keeping an up to date index is a super hard problem no matter how many crawlers are in your army c) Despite bots everywhere, the deeper web in social-media is just too login-walled for the rule-abiding crawlers to deal with d) There's just no money in do-what-i-say-not-what-i-mean search tools
These days I use ChatGPT though.
I usually get non-working code snippets that pass the wrong parameters.
If you're a German living in Morocco trying to understand Quebec's immigration policies in the original text you'll be fighting the search engine at every turn.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/oc...
So I tried verbatim. It still didn't work.
Verbatim + quotation marks. Still nothing.
I guess New Google Search simply doesn't recognize the "(-)-" part of the search term. But this is characteristic of its recent performance. I can't even count the number of times Google disregarded part of my search term and gave me an inane result.
Searching "BPAP chemical", "BPAP chemistry", etc. seems to work fine.
AFAIK, Google search has always ignored parentheses and most punctuation symbols (other than ones that are special to it, like +require_term -exclude_term "...")
https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/71287971/does-go...
Measuring whether or not results are relevant to the query is the wrong metric to use. You don't want highly relevant misinformation. You want good information.
sighs wistfully
uhh....
- I Googled "speed work running", wanting some workout suggestions. I visited four or five results that either didn't have concrete suggestions, were poorly written, or overly verbose. I ended my search with little faith that I was getting good advice. I typed the same thing into ChatGPT and got a suggestion of 6 different workouts that all seemed coherent.
- I asked Google Home "How do I make overnight oats". It replied, "I found a result for [...], should I read it?" then "The first ingredient is Nutella". That's it, that's all it said. I tried the same search on the web, and every result Google result was spam that was 20 paragraphs of inane blog content with a recipe tacked on the end. Again, ChatGPT then gave me a sane, baseline, recipe.
- I searched Google for "how much caffeine is in coffee". It gave me a calculator that said, "40 mg" and then a suggestion an alternative search for "Q: How much caffeine is in an average cup of coffee? A: between 80 to 100 milligrams". It turns out the calculator was normalizing the caffeine content to caffeine per 100mg of coffee.
I'm using Google exactly how their product is training me to use it, but the failure modes are all consistent. Google's AI features has not real understanding of the world, so their instant answers are frequently nonsensical. And Google clearly can't filter out SEO garbage.
Even if they could filter out SEO garbage, Google's early success killed the golden goose. 99% of web publishers are publishing content for Google, not for their readers and web publishing has become a cynically commercial affair. Individual publishers have by and large moved on from the web to other creator-focused platforms. So, the quality and experience of web content is absolute rubbish. Results are filled with cookie banners, ads, signup prompts, verbose SEO filler, poor writing, lack of authority, etc.
I wish I could search like I used to but we are where we are.
Uh, I do that and I’m 37. But I don’t scroll, I click the button that says "recipe" that’s on pretty much every recipe site.
IMO this is mainly about being used to the state of recipe sites on the internet, and has nothing to do with searching.
* Bio of the author - Google SEO rewards content written by "real humans", so this is there to appease the bot. * Giant images of overnight oats - Needed to rank highly on Google Image Search. * Fluffy paragraphs - "The beauty of overnight oats is that you can make them as simple or creative as you’d like. The base recipe is delicious, and filling all on its own. But if you’d like to spruce it up, you can add a variety of toppings and mix-ins, including fresh fruit, nuts, seeds, spices, jams, and more". Is that supposed to be text written for other humans? Google rewards original content, which means recipe sites need to include massive paragraphs of filler to appear like an authoritative source. * Ads - Gotta make the money. * More fluff "Here’s a few reasons why you should to whip up this recipe today…" - Again, this is not text written for humans. * Repeat the fluff, pictures and ads approximately 5 times. * Common questions "Do you have to use yogurt?" - Trying to appeal to Google Instant Answer searches. * Recipe - Finally * Recipe rating - This allows the site to put a star rating and review count on Google, again, for SEO
So, 95% of the content and functionality of that page is an attempt to convince Google into sending traffic, or ads generating revenue, rather than serving the end user.
Content on the web has dramatically changed from 20 years ago because publishers are creating content for a broken machine and not for other humans. This negative feedback loop is hurting the web, and not just Google. This leaves the door open for upstarts like ChatGPT or TikTok to gain mindshare.
> Recipes can be protected under copyright law if they are accompanied by “substantial literary expression.
https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte...
So the fluff is both an attempt at that substantial literary expression, and a way to differentiate this version of the recipe from 1000 other versions of the _exact_ recipe because the recipe itself is not unqiue or copyrightable! Without it, recipe's would be penalized by the duplicate content penalty Google applies.
This often works the opposite generational direction: when a young person has a flat tire they often call a road service and wait two hours, while the old guy would install the spare himself in less than 8 minutes. But either way, flat tires are inefficiencies that are best eliminated.
I'm over 40 and do that (and the fuzzy stuff / open questions in the top comment).
In fact, most 20-somethings are much worse than this - some studies even pin them as worse with most computing use that is not about social media apps.
For example, “speed work running”, were you looking to improve sprinting? (I’m not a runner, so it almost reads to me like “working fast while on a treadmill”). Reading the rest of your example, maybe “sprint workouts” would give better results?
(40+yr old guy here, Google had always worked for me, as many people had described it working for 20yr olds. Finding the right, specific enough set of keywords had always been my “trick”. Little did I realize I subconsciously generate embeddings like a LLM to Google search)
Speed work in running is a type of training that focuses on improving your running speed and anaerobic fitness. It involves various structured workouts and drills designed to increase your stride turnover and overall pace. Speed work is essential for athletes who want to enhance their performance in races or simply become faster runners.
Common forms of speed work in running include:
Interval Training: Interval workouts involve alternating between periods of high-intensity running (fast) and rest or recovery jogging. For example, you might run fast for 1 minute and then jog or walk for 1-2 minutes to recover. This process is repeated multiple times.
Fartlek Training: Fartlek, which means "speed play" in Swedish, is an unstructured form of speed work. During a fartlek run, you mix bursts of faster running with slower paces or jogging. You can do this based on how you feel or choose landmarks as your guide.
Hill Repeats: Running uphill at a high intensity is an excellent way to build strength and speed. Hill repeat workouts involve running up a hill at a fast pace and then jogging or walking back down to recover. This is repeated for a set number of repetitions.
Tempo Runs: Tempo runs are sustained efforts at a "comfortably hard" pace, typically just below your anaerobic threshold. This helps improve your lactate threshold and race pace.
Track Workouts: These are structured speed sessions done on a running track. Common track workouts include 400-meter repeats, 800-meter repeats, and 1,600-meter repeats, where you run at a fast, consistent pace and take rest intervals between each repetition.
Strides: Strides are short, fast runs of about 100 meters that help improve running form and leg turnover. They are typically done at the end of an easy run.
It's essential to incorporate speed work into your training regimen gradually to avoid overuse injuries and adapt to the increased intensity. Make sure to warm up properly and cool down after each speed workout. Consult with a coach or experienced runner to create a personalized training plan that suits your goals and fitness level. Additionally, listen to your body and allow for sufficient recovery between speed sessions to prevent overtraining.
Also, ChatGPT is usually really bad with long prompts when I use it, and is often kind of close when I give it a short prompt. I assume part of this effect is psychological though, where you expect the short prompt to have worse results.
(Generally just confused by how ppl always claim it’s trash or it got worse but there never is a solid benchmark)
I think the problem with Google is that 'garbage' is highly subjective, and what you think is awful is actually highly engaging for a lot of users. Google has massive amounts of data about what results users click on, how much time they spend on a website, how much scrolling they do, etc. To technical people we see that as SEO 'trapping' people to push engagement rankings up, but the reality is that it's just engagement. People could leave a site of they wanted to, but they don't. They scroll through those 20 paragraphs of recipe back story. That data means Google are finding accurate results.
If anything this shows that Google's results personalization isn't taking your engagement into account. A problem that will get worse as more people block analytics.
Man, you have strong coffee. :-(
Now, i was told this, repeatedly, over and over. It's probably false, but if it is false, cite the decision that precedented this.
Because as far as I know, I’m both and I find Google just as good as ever, if not much better.
The only place I see people complaining about Google is Hacker News and certain parts of Reddit and by no means are the opinions on these sites anywhere near universally shared by most people.
And by all means, I think calling yourself highly educated but not being able to adapt slightly when a tool isn’t working right a little rich…
They should drop the charade and do a directory listing instead, like the "portal" pages of yore.
No results: "vector plus phallophile" / "vector plus phallophile reviews" / "vector plus phallophilereviews" / "phallophilereviews.com vector plus"
vs.
Correct results: "site:phallophilereviews.com vector plus"
Yes, I have SafeSearch turned OFF. This is happening to pretty much anything that's remotely NSFW on both google.com and amazon.com -- it's getting completely impossible to search for perfectly legal things that are NSFW.
They're perfectly capable of making things better, it's just more profitable if they don't.
I don't think so. I've been using the "full sentence questions" and fuzzy questions since forever, and very seldom use "site:" and other such more formal constraints you mention.
Despite that Google results have been getting worse for the past 5 years at least.
for some definition of better that is not "the results are more relevant than before"
I do that every time I get my AWS invoice
We know.
> I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc.
Checks out.
The problem is Google monetizes search terms and thus show the highest bidders and not the most relevant results.
This manifests itself the most for things people want to sell (products or services)
- full screen of those “intelligent” answers that is just naming swords from Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3.
- two SEO spam sites
- two decent results
- a full page of YouTube suggestions
- two more SEO pages
- a section of “people also searched for”
- four more YouTube videos
- another “people also searched for”
- a block for Reddit posts discussion this question (finally what I really kind of wanted, maybe I just stop using Google…)
- about 10+ more decent-looking websites.
Perhaps your assistant is just paid enough not to be annoyed by this garbage way of getting to the answer. And perhaps she doesn’t know what great really feels like. I wonder if there’s a generation of people who only know of the Internet as being this bazaar that’s absolutely glowing with neon ads like some blade runner undercity.
Top result: article from GameRant on the best colossal weapons (I have no idea what this means)
6 "intelligent" answers, the first of which when expanded lists the "Elden Ring: All 11 Colossal Swords, Ranked By Physical Strength"
Article from The Gamer called "Elden Ring: 14 Best Colossal Swords, Ranked"
4 YT videos
Reddit block
....
Google is fine for memes, news, and the other things that normal people regularly look for on the internet. Where it really breaks down is where it used to shine—finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics. Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap for finding any content with a target audience smaller than a few million people, and while stripping out advanced search operators may smooth the path for the 80th percentile of searches, it cripples the remaining 20 percent.
If your assistant stays firmly within the 80% that work, then yeah, Google is better than ever. But they made the 80% work seamlessly by giving up entirely on the 20% that people on forums like this really cared about.
I know people say it still doesn't work, but I find adding quotes completely effective for me when I need the precise keyword. Not sure what I'm doing differently.
It can be really egregious, too: I've searched for `foo` and had it say `Showing results for bar. Search for "foo" instead?` Then I follow the link that it provided and it still is searching for `bar` with the same prompt to refine the search, even though the double quotes are clearly still present.
Google was excellent, the process took me about 2-3 hours to get everything clear in my head, the documents went off in the mail, and the certification has been issued in the UK.
So yeah, I don't know what your experience is, but it's not mine.
That is generally no longer true, due to human nature and the rise of walled platforms and/or non-Web platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Medium, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. Most content is either private, or public as part of an offhand comment/discussion thread. Actual public pages with high quality content are near extinct.
In the few cases where it may be true, the results are sorted for the common denominator, especially since most people who would be looking for such niche information have disabled personalization, so Google can only assume that you are an average person who wants common denominator results.
In the early years, technically inclined individuals / power users were the early adopters of the Internet and Google and thus arguably a high percentage of users. So it adapted to that user demographic.
The early demographic (as is so often the case) enabled the revolution, and it became mainstream. And the early demographic is left behind.
Google (with all of it's measuring, automation and various generations of algorithmic and machine accelerated learning evolved from being optimized for early adopters to being optimized for the mainstream.
Maybe some of these links will help? ;-)
https://www.google.com/search?q=learn+to+talk+like+a+teenage...
This works for most people most of the time and is exactly what we’re finding frustrating
But knowing what you can still use it for is 90% of the battle, my latest common use case is just fact checking AI right now but my primary queries are all to sandboxed language models
I'm thinking when our carefully curated prompts, chain-of-thoughts, and what else will stop working on ChatGPT because they optimized it for the technically uneducated users.
We'll meet here again. Missing the days of "Let's think step-by-step". Ah, this one in particular seems to be already over!
Those still work, don't they? I use site: all the time.
All the people I feel are "using Google wrong" and are just "fluking the right results by accident "... They're actually using it more efficiently than I am! Same with almost everything mobile. I like the control and certainty and size and detail of desktop computing and my ergonomic keyboard and 32" monitors. I cannot understand how people are using wonky apps and Imprecise directions and half-understood usage... And getting many things faster and easier than I would :)
I had an enlightment moment last night. I usd to run a photography studio so am pretty handy around a digital camera. I was setting up my phone's main camera with long shutter and trying to steady it to take a photo of a Halloween costume in the dark... When my friend just turned the phone to selfie camera, it automatically used it's screen as 6" flash, and he got a better photo faster and with less thought and kerfuffle. Was he "using it wrong", with lower res camera and single point direct flash (big no no!) and just not thinking it through at all? Maybe? No... He got a great result quickly and efficiently, I'm just stuck in stone age :-).
(There are still times and areas where understanding the how and why is useful. But in many mundane daily tasks I'll get beat by people who don't bother :)
Knowing how to use a camera is not being stuck in the stone age. His photo was good because the phone automatically had a longer shutter time, did post processing HDR and did light light edits.
If you both set up RAW images on your phone, and put it on lightroom, yours will be editable into a perfect photo, his will be a mess of flash and AI generated artifacts by the phone to make it "just work".
Having things that "just work" is great for everyday tasks, but power users and technical people should still have their tools to do things right. Apple allows for RAW image and videofootage while still having many settings by default for most people. Spotify used to have a ton of cool audiophile options in the settings now its like 3 options and they are all terrible. Google has gone that same way, instead of enabling both, they have cut off power users by focusing everything on "everyday use" which makes their product largely useless outside of some scenarios.
You used to go to Google and effectively be asking, “Google, find me information about X.” Today you’re implicitly asking, “Google, show me ads related to X.” You just kind of accept that what it shows you will be the thing that is most fine tuned to appear most related to X - and the most common reason to do that fine tuning in the first place is to deliver an ad.
So you gotta search in natural language like an ad, and hope that someone in that first page of results decided to SEO some particularly good content so they could get you there to look at more ads.
I've been doing that "informal" since Google existed - surely it's quite common. You describe what you want in fuzzy terms, and add more qualifiers to narrow it down.
So, "melting house halloween" would be my first search, or rather "melting house halloween <city>". Similarly if I wanted to search for say Eugene Levy and didn't remember his name, I'd write something "comedian big eyebrows" (he's the second match after Groucho) or "big eyebrows american pie" (first match), and so on.
Out of curiosity, how would you search for that house?
It's like their trust of the Internet is 100x higher than someone recounting something they've seen with their own eyes, and the value of knowing a bit of information or getting a dopamine hit is way way higher than having an engaging conversation with someone
so to the point here, I lament that Google doesn't work any more, but she doesn't, she thinks it works great. Now if I can just get her to stop finding restaurant recommendations on TikTok...