from Hacker News

Ask HN: Have your search results gotten worse recently?

by cauliflower99 on 5/14/24, 2:46 PM with 20 comments

• by arromatic on 5/14/24, 3:02 PM

  It has gotten really terrible , some examples :

  1. Site diversity is non existant . Nearly every term results same handful sites. Proof [0]

  2. Actual blogs are not shown in serps . I have to use blogger and wordpress in search term to find blogs but it exculdes all the blogs that are not blogger or wordpress .

  3. Way too much focus on reddit compared to all other forums. Its like both people and google both forgot forums other than reddit exist.

  4. Too many non related articles .

  5. Got too many seo optimized junk ? Just go to page ten or twenty . Turns out google now capped search results to a few hundred . And bing ? The pages become irrelevant at the later pages.

  Workarounds I use :

  1. Adding hackernews does improve my serp that are related to to tech .

  2. limiting my search results to a old date/month improves the serp .

  3. Marginalia [1] and kagi occasionally helps .

  4. Sometimes I use absurdly long keywords .

  5. Sometimes i use a search engine from here [2] to see if it gives better results or not which usually turn out to be not .

  6. Yandex sometimes work but not always .

  In short : The current search quality is terrible and finding smallweb ,forums and blogs are even more difficult .

  [0] https://detailed.com/google-control/

  [1] https://search.marginalia.nu/

  [2] https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

• by cpach on 5/14/24, 4:08 PM

  Related:

  The man who killed Google Search https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 (2024)

  It's not SEO: something is fundamentally broken in Google Search https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113007 (2021)

  The internet is an SEO landfill https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764 (2019)

• by theGeatZhopa on 5/14/24, 3:07 PM

  Not recently, but since 2013 or so it declines constantly. Still, I'm able to get what I need, but it became so cumbersome. Someone did search engine optimization, I guess :)

• by YaBa on 5/14/24, 11:20 PM

  Yup, Google keeps getting worse everyday. Some queries return 90% crap/spam/AI blogs and 10% useful information. Bing is not an option, DuckDuckGo it's a little better, but still... a lot of garbage. I've been noticing this since 2023, but now it's completly weird. How did spammers won the SEO battle?

• by sandwichukulele on 5/14/24, 10:56 PM

  My search experience has been the same always, just fine. I exclusively use Google and will switch my default search to Google even if it isn't (such as on raspberry pi OS where the default is DDG). To get anything of value, I have always first looked towards physical books and I spend most of my time at the public library. If I want the news, I turn to the physical printed editions of the newspaper that are updated each day at the library. For example, my last Google search a few minutes ago I looked for the iPhone 7 MSRP and release date and had no issues getting this information from google. I am left confused about these posts because they lack specific examples to better understand where you're coming from. I've always seen the comments about how people do site:reddit.com but I've never felt the need to do so either

• by manuelmagic on 5/14/24, 3:23 PM

  DDG started to ignore the country preference (the slide button) I set.

  I keep it in the off position, that should mean "all countries" but it still shows me results in Italian language, even if I search in English.

  Google started doing that years ago, and it's quite annoying since I usually want international results.

• by solardev on 5/14/24, 3:09 PM

  I almost never use Google Search for real queries anymore. ChatGPT is where I get most info these days. For businesses it's Google Maps. For everything else it's usually Wikipedia or reddit. A generic query on Google with no qualifiers is just going to get you SEO spam -- and that's after I manually blacklisted many sites (quora, etc.)

• by potta_coffee on 5/15/24, 9:39 PM

  Google is essentially useless. If I really want to find something, I'll try Yandex nowadays. For the most part, I don't even search anymore. I just suffer with sites I've had bookmarked for years. Most of my potential searches are for programming language documentation / APIs etc.

• by tanaylakhani on 5/15/24, 11:04 AM

  We are building Stacked Search: Beyond the first - https://stackedsearch.com

  We index the links that are curated resources from people all over the world. We have already indexed 1M+ links on a wide variety of subjects.

• by JohnFen on 5/14/24, 4:47 PM

  My searching has become better than it has been in many years (although not as good as it was before Google started to degrade), but I also actively use Kagi's ability to weight websites so that some are deemphasized and others are emphasized. That alone has made a world of difference.

• by sujayk_33 on 5/14/24, 4:25 PM

  True ;)

  But the current situation is like "Out of the frying pan and into the fire"

  I was using ChatGPT first then when Bing Copilot was released, I turned to it only to find out, it was even dumber and needed more prompting and there comes the prompt length

  I prefer using the HN search engine instead..

• by eajr on 5/14/24, 10:27 PM

  I switched to Kagi a few months ago and pay for it -- it's worth every penny. I never go back to google/ddg (unless im looking at maps).

• by prashant541 on 5/14/24, 5:45 PM

  Yes, the new changes have effected things a lot.

• by nothercastle on 5/14/24, 8:15 PM

  If it’s not on Reddit I can’t find it might as well not exist. I can’t find any info elsewhere

• by antinone on 5/14/24, 2:54 PM

  i thought so, too, a while ago. it was horrible. but then i simply started to phrase the question much much longer (on google, don't know about the duck) and got much better results again. a lot of weird, fun stuff, too.