from Hacker News

Why does every site's search now insist on giving me what I don't search for?

by sathackr on 4/4/25, 1:07 AM with 18 comments

• by didgetmaster on 4/4/25, 1:27 AM

  If I search on many shopping sites, the more specifics I give, the broader the results become.

  It's as if every term gets translated down to a sql statement where each part of the query statement is a bunch of OR clauses instead of AND clauses.

• by suyula on 4/4/25, 2:56 AM

  If you've got 15 minutes, here is your answer: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

• by Apreche on 4/4/25, 2:26 AM

  As the old saying goes if you aren’t paying for the service then you aren’t the customer. You are the product. All of these things make money by selling your attention to advertisers and vendors.

  Advertisers are paying them to have themselves be shown to you. Their interests factors into the search results as much, if not more than, your query. They are paying to make it happen, so it’s going to happen.

• by ChrisArchitect on 4/4/25, 4:57 AM

  Why do ppl keep saying quote search doesn't work? Totally gives more focused results for the quoted item than not. As does something like "site:"

  You can share in some other related recent anecdotal gripe threads:

  Search could be so much better. And I don't mean chatbots with web access

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43563915

  I don't think I can trust Google as my search engine anymore

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43517828

• by linuxdaemon on 4/4/25, 12:52 PM

  Semi-related: Why do sites grab search keystrokes (like '/' on github) to force me to use their crappy search when I'm trying to find content on the page I'm currently on?

• by add-sub-mul-div on 4/4/25, 2:29 AM

  Deterministic search is power for you, manipulated search is power for them.

• by fallinghawks on 4/4/25, 2:58 PM

  The ignoring of quoted words is pretty annoying, especially when the search engine assumes you have spelled something wrong. Search is also incredibly sales oriented - shopping results are prioritized and fill up your results over the information you're wanting.

  I was joking last year that we needed AI because regular search had gotten so awful. Not really a joke now.

• by blackhaj7 on 4/4/25, 2:31 AM

  I have also noticed all docs websites seem to be using the same terrible search plugin that means they match pretty much anything except what you are looking for

• by toldyouso2022 on 4/4/25, 1:25 AM

  Doing guesswork of course, they would rather you get what they want but also they probably don't know how to fix it and make it deterministic again

• by more_corn on 4/4/25, 2:29 AM

  Because “fuck you”. This appears to be the new customer service philosophy of the major tech companies. Perhaps they’re sick of people pestering them with endless questions?

• by daft_pink on 4/4/25, 9:49 PM

  Kagi.

• by toomuchtodo on 4/4/25, 1:34 AM

  Use Kagi

• by pcunite on 4/4/25, 2:07 AM

  Its a grand conspiracy, really bad search makes you look at what they want you to see. I've wrote my search tool just to see what was so hard about it all.