Ask HN: Why is Google search unusable lately?
It feels like for a year, maybe more now I’ve had to append basically every search with “Reddit” to get any meaningful content to my queries. Is Google struggling to fight SEO spam? Does it care? What’s the play here? I’m assuming internally they know of these issues in degradation of quality. Maybe it’s just me? Feels like the dead internet theory is more and more credible ! I worry that people in these tech community conversations have socialized themselves into accepting and repeating this narrative and reinterpreting their experiences to align with the consciously adopted narrative. So you just get this vague, lobotomized commentary to the effect that the results are "terrible" without it meaning anything. I'm personally frustrated with Google as much as anyone else, but I know they are metrics driven and I wonder if, according to a certain metric, Google is nailing it just as much as they ever have been, or perhaps are even more so. Or they've shifted strategies to optimize for things that give them a high hit rate, perhaps things that leverage their knowledge in maps, or people's desire for extremely recent news. All of the unconscious times that we use !g because we don't trust DuckDuckGo enough to get the right answer. I don't know what the right answer is here, I think the question "does Google suck" breaks down into several sub questions that get at the essence of what we mean, and certain variations of the question the answer is yes, such as niche discovery or deep dive research, credible long-term commitments to any kind of specific algorithm whatsoever that can help you grow an extinctual relationship with the product, and for certain other questions the answer is no. So it's not even that I disagree, I just think anytime I see this feeling expressed, it's always reiterating that very vague first pass subjective unprovable version, and it's not breaking down into sub questions. I just think most people aren't looking for websites with Google Search, and Google knows this. You can just type in a few words and you have "enough" information show in the Google specific panels. Searched like "super bowl", "food nearby", "X drama", "shooting in Kentucky", "hurricane map", "headphone gift 2024", etc etc etc. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 / Google Search Is Dying, 1582 comments, Feb 2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136 / Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories, 1290 comments, Jan 2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702 / Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?, 502 comments, Nov 2021 The spam is all that's left, now supercharged by AI. Anyone competent enough to make an information based website worth ranking on google front page will be better off making a youtube video on the subject instead and that's what they're doing. And frankly, these videos are agonizing to watch even when they jump right in. I can’t effectively grep through someone’s rant when I’m trying to find information about that one aspect of a product that will make or break my purchasing decision. I don’t want to listen to someone wax poetic about the geopolitical economics of Consumer Packaged Goods when I’m trying to decide which desk to buy. It’s not that I don’t care about these things. It’s that I have other things to do too and this is time-consuming and inefficient. Unfortunately you're at the mercy of what the people making the content offer and clear concise information earns the creator nothing while a 10min+ youtube video funds their hobby, potentially their livelihood. This. The problem with YouTube is often enough, I’m looking for something specific that takes 10 secs to convey. I don’t want to watch a 10 min video to get the 10 secs I need. Maybe LLM’s auto transcribing and pinning timelines to them (like loom does) is the solve. Beyond the search results, it's becoming unusable in various other ways: - Exact token searches (quoting, + prefix) are completely gone. - Doesn't work properly until JS loads, leading to false starts. - Screws with browser history so that often I cannot hit back to go to the results again, I land on the previous page before the search, and going forward goes to the result I clicked. - 80% of the time I can't copy or save images on mobile. (This one is especially irksome). - Shows nearly a full page grid of shopping results I don't care about if I search for any product. If I wanted shopping results I would use the shopping tab! - Adds :~:#text= to URLs I click into, making sharing links I search up obnoxious. It just goes on and on. These days I use Kagi, despite the friction/flakiness of the plugin on iOS. Edit: looks like the newer 2.0 plugin just got updated a couple days ago to supposedly fix the lack of redirects. Seems to work so far! And now it redirects on any search engine site you allow the extension on, and doesn't on ones you don't, which is a fair bit nicer if a bit confusing to configure. I didn't know they officially got rid of quoting for exact token searches. I was trying this the other day and i felt like it wasn't working but there was no way to know other than the fact I still wasn't getting results I wanted/expected. I have also had the problem with my browser history and always blamed my device. Maybe I was giving Google too much benefit-of-the-doubt. exact token searches aren't gone? what are you talking about, I use them all the time and the results are clearly different than just putting a bunch of terms on their own Sure, they're different. But they aren't results that strictly only include the exact token or phrase. I have many times searched for an exact phrase I know is in a result and could not find it on the first two pages of results. It's not just you. There was a recent study showing Google Search has declined which generated a bunch of articles about it a few weeks ago. I suspect it's a combination of Google prioritizing more and more revenue-maximizing changes (like inserting a distracting, space-hogging YouTube video section into many results pages) plus so much content now being SEO optimized (by both human authors and AI generators) to the point of being nearly useless. I now have a Userscript that runs on Google Search pages that automatically makes over a dozen conditional changes to both my queries and the URL parameters, like adding "-site:youtube.com" to searches not on the Videos tab. I also have a couple of "Fix Google Search"-focused Firefox add-ons installed as well as at least half a dozen uBlock Origin Google Search-specific rules to hide various annoyances. Combined all this makes GSearch still sort of useful but I can tell it's a losing battle and I now often use either DuckDuckGo or Bing . And the top results where google give you the answer instead of taking you to a web page is often just hallucinations or not relevant. Saw this the other day https://bsky.app/profile/drewtoothpaste.bsky.social/post/3kk... I don't get that result. I get a great bit of info: a range in kg of average dog weights and a comparison with some other small animal pets like cats etc which is helpful. These kinds of posts are all just hearsay and based on a billion variables of people's search history etc that Google is trying to adapt to. Software anecdotes are much more important than life experience anecdotes. The variables you are referring to are controllable (and reducible), unlike in life. We should care when an information tool provides terribly, terribly wrong information - even rarely. Not really. Search isn't a simple "location + query = results" anymore. Google integrates your past queries, it's estimation of your interests, LLM randomness and loads of other things that means search isn't controllable or reproducible. This isn't like an SQL query where a weird result 1 in 1 million times would be an indication of a bug. I switched to Kagi. It’s better than Google was several years ago, worth the subscription much more than Netflix is. I never bother Googling anymore, it no longer gives me relevant results. Same, and Kagi's academic search option is excellent if that's something you need. To that point, https://scholar.google.com/ is still useful. I find that let’s say you search for a review of a type of software. The comparison will either be written by one of the two software companies or a third competitor and the purpose is to sell you the product of the domain. Also, if you search for a recipe the top results will often be from a company that sells one of the ingredients. I wish there was a way to hide or remove results from these or just to flag low quality results to train an ai to provide better results. Just searched today for a specific product, none of the results were for it. Just got a bunch of other stuff for different models and products. Something is badly wrong. If you want more to read this has been discussed extensively for at least 2 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=search Reasons mentioned: SEO is winning, being an advertising company is contradictory to being a good search engine, people and content moving into big silo sites some of which are deep web, greater ease of just producing a giant amount of autogenerated sludge and sites and Google trying to be too smart. Google changed their SEO formulas and told people how to game them. People gamed them. Google has changed their SEO algorithms before to prevent things like tag stuffing, and they could do so again to change their criteria for what a valuable, high ranking site should be. But they haven't and things are bad. What are you googling? As a full-time googler ( programmer), it never failed me to find my desired searched term :) https://twitter.com/lillybilly299/status/1756714094596358351 Money. Particularly adsense, which rounds to the idiots at google incentivizing / putting lots of the dollars in that fund seo, effectively incentivizing and funding the ruin of their own search engine. I think they were arrogant enough to believe they could outwit the seo, but seo has pretty conclusively won. And a need to juice revenues for the stock value. Try kagi. I was skeptical at first about the idea of a paid search engine, but my experience has been they are mostly simply better than google for all searches related to software development, and at worst, equal. So - I have a theory. My 3 year old mac is easily running 7b models that are really good at producing content. It can produce 3000 words per minute easily. Essentially, having the cost of production for producing SEO-optimized articles to essentially 0. If I was selling something where SEO makes a difference, I would be running a content farm right now. This breaks or at least alters how google ranks sites. It becomes unusable. Someone needs to look at search from first principles. Everything from scratch. And to your point, I think XKCD did a comic that basically ask the question you're asking, which is what's the logical culmination of the search for "good" content in a world where machines can mass produce content. The comic I believe was about YouTube comments rather than Google search results, but the ultimate idea was that if the machines actually at least made good content that is every bit as good as what we're hoping to get from humans, the question of whether it's machines or humans is moot. I'm not sure I agree with that conclusion, but I do believe it represents a forward step from the status quo, where machine produced content dominates but is merely in the C to C+ range for quality. Works for me…got any examples? I just searched for “emacs comint mode” and got several useful hits. What incentive does Google Search have not to be terrible? I wish Apple would enter this space. I think Google has become so big and needs so much revenue that they can't afford to fight SEO spam anymore. Since ads are still their main income they have to do whatever it takes to make money. And looking at the numbers this strategy works really well. You’re looking at it wrong. Google is a decent product search that occasionally mixes in other information. Seriously I’m rennovating a house and the top of the google page usually tells me whether Home Depot or Lowes sells what I need in seconds. It's not? Why you think reddit is a reasonable thing to append in the first place is suspect. I don't know where that came from in the last number of years. Maybe it's that whatever you're searching for is all on reddit so hard to say that has anything to do with google. Why you expect the content from reddit to magically appear in google searches without appending it is weird. It's silo'd away in subreddits without any clear credibility. I don't want any reddit content to appear for the majority of searches. Millions of people are using google every day to search for other things and getting results. I use it constantly without issue for a number of daily topic searches. You don’t get it. More and more people append "Reddit" to their search because it’s the only way to find opinions written by humans. For example try searching "best coffee grinder" and "best coffee grinder Reddit", the quality of results (and arguments) is night and day. This is true for any "best x Reddit" query. We don’t specifically want Reddit results, we want results that are not obvious SEO/AI spam. Ideally I’d like the ability to add ":humanblog" to my queries to get only blog results, but it’s not possible, so "Reddit" is the best option left. my theory: they're gearing up for the launch of RAG-type search, to compete with ChatGPT. Post-launch, it'll finally give answers instead of links. This will destroy their company, so they can't. The deal is publishers (including stackoverflow, reddit, etc etc) let Google scrape their pages because they send traffic. That's the trade. If the trade, instead, is google scrapes your pages, uses that as AI training data to give "searchers" answers, and then and never sends you traffic, site owners will block Google's scrapers. And just like that, all the training data disappears. Google could afford to pay publishers, but that also opens the doors to governments the world over demanding payment for scraping and links, so... yeah. And also, then, what is their advantage vs OpenAI, and how does Google remain ungodly profitable if their tac jumps thousands of times, etc? Tough spot. Maybe they will have a major update soon that increases importance of sites like Reddit or HN or Stack overflow? That would certainly be awful. This is just part of their promotional deal with Kagi to drive customers to them Maybe there is something wrong with the way you form your queries. Give us some examples. There are some queries that have useless results by nature of being useless questions. "Best shovel" etc. I switched to Kagi and am it's definitely better imo, though doesn't feel nearly as good as Google from ~10 years ago. Yes, they are on the right track, but still a lot to improve upon. > Google removed the "+" symbol as an exact match operator when Google+ was launched in 2011. That's when Google started to go downhill quick. Welcome to the post-covid internet, which is completely rules by 3-5 companies. The presented choice of websites and results is reduced for your safety and convenience. Hope you enjoy your stay on any of the dozen (easily) available and discoverable websites. On a different note: yes, google results have degraded very noticeably in the past 2-3 years, to the point where you are better off using Yandex (except for politics and contemporary history - for these look for some other source...) I've been using Kagi for almost a year now and I have to say I don't miss Google search even one bit. Your explanation of Google delivering lots of AI SEO generated results is that there is an enormous government conspiracy which aims to prevent people from learning the truth about COVID? Nope. More like that covid was a watershed event for a lot of things - sometimes it was used as a divider decidedly, sometimes it just happened accidentally.
I trust that the complete siloing of the internet belongs to the latter - the internet was much more open and diverse before 2020 compared to
today (at least when you look at what you can easily see, without taking a very deep dive - "funnily" there is almost no need to setup Tor to hide from clear-net) Kagi The wikipedia article on enshittification has a section specific to google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Google_Search ai spam Try out perplexity They are probing the reality of our universe.