Context: Recently I've noticed that almost every search ends with ' reddit'. This is because msotly everything on google search shows either ads or content farm articles and listicles.<p>This is also slowly getting into more niche topics too.<p>Does anyone else feel the same?
My searching has split pretty evenly between Google and Bing. There was a relatively recent change to Google's search functionality that really brings down the usefulness: I can type an exact phrase in double quotes like I have for years, but often it will "correct" it to something else. These corrections involve either changing a term into another word or dropping words from my query altogether. It completely defeats the point of double quotes and often delivers wrong results because of it. When this happens, I switch to Bing and often get the results that I'm looking for.
Despite the consensus of Google from people who know about alternatives or ways to avoid it, Google is still the most mainstream and de-facto search engine in atleast the English speaking world, and is the top most visited website in the world.<p>I wish people would stop saying something is "dying" when they personally dont like it anymore or don't use it as much, you don't speak for the world.
For the past few years I've spent extensive time using Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Google. I've found that Google is still the best when searching for answers to technical questions during my work day, or searching for information about local businesses and events. Outside of those topics, the first page of results is usually a collection of posts from content farms with titles like "The best ___ for ____ in 2021". As a workaround, I also find myself appending "reddit" to the end of my queries, but I'm sure that will be gamed by blackhat marketers soon enough.
I find myself using HN search more and more to get beyond machine-translated nonsense and naive "content" for professional info. Same with stackoverflow.com and, to a lesser degree, reddit.com, and a couple other sites. Because why go to the middleman when you can get it directly from the source in these post-forum times. Maybe it's time for new browser meta-search plugins and/or revival of OpenSearch (not the ElasticSearch fork but the 2005ish proposal to have sites expose a search URL)?
Dying? Probably not. Becoming less useful? Absolutely.<p>Finding answers to very specific problems? Eh, it's still ok.<p>Searching for specific content? It's fukken gahbage.
This may be because content is moving away from conventional websites and onto platforms.<p>Reddit, stack overflow, writing sites like wattpad, and content sites like substack, all make content publicly available. There is also a lot of real public content on youtube. These are indexed and show up on a search engine.<p>But lately, a lot of platforms wall off their content, for privacy (facebook, linkedin), or to allow content creators to monetize it (udemy, patreon, medium). Search engines can often surface content based on e.g. course title, article title, but the in depth content is not accessible so they don't rank.<p>I think what you are seeing is the end of the open internet, and search results just reflect that.
Google search is technically the best it has ever been with its use of Bert and Passage Ranking. Ironically, this has had the unintended effect of forcing content-farms to produce more realistic content that resembles the babbling of GPT2, where you can’t just skim the content to immediately recognize it is babble. This means that while there may actually be fewer content-farm results in our searches, it costs the user substantially more energy and time to filter those results out manually.<p>Google search may be dead in the sense that Google has gone as far as it can go in ranking the relevance and quality of content. What we need is a value ranking of content — contextual to a specific person’s needs rather than as an answer to a one-line query.<p>The reason so many of us append “Reddit” to our queries is because humans are the only things on this planet capable of making evaluations about value. At least, for now.
Google search is one of the most used products on or off the internet with billions of people using it billions times a day. So no, it isn't dying. It's about as far from dying as any product can be.<p>There's a different question about the quality of the results and how that's changed over time.
I feel like Google search is definitely regressing. It's almost like they are allowing old ways to game their search engine to creep back in. Maybe all the original engineers are gone and the new ones are making the same mistakes again.<p>I'm seeing top 10 search results with malware, redirects to affiliate links, sites with just garbage content, the SERP quality is way down.<p>I would love if they would launch a new product.<p>Google Classic Search<p>Search like it used to be.
It's still unmatched in finding programming solutions. Compared to DDG, which is my daily driver search engine, Google is able to get into Github issues, Stack questions, etc much easier than DDG. I'm heavily using !g in most of my programming questions via DDG.
>Recently I've noticed that almost every search ends with ' reddit'.<p>Quite true, but as I ranted here[0] Google screws that up, too. If you try to limit your search to only post from e.g. the last month or year, they'll happily show you archived posts from 5 years ago as well.<p>0. <a href="https://svilentodorov.xyz/blog/bad-search/" rel="nofollow">https://svilentodorov.xyz/blog/bad-search/</a>
Yes, I do the same. Almost all my searches are restricted to specific sites. Still, Google is the best at searching specific sites, usually much better than the site-specific search functions.<p>It certainly has gotten worse, ever since they started thinking it's a good idea to let AI "guess what you want." But such a widely used product doesn't die quickly...
Google search is definitely not dying since for many people what you can find on google is _the internet_. But I personally no longer find google search as useful as I used to find it before. I use plain google mostly to get quick answers for programming problems.<p>Anything else I search for gets a quick "site:<authoritative_website>" to filter out the cruft. For random subjective topics "site:reddit.com".
!r <query> and duckduckgo will forward you to native reddit search. Bangs are incredibly useful when searching for domain specific content (!so, !rust), or searching for opinions/discussion about something (!r, !hn). For general searches, search engines are still king. I find ddg around the same as google minus the ads.
Wow, I didn't realize how many people add " reddit" to the end of their search. I've also been doing that for over a year because the search results are absolutely useless. I think this may also be caused by way shittier content though.
I add reddit to a lot of things like others have mentioned. For opinion results. I don't think is a product of google search though, its the product of where the web is currently.
As a non-native English user, I recently set my default browser back from DuckDuckGo to Google after the un-satisfied experiences with the former one.<p>The reason is that, Google can support my quick checks about English usage that can be minor to native users, such as<p>"as a result" vs "as the result"<p>or<p>"looking for the X factor" (I feel like I can write this phrase but not quite sure I understand what X factor really is or if there is anyone really using this term)<p>or<p>"someone advocating for implementing" (I want to use this phrase to indicate some colleague but I want to know if saying this is natural enough (or has more search results))<p>Silly but I do rely on Google to do this for me. Sometimes I feel guilty about this because I know these search requests costs energy and increase carbon emission.<p>DuckDuckGo is nowhere near the performance of Google for this. Also, it frequently returns NSFW websites at the first result page.
I understand what you're trying to imply and yes, I've noticed the search engine get crappier too especially in terms of something code-related. The top results I've been getting apart from SO/Reddit are those weird websites that crawl other blogs, replace words with their synonyms and then re-publish them automatically. That's a very bad user experience in my opinion.<p>Although, I won't go so far as to say that Google search engine is dying by <i>any</i> means given it still performs way better than other search engines out there and even though I've tried switching to Bing, Google just has more data on me and the predictive search results are a huge selling point for me.
I find the “date” filter on Google has been broken for a year now. It used to work perfectly even on Reddit posts. But something changed early last year when the date filter simply doesn’t work.
I feel the search is just as good, very likely the first listed link will be what I am looking for.<p>I'd say however the results have become more concentrated, like many others have said, these are concentrated around a few platforms. Another I'd say is maybe something bad has happened around SEO. I searched for something I wanted to buy the other day and every listing linked to the same website, even with different search terms, this is despite many online stores stocking it (I found many links on the manufacturers website).
Google is thriving. Search is Dead.<p><a href="https://chapra.blog/search-is-dead-352/" rel="nofollow">https://chapra.blog/search-is-dead-352/</a>
That's funny, I've been doing this (appending searches with "reddit") for a while, but I thought it was just a random thing I did, not the universal experience of so many people.<p>It's probably not so much search that is dying but <i>non-profit</i> content on the internet. Not a whole lot that search engines can do about that, unless they become search "walled gardens" ala Apple.
Google Search has been becoming less useful to me starting around 2003, but in the last year or 2 has become more useful so now its usefulness is back up to where it was in about 2015.<p>The main causes of the decline are the rise of content farms and SEO and dubious "improvements" to browsers that make them better software platforms but worse browsers of the written word.
I've been testing out Neeva (Ad free, subscription based) since I got off the waitlist for testing. I was skeptical at first, but just from anecdotal experience I've had a more pleasant experience not dealing with Ads. I also have noticed I do less specific website searches as well, which is a proxy metric for better searches?
I wouldn't say dying, maybe peaking. And a peak is quite natural considering they've taken over the world(in internet terms).<p>They are not covering some user stories as well as others, e.g. security minded users and DuckDuckGo, but overall still doing more than ok. "Googling" is also a verb so there's that.
Google Search has been dying for a decade. Try image search today - it’s awful. And regular search isn’t any better.<p>It used to be simple to find drivers with Google. Now it’s easier to go to the vendor’s page and try to navigate their mystery meat hellmaze. That’s terrible.
Speaking only for myself, off the top of my head, I use it to look up stuff for work (software engineering), for several of my hobbies, and to learn more about local news / events, and I feel like it works equally well or better than a few years ago
Yup, I end all my searches with either reddit or stackoverflow/stackexchange. Google has become worthless. Any query like "best xxx" doesn't return anything meaningful.
If I am looking for opinions or discussions (on things like agile, work issues, pets, holiday destinations, covid, etc, etc) I will always check HN and Reddit via Google search.
I use DuckDuckGo by default due to privacy concerns and Google returning tons of irrelevant answers in recent years.<p>I only fallback to Startpage (which use google result) when DDG doesn't spit good enough results (happens mostly on rare topics / Chinese search)
I can relate and it depends.<p>I find that if I am searching about programming topics, especially in option, DDG does great. If I am searching about more general things, like say a list of smoke points for various cooking oils (last night), google seems to do better.