Last night I watched a YouTube video that had a song in the background that I hadn't heard but really liked. I pulled up Shazam but it didn't recognize the song, so I took to Google. I entered the lyric and added the search terms "lyrics" and "r&b" at the end. Google returned 4 YouTube videos to songs that didn't contain the lyric, a link to a Boyz II Men song on Genius that didn't contain the lyric (good job Google, you know an R&B band), a link to peterbe.com to find a song by lyrics, and a bunch of other useless links. I clicked on to page 2, which hilariously presented 3 of the 4 YouTube videos that were on page 1.<p>I was immediately turned off, so I pulled up DuckDuckGo and Bing, entered the same exact query, and both engines returned the song I was looking for in the first result. I laughed out loud.<p>I then thought to myself, "I wonder how many pages I would have had to flip through in Google to find this result." Eventually, I found it. It was the 68th result on page 7.
I'm just gonna throw this out there as I'm noticing it more and more at this point since switching languages.<p>What the actual F has happened to google search results for programming issues?<p>I used to be able to google a question and get, more or less, a right answer from a forum or stack overflow.<p>Recently, many coding tutorial websites have clearly figured out how to hack googles pageranks and now instead of one 'right enough answer', its 5 clone 'tutorial' websites, with all the same crappy answer that isn't actually what I was asking. Like I can't use google for coding questions any more. Not like I was able to previously. Also, Stackoverflow with bangs from ddg are broken and it thinks I'm a robot. No answer except to go to SO directly and search.
Yeah I’ve noticed this too. But also the rest of the front page is often either seo spam (like those Pinterest links which catch whatever search term you’ve used) or shopping sites. I’ve found google search to be increasingly hostile to its customers.<p>I guess we’re not the customers. Use duckduckgo or something else.
I call this the squeeze.<p>Google, even after all its attempts, is still a one trick pony. They have to grow at least 20% year over year to justify the market cap. They weren’t able to create a two pillar company like Amazon (AWS + Retail) so what do uncreative master executives naturally turn to? Of course their only cash cow.<p>“ Rabban! I place you in charge of Arrakis. It's yours to squeeze, as I promised. I want you to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze!” - Dune
Just as I saw this link a notification popped up on my Pixel phone:<p>> Trending: "Turkey inflation rate"
> See search results<p>I've already put a lot of effort into purging as many categories of Google spam notifications from my phone as possible, but they just keep adding new categories that I have to track down and opt out of individually. And the only way to silence them from the notification itself is to block all notifications from that app/service.<p>I paid good money for this phone — just stop with the OS-integrated spam! It's a never ending game of spam whackamole with Google these days. I guess various product owners are incentivised to increase "engagement" or whatever, but right now they're just increasing my engagement with Apple's product pages.
The problem with profit optimising companies is that they don’t know when to stop. They will keep squeezing every last drop of blood out of their products, and their employees, until the business fail, or a competitor gets competitive enough. Especially when they hire a “General Manager” who’s only expertise is to force a 10% cost reduction on the business every year. Until the business is a dead corpse. But by then of course the CEO has already skipped ship and started the cycle again with another company.
I feel like using search engines has become a "jargon arms race" where you have to be smart enough to figure out the right combination of synonyms for what you want, that advertisers, seo spammers, and regulators haven't figured out how to stimey yet. Jargon is almost like a different language at this point, where if you know how to speak in esoteric jargon you have unfettered access to information, and if you don't, then information rapidly approaches unobtainable.
To be fair, it depends on the screen. The submission makes it sound like the whole <i>first page</i> is ads, but there’s 4 ads at the top instead of the usual 2-3. It happens to extend to the fold in this Twitter user’s browser.<p>I scroll past all ads out of habit[0], so honestly this doesn’t impact my Google usage. Wish I didn’t have to train that muscle, but here we are. :(<p>[0] my pihole breaks the links anyway
Firefox + Ublock & Privacy Badger, on desktop and mobile. I also use Blokada on Android. This combination stops most ads, and if a few sneak through it is easy to create a custom rule.<p>While I still find Google useful, especially Google Scholar, I've primarily moved to DuckDuckGo for most casual searches.
“The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates.”
-Gabe Newell<p>When the pain of watching ads becomes greater then the pain of setting up a way to block ads.<p>Blocking ads will become the norm.<p>They're doing this to themselves.
Now that I think about it, I don't use search engines very much anymore, at least not in the traditional way. My searches are almost all site:$foo.<p>Actually, a good majority of my searches are site:reddit.com {product I am looking for}, or site:news.ycombinator.com {some tech thing I want to find again}.<p>I think there is a comparison here to how inbound telephone calls, or to some extent email, have been made useless by marketers. Google searches for "Phoenix {thing}" tend to be almost all yelp/yelp clone spam.<p>edit: this made me actually look in my history. It seems that <i>by far</i> the thing I am using google for the most is image search. Second from that is spelling/grammar sanity checks.
The Facebook stock debacle from yesterday makes me think that maybe there is a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line. For a while it seemed like companies like FB had captured enough of the market that they seemed impervious to backlash from their many controversies, too big to fail in a way. It’s too early to tell if this is the beginning of FB’s demise, but it looks like letting resentment towards your product build among your user base can come bite you in a very real way after all.<p>FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out. Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. When Apple added restrictions that cut off oxygen to FB, FB started a PR campaign to paint it as one grave injustice. It seems like that was met with a collective shrug. Who cheers for the bad guy?<p>All that is to say, it seems like Google has been in this value extraction mode for a while and I don’t see what the long term plan is. They don’t seem to be innovating much, but are instead intent on squeezing as much money as they can from their existing assets. And while that may work in the short term, FB has shown tech giants are not invincible. I’ve seen a lot of talk online lately about how bad the quality of search results have gotten. If a credible competitor emerges, I think a lot of users would gladly switch. If/when that happens, Google better hope they don’t find themselves in FB’s position where they can’t acquire their way out of their rut.
In principle making a some-of-the-web search engine is a tractable problem. Start by indexing known high quality, preferably moderated sites. Allow trusted users to upload their bookmarks for indexing. And so on...<p>My guess is the reason there are so few competitors is economics. You can't get investment as long as Google stock is a sure bet. Few will pay for your service as long as Google is answering their questions. Advertisers aren't interested as their money is more effectively spent on Google. Therefore you can't build an audience sure to lack of revenue/capital.
it s really a mess. Searching for 'viper' brings up 'Viber' as the first result, the rest is cars except for a link to 'viperidae'. It's a goddamn snake, google
Most people are fairly resistant to changing their behaviour because of annoyances. Take broadcast TV for example. From the 50's to the early aughts, TV's only competition was theatres, and its in-home convenience let it win that competition handily in terms of the hours people spent watching TV versus going to the theatre. Television providers took full advantage and the percentage of ads by airtime steadily increased. Shows that were designed around commercial breaks in one era had to be cut down in length and have additional breaks added when rerun in later eras.<p>There was no meaningful competition, either from alternative media distributors or between broadcasters to see who could offer more actual content per hour. It wasn't until streaming came along that cable TV finally started dying. This isn't a huge issue for cable companies, since most have pivoted into operating as ISP's and streaming itself. It's only a matter of time before cable TV is no longer offered as a service by the companies created to offer it.<p>Google's search engine has few competitors. Even the search function on many websites is inferior to a google search restricted to that site. The ads in google search results can be scrolled through in seconds, although Google constantly plays games to make it harder to tell where the ads stop. Their search algorithm is now suspicious in how it sorts the non-ad results of many searches. All of this is annoying to users, but is it annoying enough to force users onto other search engines? Google appears to be determined to find out just how much spam is too much.<p>Will DuckDuckGo or other alternatives to google gain traction as a result of this? Probably some, but probably not much. They likely won't make much of a dent in Google's bottom line until they offer something compellingly superior to Google, just as streaming is superior to broadcast TV.
I wonder if there would be a good way to monetize a search engine such that returning great results gets them paid.<p>Like a check in if you found what you were looking for, give a penny. Or potentially not what you were looking for, but something that you are happy you found. Thus giving back good info to the search engine and only pay a nominal amount when you get what you want.
The not so happy thing about this is that at this point the entire web is somewhat flawed. Too many sites have produced too much junk content just to game Google. A fundamentally new approach is needed to identify and surface “organic” (whatever that may mean) results. So I suspect (albeit with no data to show for it) that even if we just switched all ads off we still wouldn't be happy with the results that we see.<p>Google’s revenue model has been at odds for far too long with identifying and weeding out SEO spam. I don't mean 'spam' here in a derogatory way, but rather everyone who has a legitimate and interesting product and has had their back against the wall and was forced to play the SEO game and become a 'search spammer'
As a result 'spammers' (again, pretty much every site these days) 'won' because it was and still is the only way to survive.
I work in medical education related tech and I make content. I spend a lot of time searching for information related to medicine online - knowledge aimed more at the actual medical practitioners. One of the big irritants in this research is how much the ad model has warped everything to be centered on the patient. I'm not totally blocked but I do feel hindered. For example if I'm looking for a procedure it's far more likely for the results to be from sources which dilute and simplify because they're intended on selling patients on something.<p>If I were presented with an information search product capable of being aware of my specific needs and adapting itself for these needs, I could probably convince my higher-ups to actually pay for something like this. I really wish I could get the same experience doing medical research as the one I get when searching programming related questions, which often return detailed explanations on stackoverflow, actual documentation and other valuable content.<p>On another and somewhat different note I'm from a specific European country and I've noticed searching in my language in topics related to my country is even worse. If I'm searching for important information regarding something specific for my country, like taxes/institutional affairs, the google search is basically unusable because the results are infested with obnoxious endless clickbait/GDPRconsent/cookies/garbage/websites. I vividly remember how search results in my country used to return forums and conversations, but from what I understand everyone is on FB groups which aren't displayed. There is so much out there being talked about that doesn't seem to 'exist' in the eyes of a search algo.<p>Weird times.
I can't speak for Google but I think the theory they work under is that for some queries the ads are the best results. In other words, the user is more likely to find what they are looking for if those ads are there. There are many signals used for ranking results and the ad auction price is one signal.
I've been looking into alternative search workflows.<p>Google (and near equivalents) feel a bit like Windows GUI when I want Linux cli for a) quickly going to a site I already know, b) answering a question when I have a bias about where good answers will be found, c) picking one thing from a long list<p>I feel there's already an equivalent with a few rough edges but a power tool I can be productive with.<p>Any product that aims at Google's entire market is only going to turn into Google, I need an ecosystem of tools so there will always be one that is aimed at my use case.<p>It feels like there's a common sentiment around this so there may be room for a new business model or open source approach.<p>One thing is bang searches, like duckduckgo has. So if you already know the site you want to search, and they have decent search then you can use their search directly.<p>There's an open standard for advertising your local search but it feels a bit forgotten like RSS Vs twitter. You can find lists of sites that advertise this search in the Mycroft project on mozdev.<p>I think Firefox has a non standard extension for search suggestions too.<p>If the sites don't have decent search, you can get a site specific search via Google or whatever, but it feels like site specific search for code related things would be a good niche. Like Google, you don't need to own the content, just index it better by adding intelligence from context.<p>You can even aggregate across a few different sites, like official docs plus official discussion, email archives, a Reddit sub and so on as appropriate. Yes you'll miss the long tail, but you'll have limited the scope so much that there would be a lot for value in exact searches for errors and other similar things.<p>Possibly language communities could build their own index?<p>The same for discussion sites seems possible and other general groups of search tasks. Wikipedia is a good target too.<p>If you built a good one you could then offer it to the sites to use as their internal search too, in a virtuous cycle.<p>On that note I'm going to go look up what Algolia does in this space.
I had a very similar experience. Only two days ago, I tried looking for something related to a friend's phone not recognizing the correct lock pattern on Android (Asus Zenfone 7), the term was "zenfone 7 does not recognize lock pattern even when correct and it's locked",
and the first two pages were, with the exception of an official Asus support page, ALL the results were crap ones going to generic tutorials...<p>Searching for the same phrase in DuckDuckGo, the 2nd result pointed to a Samsung forum thread [1] which, while pointing to doing things with a Samsung account, said it started working by itself in 1-2 days, which it did.<p>Setting aside the fact why Android would behave like that, the search results in Google were so low quality and awful... While this is just an anecdote, it seems for quite a few types of search results, their quality has dropped hugely. Is it due to people hijacking the results by using clever tricks? Or has Google's algorithm starting to hit some sort of limit in terms of the amount of content that needs to be indexed and ranked? I don't know. But something definitely seems off to me.<p>[1]: <a href="https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/other-smartphones/my-pattern-lock-is-not-working-anymore/td-p/1357021" rel="nofollow">https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/other-smartphones/my-pat...</a>
Could it be that google is relying too much on the input from the address bar?<p>Unlike new search engines, google doesn't have to scrape and analyze the web because Chrome shows them what people want when they are searching for a set of words.<p>Since Bing/DuckDuckGo doesn't have the same level of manipulation, I would assume that SEO spammers have managed to influence Google by faking browser feedback.<p>I would assume that there are thousands of artificial Chrome instances that fake active users and flood Google with wrong user feedback.
today i bought another batch of Yandex stocks after they tanked 30% since a few weeks ago. I believe Yandex is able to fill a niche left empty by Google - good ole useful search results without censoring and ad infestation. I'm bullish on Yandex. they also have amazing image search (much more useful than googles) and they are planning to expand focus beyond Russia and neighboring countries.
Now that Google has killed their G suite accounts I am looking to move everything somewhere else and planning to completely stop using any of their services.
What would you recommend to jump to (paid service)? What tools I could use to move my emails?
(I have my own domains etc.)
I am not so much concerned about a search engine, which is superficially free to the end user, displaying adds.<p>I am totally concerned though that the non-adds results are those where the interests of the company behind the search results and my interest are deeply leaning towards the interest of the company instead of mines.<p>In clear text: Content of sites disguised as original content yet serving no other purpose but linking to Amazon or sites which display a ton of adds served by Google.
Facebook's tanking, Google's on it's way down, Amazon's getting broken up. Seems like the long-predicted next economic recession is around the corner
It's just another argument for (1) using ublock origin or equivalent (2) refusing to use browsers that do not allow ublock origin or equivalent to function.
Another search term where you usually got four ads as the top results is "web hosting"<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=web+hosting" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=web+hosting</a><p>And, surprisingly, the [ADS] search results when I'm logged-in versus when searching anonymously are different!
Google's only way to seriously grow revenue is to throw more ads in front of their users. This always, eventually, hits a breaking point where the ads become too much and erode the user experience.<p>Any company that relies primarily on ad revenue is built on a house of cards. It can be highly profitable, but it is fragile.
I would pay $10 a month for an ad free search engine that serves objective (not "personalised") query results related to what I'm looking for that doesn't sell my data, with similar features to Google Scholar <i>and ideally even greater granularity</i>, but for the whole web.
I often prepend my searches with strings such as "wikipedia " - typically there's a big improvement on the SRP end...but the borG will fix that if it catches on.<p>Coming soon - "Ad Infinitum(tm)" Google search results pages, which start to slowly scroll 5 seconds after being displayed...
Google is a product search engine, if you want to buy something local, or search anything local use google.<p>For any other query use duck/bing.<p>I find duck better for general stuff and bing better for programming stuff.<p>For streaming websites or controversial content use yandex as they bring up random blogs and small unknown websites.
Here was Dave Rosenthal's take two years ago: <a href="https://blog.dshr.org/2020/02/more-on-ad-bubble.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.dshr.org/2020/02/more-on-ad-bubble.html</a><p>Disclosure he and I agree on what is going on here :-)
It'd be nice if there was a search modifier that specified "only text and jpgs and some html markup". In C++ there's a notion of POD (Plain Old Data) for simple structs. Maybe the web should have POT (Plain Old Text).
How much is pagerank involved in google searches these days? I wonder, if they were to revert to an early version of it, would searches improve? Or did they move away / update / augment it to prevent seo abuse?
As I was reading this thread, scrolling down a bit, my whole browser screen turned into a loginwall ad for a Twitter account.<p>It's amazing to me that people are still donating content to these platforms.
Try neeva . com it's really similar to google but with none of the garbage experience from ads and SEO Spam. I switched from duckduckgo to neeva recently and have enjoyed it wayyy more.
Using DDG for years and reading this thread I wanted to try Google but apparently I sent it to zero in the hosts file years ago when it was still good.
Busy testing searx - selfhosted front end for search engines. Results seem decent enough.<p>And set up protonmail today.<p>I've just about had it with google's bullshit.
google.com/maps is also a pain nowadays, with almost half the space of my (smallish laptop) screen being ads and controls. I'm glad I don't own stock in this company, because they are on the wrong side of the advertising Laffer curve, and moving back will be difficult because customers have choices and are unlikely to come back.
"We sell advertisement, not search results"<p><a href="https://twitter.com/krebs_adrian/status/1488173888068542466" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/krebs_adrian/status/1488173888068542466</a><p><a href="https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/</a> (Note: the url of this page is /honestresults/)
We've been suffering from this literally for decades by the dominant Korean search engine, Naver. Now it is time for you to suffer too, westerners!
Hah, you don't even need to do a search now. In my iPhone, as soon as go to google, two thirds of the screen are covered by obnoxious google ads about their crapware "google app".<p>Guess nobody wants it on iOS and they are going with the "spam the user until they comply", like they do with YouTube Pro. They are the digital equivalent of an abusive partner that doesn't accept "no" as an answer.
Many people here suggests other services, including services you can pay for to bash Google. The reality is that Google offered Google Contributor and now offers YouTube premium but most people prefer free content with ads. And that is fine. I find very surprising the HN folks complaining about the tech companies making ads-based money for their services when they are not willing to pay for the ad-free version. It is disappointing that they feel using ad blockers is the reasonable thing to do. $9/month yearly subscription) for ad-free YouTube is an absolutely fair price IMHO. Ad blockers are piracy and kill jobs, same as downloading movies or books.