I'm not the kind of person who thinks about search quality, this is the first time in my life I have ever noticed it being frustrating.
For instance I just now searched for a specific e-mail address that ends with "@hotmail.co.jp" -- since it didn't find any hits with the full address, it decided to strike out the username part and return thousands of results for just "hotmail.co.jp". This is literally useless and they should know better.
It just gets worse and worse for technical searches too, I find. Searching for stuff like datasheets for chips and vintage obscure computer programs and peripherals rarely returns anything useful without "wrapping" "everything" "in" "quotes".
Alternatively, if you can edit the URL used by your browser, you can just add "tbs=li:1" to it; for Firefox, you can add it as an alternative Search engine by running this on the Console:
window.external.AddSearchProvider("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/popthestack/1530165/raw/c99a1c5e6e783aecffa432397a527f557944926d/google-ssl-verbatim.xml")
I feel like Google a few years ago had struck a decent balance between trying to be smart (sometimes automatically including synonyms to your search terms, etc.) while still respecting your actual search terms. Now it's way too far gone in the "assume user is a total idiot and doesn't know what he wants" direction.
I always used image search to try and find the original source of an Image. It's super useful to determine the authenticity of a news article, identify the author of a photo for licensing and a million other uses.
Then at some point, search by image started to simply return results based on the image classification tag on the image: so instead of similar images, or other instances of a photo, I get results like "beach" or "bicycle" or "city". This is so frustrating and completely useless. I'm sure anyone is capable of typing "mountain" in the search field to find generic photos os mountains.
So that got me back to tineye.com - I just with they had a larger coverage of the web =[
There aren't many tools that find exact/slightly transformed matches of an image. That was very valuable, especially with the power of Google's webcrawling. Imaged get shared, stretched, watermarked, and artifacts build up. This was the single best way to find a source image.
Now the image is converted back into text and it searches for images using the text. We could search for images using text before. This is not new. The unique thing about reverse image search was killed and turned into just a fancy input for the same old image search.
For some reason, it keeps recommending the videos I already watched, the ones in my save for later and the most annoying one: the ones from the channels I marked as not interested.
My recommendations also getting less and less relevant.
They definitely changed something and broke a perfectly working system.
"recommended for you", yeah right. How do they arrive here from say 1 from CGP Grey, 2 from ACDC and 1 from Iron Maiden?
Last.fm used to have my music taste well nailed and followed up with a lot of unknown stuff that I ended up loving and buying. YT had more data for longer yet has no clue at all. Now I just search and play direct from DDG.
YT never worked that well for me, but now it's rarely worth even checking the other videos column.
Also they need to stop reccomending flat earth, anti-vax and other toxic nonsense without prompting.
There are trying to at least that: https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/01/continuing-our-work-t...
also this post (and the related discussion) provide some additional context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19128259
I assume it must have improved in that time; maybe I should try it again.
When I started using DuckDuckGo I often switched to Google for certain queries, now I do that very rarely because Google's results get more disappointing every year.
So yes, you should try it again.
That said, it's definitely a lot better than a few years ago. I'm the same in having tried it back then and I couldn't get many useful results. I've been using it for half a year again now and only occasionally do I use the "!g"-bang to revert to a Google search.
Youtube's recommendation has really changed for the worse.
It's totally correct that often we want search results that don't include the exact word which was specified in the search request. We often want close synonyms, stems, elimination of redundant words etc. and flexibility on this helps to retrieve much better search results.
On the other hand, Google has a particularly frustrating habit of dropping words which are absolutely key to a particular search. You know, those cases where you are searching for details about a very specific set of explicit keywords, and 90% of the results exclude one of them, making them totally useless.
It's like an "uncanny valley" in some ways. When it says "You probably don't need the word 'and' in your search, and also 'video games' is the same as 'computer games' so I'll just include both" then the process makes sense, feels helpful, and indeed you probably don't notice. When you search for two explicit technologies and one of them is ignored, it feels like you're fighting a system that's trying to second-guess what you mean.
Ultimately the search engine is tuned for common queries, and the majority of users aren't likely to have the required technical skill to express exactly what they want to find without some help. This results in mismatch between the expectations of different users.
Verbatim search helps with this, in that it allows advanced users to better control their results. I'd be super happy if I could just toggle this "on" all the time.
A single button that says "try searching without word for more results" would be far less frustrating.
I miss the days of +forced +terms.
It seems just stupid to return these completely useless results but I guess it makes them money somehow.
It allows (allowed?) you to tell the search that the other words can be used for ranking and are nice-to-have words, while the must-include words are treated differently and must be present and match exactly.
If all search terms were automatically must-include with no override, search results would be garbage because as a user you aren’t going to predict the perfect inflected forms of words used in documents every time.
Being dumbfounded should not lead you to think other people are wrong. It should lead you to wonder what you are missing.
The final straw for me is that it now "helpfully" drops
search terms on my behalf. I was already using DDG for a third
of my searches. I'm going all-in now. For people who don't spend
much time online, maybe what Google is doing works for them.
I suspect that the people who’ve noticed this and feel frustrated have, like me, been searching on Google since back when it was on its way to unseating Altavista/Yahoo/etc (or maybe somewhere between). But I don’t hold it against Google because they’re optimizing for the widest possible audience and if it makes it easier for most people I’m ok with being a little inconvenienced. As long as adding quotes or other modifiers kicks in the old/advanced search I’m ok with that price for something I not only don’t pay for, but don’t click on the ads for either.
I'm seeing my search results show less and less of what I'm looking for, it's like google search is forgetting how it used to work.
The same with SEO, I'm seeing sites ranking again on the first page that have useless content using all the tricks/ghosts of SEO past. It seems all the legacy SEO hacks/tricks filters that had been in place at Google have been removed recently.
I was a huge fan of Google, but I'm definitely seeing a decline in quality of the SERP.
Two possible explanations:
1. The latter is much more of a moneymaker.
2. I don't think there is anyone left at Google that actually understands how the search engine works these days.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19111306
A Search Quality engineer at Google responded to me but I didn't find their arguments very convincing (nor did a number of repliers).
I have switched over completely to Searx on most of my devices, and by telling it to weight results from Bing, DDG and Google I feel I get better results than from any of those search engines alone.
Google has been returning really obvious results that one expects to get based on search history, other internet usage, etc (much like Netflix's matching). So much so that in order to find really unexpected gems of info I need to really spend a great amount of time searching a lot of different websites (hacker news, reddit, linkedin, corporate affairs data, marketplaces, truecaller, etc etc).
I feel like we need a new search engine now that there are so many different types of search results (blogs / media, aggregators / marketplaces, directories, social profiles, company websites, etc). One that lets us take more control over the type of results one can expect and more importantly one that doesn't show you what you expect to see (after being heavily influenced by your previous activities).
Also, Google may have millions of results for every keyword, but the quality of those links deteriorates quite fast, post 3rd page results are just crap.
I genuinely believe that Google worked and innovated when other search cos were wasting users' time by not rendering results quickly, but today we need something that better suits the complexity of the web and doesn't heavily rely on usage histories, etc.
Granted search engines are no psychics, you also need to better phrase your searches sometimes.
I remember Google used to return way more accurate results a few years ago. I guess privacy regulations, increasing demand for higher ad revenue have made it a lot worse than it used to be.
Because no one wants to wait forever (delay is indistinguishable from failure), Google returns the best results it can obtain within some time threshold. Unfortunately, the utility of a search term is often its rarity relative to other search terms and the rarity of a search term makes it less likely to be cached nearby. If "nobody ever searches by that term" it is more likely not to be indexed or on a far away partition. Think of adding a Korean character to a string of English search terms : In Korea : In the US.
Unfortunately, duckduckgo and the like aren't still as good as google else I would've shifted to those search engines a long time ago.
(I know of firstround search and I think this is the best you can get. I was thinking there should be a website that aggregates articles linked on twitter by people from VC/founders world, but I don't think there is one sadly)
Several search queries took 2-4 seconds to return results.
What are you searching for when you see a decrease in quality?