
Ask HN: Is Google's search quality declining? - dc957a3134
A few minutes ago I wanted to find the table of contents for a book from high school—a collection of short stories called <i>Characters in Conflict</i>. I knew a few of the story titles, so I did a multiple-phrase search, like so:<p><pre><code>  &quot;to build a fire&quot; &quot;harrison bergeron&quot; &quot;characters in conflict&quot;
</code></pre>
The results from a Google search are near useless. Curious, I tried DuckDuckGo (which I&#x27;ve heard of but don&#x27;t regularly use). The fifth result was this page, https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ci.nii.ac.jp&#x2F;ncid&#x2F;BA09833406?l=en, which had a nice text table of contents.<p>How is it possible that Google, with its vast resources, isn&#x27;t showing me this page for my search? Is it possible that it was missed in the crawl?<p>The only reason I tried DuckDuckGo in the first place was a hunch that for research, Google has actually gotten worse. It seems almost too clever for its own good. It can interpret natural language queries and I can use it to zero in on a celebrity&#x27;s name I don&#x27;t know just by typing a few related words—and yet when I want to use it to find a needle in a haystack, it&#x27;s hit or miss.<p>Anyone else experience the same thing, or is this an n=1 situation?
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rajnp
Recently I started using DDG and I find it surprisingly good. I do parallel
searches between DDG and google, DDG returns much more relevant results than
google. Based on my experience I find DDG has improved drastically.

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qnsi
For me, the problem is with how search is being gamed with content marketing.

Lately I cant manage to find any good articles using search - I very often do
subsearch on hackernews to see discussions

