
Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down? - coffeemug
Yesterday I was surprised to find myself trying Yahoo search because I couldn't get satisfactory search results in Google. It was the first time in years. I started thinking about this, and I realized that in the past few months I haven't been getting particularly good results from Google. I don't get spam or anything, but a lot of times I don't get useful results.<p>The thing is, I'm not sure if it's because I do a lot of very specialized stuff these days, or because the search quality really has gone down. Consider these two examples:<p>Search for "Linux asynchronous IO". You'll get a lot of articles, but most are four years old (which is an eternity in the Linux world). These results aren't very good - posix AIO is implemented in userspace threads, and io_submit and friends don't work in many cases. Which cases? Hard to tell - I couldn't find any information in the results no matter how long I searched. I couldn't find any benchmarks either.<p>Perhaps it's because there is no good info on this on the web (hard to believe). So let's try something else - search for "concurrent hashmap in C". After hours of searching and playing with keywords, I got almost no useful results (other than Intel's libs, but not too much info on that either). It's difficult to believe that there are no good implementations out there.<p>So, is it the specialized nature of my searches, or is it Google? What do you think?
======
joeyh
I've used google since it was google.stanford.edu, and it's clear to me the
results have suffered. My feeling is that two of the problems are SEO and
feedback effects of google's own popularity.

SEO: When you cut through all the BS, the entire goal here is to make a less
good match come first. And it works (sorta). Just consider crap sites like
Experts Exchange that we've only learned about because they pollute many
searches.

Feedback effect: Thanks to google, less people do less collecting of good
links. Why bother when you can google for it? So there's less good information
for google to use in ranking links. Bear in mind that when google started,
nearly every home page had a long list of links to all the pages that
particular user liked and frequently used. I used to have one; I've long since
deleted it; my blog has some outgoing links that I like, but relatively few.
If I twittered, I'd probably post a lot of outgoing links, but of dubious
value; there's no gardening of just the perfect page of 100 links going on
anymore.

(I think this also partially explains why some (generally more specialized, so
less effected by other things) results feel dated -- legacy links that are
still hanging around from days when links were still used that way.)

Feedback effect: Thanks to google, ten sites tend to be more important than
any other sites on any given topic. This results in certain sites becoming
increasingly important. Wikipedia is the chief example here. Why is there only
one Wikipedia and not a dozen? Chiefly because it's gotten all the google
juice. If you want your wiki article on foo to show up in google, you
naturally write it on Wikipedia, not Fooipedia. The result here is that all
google searches feel increasingly the same -- of course Wikipedia is always in
the top ten, or maybe something like Stack Overflow for a technical search.

\----

So, these days, if I don't see something interesting in the top ten, I often
click on the link to page 10 (or 20, or 100) of the results. Often more
interesting. For example, google for "mashed potatos".

Top 10 results: "Perfect mashed potatoes" (SEO), allrecipies.com (always in
top 10 for any recipe search), foodnetwork.com, Wikipedia, about.com, nytimes,
etc. Pictures of mashed potatos. All generic and useless.

Page ten results: Dairy-free mashed potatoes. _Potato_ free mashed potatos!
Caramelized Onion Horseradish Red Mashed Potatoes! A poem about eating them.
At least marginally more interesting and quirky. What I would have expected
out of google circa 1997.

~~~
pfedor
The results from Experts Exchange are typically useful, but you have to scroll
all the way down past the ads and other crap to see the actual answers.

~~~
gnoupi
Last time I checked, EE was hiding all actual answers to visitors. It doesn't
really qualify as a useful link, then.

~~~
ggrot
If you come to the page with a google search result referral, the answers are
all at the bottom of the page. This is called first click free:
[http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=...](http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=40543&topic=11707)

------
Erf
Yes.

One thing I noticed is that searches no longer require that all words in the
query be present in the search results. Adding a + before a word is now
required to ensure that it's present in results. That frequently results in me
having to do 2-3 searches to find something that could previously be found
with one.

~~~
klon
I have noticed this too and find it very irritating. I expect ALL words to be
present. Why did they change this?

~~~
bh23ha
I have no idea why they changed this, I noticed it recently and I can't figure
it why.

User testing must have somehow played a role, I hate to blame non-technical
users but... still I can't believe anyone gets better results when the
keywords are optional.

The odd thing is I remember switching from AltaVista to google, before google
you always had to discount the first bunch of results, but google was just so
amazingly accurate. And yet now I find myself skipping the top results in a
google search.

I remember when google bombing first started, it didn't bother me much, but
then google tried to counter it and I could swear searches got a bit worse.
And recently they've gotten even worse.

It's a shame this seems to be destiny of all truly great things.

------
mahmud
Yep. I never used to use search operators unless I was looking for something
really specific. Nowadays I get completely irrelevant results and I am forced
to quote strings and explicitly specify term precedence, conditionals and
other regexy stuff.

Last night I was searching for the syntax of DEFTYPE when used with various
types (i.e. MEMBER, SATISFIES, OR, etc.) and the #1 his for "deftype member"
was the personal MySpace page of some guy.

I think they're optimizing for "social" results now.

~~~
NikkiA
They'd probably do well to have a seperate 'technical search' for searching
for things related to technical matters, eg programming languages, physics,
chemistry, medicine, engineering, etc. And remove the casual stuff (facebook,
myspace, pages that are clearly not about a technical subject, etc) from that
index.

It would probably be a highly praised feature to seperate off a second index
like that, as specifically searching for programming language concepts and
documentation can be difficult (the C# and .NET problem).

~~~
Perceval
Having separate indexes and separate searches for sub-domains of knowledge is
an interesting idea. The original idea of PageRank was that each link
constituted a 'vote' for a page. Perhaps different epistemic communities on
the internet use links to mean different things. So, the _meaning_ of links on
technical webpages is slightly different from the meaning of links on social
websites. Interesting idea to play around with.

------
epi0Bauqu
Yes, and this is why I started Duck Duck Go: <http://duckduckgo.com/>. Thanks
for posting specific cases--they help me immensely. Anyone else have more?

~~~
catzaa
I've used Duck Duck Go a bit and the results are okay. Maybe just a shorter
URL would be awesome (such as ddg.com ddgo.com, etc...).

Here is a search that I have had problems with :

octave "--eval"

Your site does pretty well with this (fourth link is somewhat relevant).

------
NikkiA
It has certainly gone waaaay south since day 1, that much is undeniable. Of
course, a large part of that is that the internet has gotten a lot more
useless filler in those years, and this has of course made 'relevant search'
an astronomically harder problem than it was in 1998.

On the more important metric of 'has quality gotten worse in the last couple
of years', I would say 'sort of'. The direct quality of results HAS suffered,
but on the other hand, google have implemented the user-wiki thing that allows
you to modify, to a degree, which sites are less relevant.

I will add that I think google needs to rethink it's keyword fuzziness, in the
past it used to be acceptable if the results didn't exactly match what you
were searching for, but these days that is becoming more of a problem. If I
search for a bunch of words, I typically know I want those words, by all means
suggest 'did you mean ... ?' but the fuzziness in the results needs to be
pulled back.

------
robk
Back to the Altavista days of +search +must +include +plus +signs +"and
quotation marks"

Seriously, the problem is advanced users get unexpected results with the query
expansion and refinement layers they've added on. While dropping obscure words
is helpful when grandpa has misformed queries, it's maddening for a technical
user looking for a very specific, infrequent keyword. However for grandpa,
it's probably a better experience for a generalized result.

Using +'s works well enough, but it's disappointing we have to use a less
efficient method of querying now.

~~~
rw
More generally, I think that we don't have a good mental model of how Google
is searching. It used to be straightforward, almost like Git, which won't make
any "clever" merges. Google, as a tool, is on the decline because it's not
comprehensible (even to us advanced users!).

------
niyazpk
Quote from Google employee:

 _It does work as described! - which may very well not be as desired. If you
want a more mathmatical-logical use of operators then you need to go find
another search engine._

[http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=1327f6fc2f6238e3&hl=en)

I am afraid that Google is now more of a 'social search engine' than a 'hacker
search engine'.

------
MattCutts
I think the the results quality on Google has been the same or better over the
last few months; one thing we have been looking at is helping less savvy users
who might mistype a word or type extra words that they don't really need in
their query. That can be a little more annoying for power users, but on the
other hand the power users pick up tricks like "Use a '+' in front of a word
to require Google to match that word."

Regarding the query [Linux asynchronous IO] returning older results, here's a
tip. Above the search results click the "Show options" link to open up what we
call "toolbelt" mode. From there, you can click to show only results from
(say) the last year, or in a certain date range.

Toolbelt mode is really handy, e.g. if you search for a product, you can click
"Show options" and then click the "Fewer shopping sites" link to get more
reviews and manufacturer pages instead of comparison shopping sites.

------
indiejade
Did you try <http://www.google.com/linux>

?

Although I alternate search engines regularly, I do think the way Google
indexes for specialized searches is pretty smart.

~~~
aarongough
Is there a list somewhere of all the specialized searches?

~~~
ed
<http://www.google.com/options/specialsearches.html>

Only 5 topics, unfortunately.

~~~
aarongough
Oh, that's a shame! I was looking forward to seeing a big page of specialized
searches. Oh well.

Thanks for the link!

------
VladimirGolovin
There was a comment on LessWrong where a poster suggested using Yahoo over
Google for non-quoted search. I tried it myself (I need to find an article
based on several words mentioned in it) -- and was pleasantly surprised. Yahoo
seems to be doing much better job than Google for non-quoted search requests.

------
catzaa
We had the exact same discussion on reddit:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s6p2/google_is...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s6p2/google_is_turning_into_cuil_since_when_did_quotes/)

It is starting to get incredibly difficult to do specific searches (such as
for documentation). It also seems that SEO have become incredibly successful
in gaming Google.

It would actually be good if there were some competition.

------
petervandijck
I tried Bing the other day out of curiosity, and the results where
_incredibly_ dissapointing compared to Google's.

~~~
garply
Did you try their image search or product search? I've almost completely
dropped those two parts of Google due to Bing.

~~~
trafficlight
I definitely agree with the image search. It's lightyears ahead of Google.

------
mattlanger
I've actually noticed the inverse problem with some non-tech-related searches.
Politics is a fine example: try and find an article about a 2002 House vote on
Social Security and there's no chance you'll find it; the results are all
present day.

Strange that with regard to current events the web seems to have little
historical memory, and yet with regard to current technology it has too much.

~~~
Perceval
Google News has an archive search that is useful for that type of query.

[http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=2002+house+vote+socia...](http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=2002+house+vote+social+security)

------
mojonixon
The autocorrect is maddening. I've been researching Riak recently. It's new so
there isn't a lot available. Paired with another search term I frequently get
results only for "risk." Let me know if I might have made a typo, but don't
assume I'm an idiot and do something different than what I told you to do.

Dropping keywords also annoys me. If the keywords don't exist then tell me
that so I can adjust my search. Don't give me a long list of results that I
have to click through before realizing you screwed up the search.

The only reason the google search bar is still my default is because I use it
as a quick and easy calculator.

~~~
aarongough
If you're using a Mac you might find it interesting to know that the spotlight
search bar can be used as a calculator almost exactly the same way as Google
can... Unfortunately it can't do conversions (at least not on Leopard). Also,
the shortcut for spotlight is CMD + Space.

------
webwright
Absolutely-- especially when you drift out of the world of technology. Google
is based on the "linkerati" (hat tip to SEOmoz) - geeks and bloggers who link
to stuff aggressively. That works great in the worlds where people link
(social media) but poorly if you're searching for non-geeky stuff.

I've been doing home remodeling a bit lately, and it's clear to me that there
are NO home remodeling linkerati. But there are plenty of SEO guys out there
and it only takes a few low quality links to top a lot of searches. So search
for home remodeling stuff and you see plenty of adsense spam.

------
utnick
its more the internet has gotten worse I think

They should drop yahoo answers, any site with an affiliate link, and any of
the internet marketer sites ( like ezinearticles.com ) from their index

~~~
tocomment
that's funny, I was about to suggest dropping Yahoo answers too.

My friend had an idea to make search rankings go by the number of ads on a
page, the less ads the higher the ranking. I guess Google would never do that
because of their adsense program.

------
codyrobbins
See also the discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803201>.

------
qeorge
Not overall, but I have found Google frustrating for things that are very
recent. For instance I wanted to watch Obama's speech to the schoolkids on
YouTube (the day after he'd given it), but the only videos Google would bring
back were from his race speech in Philadelphia. I tried all the operators and
keywords I could think of, and couldn't get what I wanted.

FWIW, Bing nailed it on the first query.

------
rg
It's eye-opening to try "Blind Search", which submits your query to Google,
Yahoo!, and Bing simultaneously, and displays to you the three sets of results
without (at first) identifying which is which:

<http://blindsearch.fejus.com/>

I was amazed to discover that I was consistently choosing the blind results
from Yahoo! as best for my own searches.

~~~
decadentcactus
First two attempts I picked Yahoo and Bing, heh.

------
jrockway
I think you picked two bad terms. "Linux asynchronous IO" has meaning more
than just "IO under Linux that's not blocking". That's what most pages using
those terms are referring to, so it makes sense that that's what Google would
give you.

"Hashmap", the term you searched for, is a term popularized by the Java world;
I think most C programmers still call them "hashtables". (Hash map is a better
term, as many excellent map implementations aren't actually based on hashes;
see "Judy" for example.) A search for "C concurrent hashtable" gave me a lot
of useful results. (You are also suffering from C's lack of a coherent
community here. Lots of people write this sort of thing, but few think to
share it. Hence, not many search results.)

------
stbaker
Hi, My name is Steve Baker and I'm a Software Engineer in our search quality
team here at Google. We take these types of complaints seriously and use them
to debug the problem/brainstorm solutions.

For those of you who have been forced to use + or quotes to get google to
return what you want, we would love if you would post the specific example
queries on this thread. (Some people did, but a few of the complaints were
vague.) Also, in general you can click the 'Dissatisfied? Help us improve'
link in the footer of google search results pages to report problems. We check
those out, but if you wanted to include the word "hackernews" in the info you
submit, that would let us see all your reports easily.

------
jsz0
I think the overall signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet has simply taken a
big dive since the advent of blogging. I'm sick of seeing the mindless
duplication of content in search results from a re-blogger who copy & pastes a
summary and link. It's frustrating because there's no easy way to spot it
until you've actually clicked the link. Once you see it enough times you can
spot the duplication on the Google search summary and skip it. The risk is you
might miss the 1% of people who can be bothered to spend a few minutes to add
some useful information.

One thing I have noticed is YouTube's search is dreadful. It's embarrassing
for a company like Google to not offer an adequate search engine on their own
site. The grace period of the YouTube purchase is long over. I shouldn't have
to retype my search 5 different ways to find what I'm looking for. These days
I've just given up and search for simple terms and look through 10 pages of
results or try related videos until I find what I'm looking for. Not super
impressed with Gmail's search functions either. My mailbox is mirrored on
Gmail and my local mail client (Apple Mail) Mail will almost always find what
I want when Gmail gets confused. Apple isn't even a search company. Google can
do a lot better.

------
frig
It's google's success undermining the assumptions behind pagerank (!) leading
it to perform less well.

Before google got so effective people put more work into maintaining
collections of links to other sites; hand-curated omnibus directories like
yahoo and dmoz or narrower fields.

As search became better this was increasingly a poor use of time; you could,
after all, just go and google stuff to find it again, so why bother
maintaining a hand-curated set of favorite links.

A consequence of this is that link-actions-taken-for-reasons-consistent-with-
pagerank's-assumptions dropped, and reducing the signal-to-noise ratio insofar
as pagerank is concerned; similarly link-actions-taken-for-reasons-contrary-
to-pagerank's-assumptions increased (SEO), further dropping the signal-noise
ratio.

Even extremely robust SEO-detection techniques can only cut away the increase
in noise; now that people are less incentivized to publicly post high-quality
hand-curated link collections there's less for the algorithm to go on.

This is why there's talk of twitter and fb vis-a-vis search; twitter and fb
are where the info the search engines need currently lives.

(!) I know they use additional techniques these days but whatever they're
throwing into the mix doesn't seem to be counteracting the overall utility
decay.

------
maxklein
I wish there were a search engine that was not optimized for the mass-market,
but weighs technical oriented stuff a bit higher. So if I search iPhone view,
I do not get results like "View all iphone features" but something related to
the iphone uiview.

I think in future search engines should lean a particular way depending on
your profession - "Google for Medical Personell", "Google for Architects",
"Google for Programmers".

------
wicknicks
In my opinion, information can never be retrieved from a single source. It
always pieced together from different sources by the person with a task at
hand. Google is a tool which can let you jump to different pages quickly and
let you develop insights into the data they offer and put together your own
judgment. Most search engines used to rely on token matching semantics to
retrieve results. This has widely changed in the last few years. The golden
hammer today is user-data. Google receives millions of clicks a second. With
this, it tones its indexes and cached results to provide "better results". So
if many people think Wikipedia is their best answer for "mashed potatoes", you
probably also do.

I guess a single keyword search is not going to get anything sensible out. The
answer lies in being able to interact with such systems and get what you want.
Solving the search/retrieval with a single query is a very hard problem as it
depends on the context of the user. Try searching for the word "Execute". Does
it show pictures of a person being hung or a how-to for the first hello world
program in a terminal?

------
scootklein
tech has always been hard for me, even with plusses and quotes. searches like
"uboot arm cross-compile error xyz" always turned up miles of mailing lists
that never amounted to anything.

on a similar note - [http://guillaume-nargeot.blogspot.com/2009/08/think-
twice-be...](http://guillaume-nargeot.blogspot.com/2009/08/think-twice-before-
naming-your-new_21.html) (probably saw this on HN)

------
Edog
There seems to be a consensus that SEO is distorting Google search. I think I
can refine that a bit. It appears that Google is using a "don't feed the
trolls" strategy in response to link spam. Here's my evidence:

"The Modbookish" is an inconsequential six member Ning social network, but
doing a Google search on "Modbookish" is interesting. There are the annoying
'Google thinks you are stupid' hits like the site in which there is a sentence
ending with "mod" followed by a sentence beginning with "Bookish". The
remaining results are sites that link to the Modbookish. However, the
Modbookish itself is NOT in the results. As Google ads are on the site, there
is no doubt that the Google bot visited it shortly after it went online.
Nonetheless, Google has refused to put the site into its web index for a
couple months now. Clearly, (and not without cause), it is assuming that the
pages that link to the site are link spam. It is probably waiting for some
semi-authoritative link to appear before it indexes it.

So, why is this bad? It undermines Google search purpose: to provide the most
relevant results. When Google got started, I recall that when Sergey or Larry
were asked why Google search was better they often offered the Harvard
example. If one enters the search term "Harvard" with no other terms into a
web search box, there is really only one reasonable search result: the Harvard
University website. However, in the search engines of the time, the university
often ended up on page five or six. On Google, it was search result number
one. By the same token, if you enter "Modbookish" (no spaces) there is only
one reasonable result, and Google doesn't offer it. In contrast, both Duck-
Duck-Go and Yahoo list it in the first spot.

Why is this really bad? Many (Most?) websites do not do their own site
indexing; they let Google do it for them. Clearly if Google refuses to index a
certain important but only occasionally referenced page, that is a problem.

------
cheriot
Can't your problem be solved by clicking the 'Web options' link on google's
search results page and selecting 'past year'?

[http://www.google.com/search?q=linux%20asynchronous%20io&...](http://www.google.com/search?q=linux%20asynchronous%20io&hl=en&tbo=1&output=search&tbs=qdr:y)

------
ksmarshall
I think it's hard with a generic search page to get good results. Like other
people commented if it appears in Wikipedia, MySpace, or Facebook those
results will be first almost everytime. I built a page in javascript
(<http://www.bygsearch.com/>) to aggregate & combine the results from Yahoo,
Bing and Google which is sometimes better because of the quirks in each search
engine. I was going to add some specific search verticals like /programming or
/travel and combine results from different sources. Like maybe use github and
google code in programming and combine with certain sites like stackoverflow
while specifically blocking any result from experts exchange or a list of
other crappy forums.

------
richardw
No opinion overall, but here are a couple tips:

'Linux async io' -> select 'show options' and then 1-year view on the LHS.

Sadly for the concurrent hashmap I got to 'concurrent hashmap "c" -java', then
saw this very discussion page at #3 and I'm in an infinite loop until further
notice.

~~~
richardw
Also, go to stackoverflow and ask about the concurrent hashmap. Someone will
be very happy to help you out. After that, you'll find it on Google :)

------
timcederman
Yes. It's changed a lot recently, to the point that I made a whingey blog post
about it:

[http://www.cederman.com/2009/09/google-continues-to-
disappoi...](http://www.cederman.com/2009/09/google-continues-to-disappoint-
in-search-quality/)

~~~
MattCutts
Hey Tim, your blog post mentioned the [recency microsoft word misspelled]
query. The way I normally check if a word is valid is just do a query for the
word, e.g. [recency]. In the top right we show the phrase "Results 1 - 10 of
about 2,910,000 for recency" and "recency" will be a hyperlink to a dictionary
definition if we recognize that as a valid dictionary word. Looking at the
number of results is a good signal too.

Your "Red Room" query is hard in a couple ways. First, it looks like that root
page used to have the words on the page: "The Red Room Doors open 6pm $18 Pre-
Booked" And it's also tough because it looks like the name changed to the "2nd
Degree Bar & Grill" at some point. The fact that you can type [red room] and
get a suggestion for [red room st. lucia] is actually pretty helpful in my
book because it leads you to the answer that the name changed.

~~~
timcederman
Hey Matt -- thanks for investigating and replying, much appreciated.

I actually did a search on "recency" first, and Google didn't correct me and
the first hits were a couple of dictionary entries, which is why I searched
for the longer query. I don't know why, but I guess I figured there might be a
blog post perhaps complaining about Word lacking common dictionary words and
marking them as misspelled. In hindsight, including "recency" in the query was
silly, but I'd prefer to get nothing back instead of Google assuming I want
something else, which is the issue I was trying to highlight.

I agree that the suggestion of "red room st lucia" is a good one, and it
helped me find what I was looking for! However the problem I was trying to
show was Google's new approach at suggesting a first hit without search terms
you've entered. As another example, I was trying to find my old (and
embarrassing!) Geocities page recently, so I searched for [tim cederman
geocities] and the first hit was my own blog.

------
FredSource
Simple question - simple answer: quality of results is degraded for me (both
technical and educational - I am a work in progress home handyman).

In my experience Google has not kept up with the assault of companies trying
to beat its algorithms!

------
galactus
Yes. I blame SEO :-(.

------
est
[http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6a1d6250e26e9e48&hl=en)

Let me guess:

1\. Google's Pagerank patent is about to expire, and they have to make
something new?

2\. New ranking algorithm adjustment to compete with Bing but failed?

And similar discussions on reddit:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9qro1/>

<http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s6p2/>

~~~
robk
The pagerank patent isn't really relevant anymore as the search algorithm has
so many more components and variants now. Pagerank as it is defined is a much
smaller signal than people think.

------
lssndrdn
I agree with the points made by others here, about the quality of links being
degraded in recent times, lots of SEO in lots of websites that are meant to
just play with pagerank, and a general crowding of results with old and
irrelevant stuff.

I find myself alternating between google and bing these days, for some
technical searches sometimes bing works better (especially - and
unsurprisingly - for Microsoft-related technologies).

Some competition from bing may lead us to a better google (just like
competition from apple made microsoft's new OS better).

------
tamas
I have always had the habit of quickly editing the query if the top 5 results
aren't what I was looking for, up to the point where I don't even really think
about it, just adding some more keywords or sprinking a couple pluses, minuses
or quotes. So I can't really tell if it has deteriorated in the past years.

However, I do think it could be possible that the pagerank algorithm does not
scales good enough for the growth of Web pages, and especially with the "SEOs"
out there always trying to come up with new ways to game the system.

------
deyan
In my experience, Yahoo really excels in image search and whenever there are
structural changes made to websites (for some reason, Google doesn't really
handle moved websites / pages well - there was even an article about that a
few months back). But overall, there is around 90% overlap between the major
search engines as demonstrated by multiple studies.

That being said, I do feel often like Google's search result quality is
decreasing. Bias due to using it exclusively perhaps?

------
chaosprophet
This may be true when you are searching for blog posts or articles, but when
searching for code examples, I find that usually Google gives the best
results. Also I have noticed that over time, these results have been getting
more accurate. this maybe either due to the fact that the number of "code
blogs" may have increased, or that Google's search tech maybe getting better.
Personally I'm inclined to believe the former.

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nitrogen
Originally, a Google search for some Linux-related terminology would lead to
an LKML post or white paper where that technology was explained. Now, most of
my searches lead to dozens of user-oriented self-help forums where the
questions are never answered. Finding information on actual development now
requires knowing which sites/lists to search (like LKML, alsa-devel, kernel
subsystem maintainer sites, etc.).

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chanux
Occured to me several times.

And it's duckduckgo.com that helped me.

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fjabre
Hate to disagree with everyone here but I haven't noticed much of a change.
For me, Google is still the best search out there by a long shot.

My behavior has changed slightly though. Increasingly I'm using twitter,
reddit, delicious, & hacker news to search and browse for content. Google site
search for Hacker news has also come in handy.

~~~
print
I agree with your second thought. delicious' general search and multi-tag
search (<http://delicious.com/tag/term1+term2+term3>) is so much more useful
because it's essentially edited by humans.

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10ren
So, was Yahoo - or any other search engine - any better? You didn't say how
good Yahoo was for your two examples.

It's possible that Google doesn't give you perfect results, merely the best of
a bad lot. If so, it suggests the problem is the web, not the search of it.

And the web certainly has changed.

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vital101
I feel that your Google search results are only as good as your query. Sure my
results are polluted with some sites that have invested heavily in SEO, but I
usually can filter those out by tweaking the query a bit more.

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holdenc
Unfortunately yes. Most result sites are built solely to drive search traffic.

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jeroen
vldtr is now a couple of months old. Google has about 22 pages in their index,
Bing 8.

[http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=site%3Avldt...](http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=site%3Avldtr.com)
<http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Avldtr.com>

As long as the Google has the most up to date index there is no good
alternative for me.

You mention trying Yahoo. Did it give you better results?

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simonw
Where did you get that weird google.com/#hl... link from? It broke in my
browser (the redirect from google.com didn't take it in to account when it
bounced me to google.co.uk), but I've not seen URLs like that for google.com
before.

~~~
jeroen
It's a normal Google url since Google started using ajax. I also get it when I
go to google.co.uk and search for something.

See also here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=464393>

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kvs
Yes. And the evidence is I find my self going to page 2 or 3 to find what I
wanted and sometimes Bing!

~~~
thetrumanshow
There is actually a perverse incentive for Google to do this since they get
another chance to show you more ads. I'm not saying they optimize for this
case, but the incentives are there that might encourage this kind of behavior.

Edit: redundancy

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elblanco
I think it's also a function of people trying to game how Google's engine
operates.

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pasbesoin
In lieu of having a poll, I'll say in a comment: Yes, most definitely.

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c00p3r
Yes, I feel. And the so-called black SEO is the cause. All those sites with
keywords in hostnames spoils the result.

