
Ask HN: What Happened to Search? - bsanr
I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;ve felt it, over the past few years. The slow creep of increasing inaccuracy, dumbed-down filtering parameters, results lists that are impossibly small for the query, and frustratingly focused on high-Alexa-ranking sites. What is happening? It&#x27;s become impossible to find anything of use, let alone what you were looking for, whether you&#x27;re using a general web search like Google or DuckDuckGo, or site-specific searches on reddit, SoundCloud, YouTube, and the like.<p>It wasn&#x27;t like this, 10 years ago. Obscure queries were almost always fruitful, whether you knew what you were looking for or not (and especially if you know <i>exactly</i> what you were looking for). Now, verbatim searches are don&#x27;t work. Booleans are broken. You have the choice of searching through the last day, week, month, or year, or <i>all of recorded digital history</i>; no in-between.<p>Doesn&#x27;t anyone know? Don&#x27;t we have someone in this community who&#x27;s willing to jump under a green screenname and spill? At least give us the dignity of knowing why, after a mere two decades, the opening of humanity&#x27;s knowledgebase to the average person is closing again.
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JoshuaScript
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11175244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11175244)

