
Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse? - alan_wade
Past few days(weeks?) I find myself more and more frustrated with google search. It seems to frequently omit the most important keywords I&#x27;m typing. I constantly have to click &quot;Must include &#x27;Keyword&#x27;&quot;, because more than half the links on the first page miss it, even if it&#x27;s the first one out of 3 words in my query.<p>I&#x27;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.
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einr
It feels like the philosophy has become "return lots of results at any cost".

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".

~~~
icebraining
They have a Verbatim mode which doesn't do that (as much?), but you have to
click on Tools → All Results → Verbatim every time.

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")
    

This doesn't invalidate the overall point, of course, it's just a personal
tip.

~~~
einr
Yeah, I used to have verbatim mode as a separate and default search provider
in Firefox, but I had to stop using it as my default -- I find sometimes it's
just too verbatim and it's like using Altavista in 1996 all over again.

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.

~~~
garyclarke27
Yes Good Point - I've noticed many more missing terms in the past few weeks.
Extremely irritating - Problem is Verbatim mode is buried and cannot be
defaulted and does not work with Time Filter, Time Filter is often essential
for useful searches. More control for advanced users is settings is required,
Mobile first layout still annoys me on Safari iPad, so much so that, I have to
iCab Browser - lets you change the user agent and lots of useful options such
as Text Sizes

------
guhcampos
What really, really bugs me is what they did with the image search at some
point.

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 =[

~~~
EForEndeavour
I see that particular un-feature as a consequence of undue focus on ML that
automatically generates image tags. While it's impressive for a system to be
able to auto-tag billions of images at high accuracy, these generic tags are
almost always useless as search terms.

------
Timucin
I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo, so didn't notice that but
I noticed something similar on YouTube.

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.

~~~
pure-awesome
Is DuckDuckGo good now? When I first tried it out a couple of years back, I
found it didn't give me enough (relevant) results on my searches, so I stayed
with Google.

I assume it must have improved in that time; maybe I should try it again.

~~~
DrAwdeOccarim
It's OK. It works well for me for common things that are easy to find.
Restaurants, wiki entries, etc. But for example a new paper published today in
Nature? Even searching for the whole title in quotes with DDG will not return
it. Gotta go to Google for that.

~~~
aembleton
DDG index is not as fresh as Google's. That and local, location specific
searches are what I use Google for these days.

------
keiferski
The "must include" functionality makes _zero_ sense to me and I'm dumbfounded
as to why it was ever added. If I didn't want my results to include a
particular word, I _wouldn 't have included it in the search._ Boggles my mind
how Google could mess up something so simple.

~~~
samwhiteUK
I'm dumbfounded as to how you don't see the usefulness of this feature.
Sometimes there exists more than one word for a situation, and you might miss
a forum thread, for example, that is relevant to you, but you're saying to
Google "only use these exact words" and not accounting for differences in
dialect etc

~~~
DanBC
I search for "suicide" (for my work) very often. It _fucking sucks_ that
Google seems to think "death", "died", "murdered" etc are all valid synonyms.
It means that for every single search I do I need to do extra work.

I miss the days of +forced +terms.

~~~
eudora
Surely using quotes around the term does the trick?

------
Jedi72
It seems only a matter of time until Google is just an interactive yellow
pages. Why would you spend millions trying to index peoples personal blogs
etc. when companies will pay thousands for the spot in the results and give
you the link to put up? All they need to do is maintain their position as the
default internet portal.

~~~
quickthrower2
People advertise on Google because of the massive audience, and that audience
exists because of quality organic search results. They are not going to mess
with that.

------
charlesism
It's trash now. I noticed this a few months back:

    
    
        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.
    

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18266966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18266966)

------
brazzledazzle
I think Google is focusing on the friendlier natural “human” queries. I
noticed this some time ago when I’d ask it in a “lazy” way because I’m tired
or distracted. E.g. “What day is Mother’s Day?”, or “What time is it in
London?” I’ve noticed it seems to be more and more optimized for this sort of
query as time goes on, to the point that I use the quote modifiers in many
(most?) of my searches and the other modifiers more frequently than I used to.

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.

~~~
pure-awesome
I remember the days when I had to include "AND" and "OR" between words in the
queries.

~~~
brazzledazzle
Nice! I remember when they finally added spellcheck. Probably a (welcome)
contributor to my decreased ability to remember how to spell many words.

------
saluki
It feels like maybe Google had a changing of the guard and a new batch of
engineers are making decisions and missed out on a transfer of knowledge from
the previous engineers with both search and SEO.

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.

~~~
quickthrower2
Don’t forget that the web is changing. There is more junk produced every day
and Google needs to combat search engine spam and blackhat practices. This
means changes and not seeing search results you are used to.

~~~
saluki
Double True, but I'm expecting to start seeing thousands of keywords in the
footer of sites white text on a white background. It's like SEO is coming full
circle. Just surprised Google is allowing ancient SEO tricks to work again.

------
Yetanfou
A good solution to all this $search_engine misery is to use something like
Searx [1] as an in-between. This gets rid of most of the profiling -
especially when using a shared instance run by someone you trust (to avoid
being profiled by the Searx instance, self-host and have family members and
friends use it) - and gives results from a whole host of search engines.
Configure all your devices to use that instance and you no longer have to cope
with any single $search_engine's 'new and improved' algorithms, instead being
treated to a search salad with ingredients of your own choosing.

[1] [https://github.com/asciimoo/searx](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx)

------
whateveracct
Sounds like someone in Google had a successful feature launch :) good for them
on delivering something to production!

------
ur-whale
The quality has indeed declined drastically for pointed technical queries
versus "where's the nearest hot dog stand" type queries.

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.

------
enz
I have the same feeling, I have to click "must include keyword..." to get
better results. I thought it was because I use google.co.jp since I moved to
Japan a few weeks ago, so I was guessing Google tried too hard to correlate
the results with my new geographical area. It seems I'm not the only one.

------
s9w
Not sure if it was in the last weeks.. I would say in the last months. But
google searches without verbatim mode are increasingly useless.

------
synesso
Now you mention it, yes. I've been seeing this for a few weeks. It seems often
the most salient word in my search phrase is ignored.

------
EGKW
Totally! Actually not 'worse' as such, but search results are more centered
around earnings, rather than around providing information. You can't blame
them for that, but by shifting focus they can expect a shift in public too.

------
apatters
I commented on a different post a few days ago with my thoughts about why this
is happening, in my opinion it is a problem that has evolved over several
years:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19111306](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.

------
hallihax
I agree. Google has consistently gotten worse imo - I believe the general move
towards third-party 'trust' verifiers, and Google's obsession with 'relevance'
(as in, relevance to _me_ ) has destroyed the entire point of a search engine.
I rarely use Google these days except to quickly re-find something I
discovered somewhere else. I never really use it for finding information these
days - just getting a link to something I already know exists. If I had a
better way to search my bookmarks, I'd probably use that instead.

------
Jefff8
Similar. I can't quantify, but I seem to be getting less useful results,
certainly on the first page, and often beyond. I'm not sure it's not just
perception though because I've not kept any log and it's also possible there
are genuinely no matches to the searches I've been doing.

~~~
twic
Also similar. What do we mean by "recent"? I feel like it got a lot worse a
year or two ago, and has been consistently bad since then.

------
r_singh
This question has been on my mind too and I'm glad someone thought of asking
on HN.

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.

------
thiago_fm
Just search using "". For me it didn't change, as the way I search by using
"", + etc since I started googling didn't change and it is even obvious in
some ways that maybe I could just ddg all the way.

------
x38iq84n
I have had the same feeling for months and not limited to Google, sadly DDG
suffers from the same. Search result quality has been getting worse and my
search queries contain more and more quotes just to get back to a previous
level. What I miss is a tick box for "power users" to disable spelling
suggestions, search terms omission and similar "features".

------
pi-victor
I use DDG but when i wanted better results i used google. It gets harder to
differentiate, they both miss the point.

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.

------
brudgers
It's just worse in different ways (and better in different ways as well). As
Google's index grows it shards across more machines. The odds that latency
will affect the result of a particular query increase simply because more
machines and network connections are involved. So there's caching.

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.

------
xorand
Google left for another dimension and they needed all their computing power
for that, so they resorted to this trick. The results we see are from a NN
previously trained on the real google, which is now hosted by a computer in
the janitor office.

------
fergie
It definitely did. As a complete outsider (albeit one who has done a bit of
contract work at Google a few years ago), it seems that they are going all in
on ML-driven personalisation, rather than an "objective best match" approach.

------
untangle
Google search has gotten worse and DuckDuckGo has simultaneously gotten
better! I have (again) been using DDG for the past few weeks and I type "!g"
once a day at most. Very exciting if this seeming trend holds.

------
jim-jim-jim
Glad I'm not alone. It's so bad I'm actually _using_ DuckDuckGo these days,
instead of instinctively typing in g! before all my queries like I usually do.

------
anc84
Absolutely it got even worse in the past few weeks after an earlier, perceived
drop a couple of months ago.

------
shash7
I've noticed a lot of crappy youtube videos being inserted in the search
results. These videos are far from relevant from the search query.

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.

------
segmondy
I had an issue this morning where I wanted to download some youtube videos for
offline viewing and they were already deleted. I used google to try to find
other copies and it found nothing. I used bing and was able to find all
copies.

------
qnsi
Does anyone have suggestions how to find good tutorials/blogposts? I am
interested in startup world, but when I search for things like "how to find
startups ideas" I am tackled with lots and lots of content marketing, or poor
medium posts.

(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)

------
BidCoins
Interestingly enough, I was JUST today thinking to myself, has google auto-
suggest been consistently degrading or is it just me?! Now my thinking is
there is some over-engineering going on (for lack of better articulation) as
type auto-suggest as well as speech-to-text are just plain "off base" \+ your
observation of search results, I'm sure they're all on a common, core
"function" ; )

------
nullandvoid
I have encountered this with YouTube which prefers to offer me garbage results
back rather than searching all my keywords. E.g I was searching on a react
topic and all I got back was 'x reacts to this'. It looks like it weighed the
word 'react' much heavier than the others even though the other words were
essential to getting a useful result..

------
luord
Indeed, that's one obnoxious "feature" that has become omnipresent (as in in
every search) lately.

------
belltaco
It seems to be weighting recent web pages a lot more since a year or more.
It's annoying to search something and get 10 pages of recent pages rather than
something from a year ago mixed in somewhere.

------
buboard
I am noticing an effect of "my searches don't get better as i add and change
keywords". Becoming more specific has become difficult. thankfully there are
alternatives

------
growlist
For me it's been getting consistently worse for years, not weeks or months. Is
there an 'exact search terms only' search engine out there?

------
dennisgorelik
Several days ago Google Search slowed down significantly for some of the
queries I was making.

Several search queries took 2-4 seconds to return results.

------
e9
pretty much garbage at this point, I honestly don't know what to do anymore. I
tried Duck Duck Go and Start Pages but they are not as good. I am testing
Yandex, so far it's really good and performs like old Google but I don't know
what are the implications of me using Russian search engine :/

------
qbaqbaqba
Mobile searches are even worse. First page is occupied with links to search
within huge portals. Nothing relevant.

------
dfgert
Are there any alternatives? I am ok with indie, slow, paid, not-super-accurate
options.

------
operatorequals
What's the business model of it anyway? Is it providing you good search
results?

~~~
SquareWheel
Search's business model is showing adverts at the top of the page.

~~~
abbiya
and knowing about everything on web

------
kowdermeister
No, good as always :) But seriously, yesterday I wanted to deploy my beta to a
fresh server install and I did like 10 google searches of various server and
tool issues. I got it all resolved and the beta is running but I didn't stop
at how bad these results are.

What are you searching for when you see a decrease in quality?

------
trumped
Since Google+ is pretty much gone, now is the time to bring back the +
operator.

------
paulcole
Can you give a single example?

