
Ask HN: Search engines as good as “old Google” for finding information? - _-___________-_
Several years ago, it was possible to use Google to find up-to-date topical information even from obscure sources, using a general search query.<p>For example, you could set a Google alert for, say, &quot;embedded linux&quot; and get a wide variety of good results. Now if you set the same alert, you mostly get spam results (many of which have been removed from the index by the time you click on them), and a surprisingly small amount of results overall even though a general query should give large numbers of results. The non-spam results you get are always commercial, no blog posts, mailing lists, etc.<p>I refer to Google Alerts as an example, but searching manually on Google gives the same impression. This makes Google mostly useless for finding actual information on a general search query, as opposed to advertisements and websites that function as advertisements.<p>Are there any search engines which are as good as &quot;old Google&quot; for actually finding recently-published _information_ when given a general search query? I mean blog posts, mailing list posts, and the like, not the Wikipedia article for the query.<p>I&#x27;ve tried DDG, Qwant and Bing and they don&#x27;t seem to be improvements.
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rahulchhabra07
I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks.

The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have
hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on
relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results
favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic
by searching on Google anymore. It's just surface-level knowledge that I get
from competing websites who just want to make money off pageviews.

It kills my curiosity and intent with fake knowledge and bad experience. I
need something better.

However, it will be interesting to figure the heuristics to deliver better
quality search results today. When Google started, it had a breakthrough
algorithm - to rank page results based on number of pages linking to it. Which
is completely meritocratic as long as people don't game for higher rankings.

A new breakthrough heuristic today will look something totally different, just
as meritocratic and possibly resistant to gaming.

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corporateslave5
I think the web has changed, that kind of information is no longer surfaceable
within the current paradigm of search engines. SEO won, and I think in the
short term we will just see walled garden websites create a monopoly on page
views. In the long run, someone somewhere will solve this problem, probably
will happen once nlp can understand language.

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bfoks
I've found using Reddit (e.g site:reddit.com _QUESTION_) or
[https://hn.algolia.com/](https://hn.algolia.com/) to search for valuable
articles etc.

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taprun
I just built an MVP for a search engine that lets you use a whitelist or a
blacklist for your searches. [https://cowjar.com](https://cowjar.com)

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exlurker
I feel you. And I hope someone, somewhere is working on a search engine for
personal websites only...

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FranciscusG
Yandex.

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wprapido
Yandex, DuckDuckGo, Bing

