
Google as a search engine is becoming useless - Hard_Space
http://www.coalpha.org/Google-as-a-search-engine-is-becoming-useless-td7576886.html
======
cotillion
I didn't realize quite how bad it's become until I recently set up a small
static site for a relatives two person business.

They had no web presence and a very unique name. The site quickly became the
first result for a search on the company name in Bing and DDG. On Google its
on page 3, behind all the auto generated business directories filled with
google ads. Google has picked up all the Schema.org information from the site
and indexed that and is using it in Google Maps.

My conclusion is that Google now gathers information for internal use. But
only wants to share that information when it gets paid for it with ad views.

~~~
MrLeap
I've been using the internet since the mid 90's, and google since the early
00's.

Google's early minimalism and result quality made me _fanatically_ loyal. Even
when google started doing some unromantic things, I stayed the course. The
results were just _so good_. I scoffed at bing. Pshawed at duckduckgo, hussled
an early invite to gmail, thought google wave was the new sliced bread, and
generally viewed anyone who used yahoo as sadly mistaken.

In the last two years I've had so many misfire searches with multiple pages of
spam that I've been driven away. Not at first, it's been a process. My first
mitigation was to start searching by typing "<my query> reddit" that seemed to
up my chances of getting non procedurally generated garbage content
significantly.

This method started showing its cracks too so I gave duckduckgo a try. It's
been better most of the time. Not as good as google use to be, but way better
than google is now. The muscle memory is STILL so deep that about 50% of the
time I still type <g><o><backspace><backspace><d><u><down><enter>.

Yes, I know I could set up my browser to search ddg from the url bar. My
habits were forged decades ago. Besides that, I use lots of different devices,
and I'd rather configure myself than every device.

It's pretty crazy to think the signal/noise ratio has gotten so bad to sway
me. It's not looking good when I prognosticate forward from where we are. The
protocols are still good, maybe some nerds just need to chisel out a fresh
start somehow. I unironically propose we make a web ring.

~~~
basch
To be fair to google its an arms race. They write an algorithm, people try and
game it. If google sits and does nothing, they get worse over time. They are
fighting back, but their strength against bad actors has considerably
weakened. The amount of spam in their results is maddening sometimes.

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zerogvt
"They might be politicized, and of course have a left-oriented gay agenda"
(said for Apple and Amazon). So Apple and Amazon have a _left_ and _gay_
agenda...

Sorry, but I don't think I need to read further after this. Non-sense started
very early. Just another foggy-headed guy glorifying his vile into a freedom
fighting guise. Same with countless other religious fanatics. Logic is out of
the window.

pass

------
notacoward
Factually incorrect (there were other search engines before Google), poorly
formatted, and quite possibly one of the most egotistical un-self-aware things
I've ever read.

"most people, being the mainstream dulltards they are"

Strong words from someone who can't spell.

"algorythm" (twice) ... "migrant crysis" ... "merchantile"

Hypocrisy 1:

"Its a basic logical fallacy, to believe an assertion is true just because
others believe it."

"certainly some other people agree with me on this one"

Hypocrisy 2:

"what are you achieving by shouting a few words without PROVING any of them"

Elitism:

"The masses must NOT rule"

Hate:

"The muslims ... Too bad they suck as well."

And this WTF from one of the responses:

"It seems to me that the DNS Server would have a list of all the web pages
title addresses alongside the number for the site."

CoAlpha seems to be an explicitly reactionary, implicitly racist, incel-
friendly cesspit. Not worth anyone's time to follow a link there.

~~~
Yetanfou
I did not RTFA yet so I do not know whether what you write here is based on
fact or otherwise. What I _do_ notice is that you end your entry with a bunch
of labels - _reactionary_ , _racist_ and _incel_ \- which tend to be used by
people who are guilty of many of the same transgressions as those which you
accuse this _CoAlpha_ site of: _hypocrisy_ , _elitism_ and _hate_. Your
reaction would be more convincing had it not been for that last line, now it
just reads like the pot who is berating the kettle for being black.

    
    
       ...[time passes]...
    

RTFA, the author named 'purpleduck' has diarrhoea of the typewriter and could
have said what he wanted in a few lines instead of a number of pages: Google
has jumped the shark when it comes to search. The rest is just drivel and as
such this link was nor worthy of its position on the front page.

~~~
notacoward
> tend to be used

Not sure if that's projection or whataboutism, but I also don't give a damn.
The site identifies _itself_ as reactionary. It's right there in the name.
Likewise, many of its members identify themselves as incels, and the name
"CoAlpha" is a reference to the same ideological complex. The racism, while
not admitted, is no less obvious. I'm pretty sure anyone reading this exchange
would conclude that _you_ are the one with an unacknowledged agenda in
offering such an aggressive yet truth- and insight-free defense of such tripe.

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or29544
But...uh...has anybody actually read the bullshit that guy was saying in the
posts? Like..."If some enlightened being can, such as myself, he is the first
to accept that others will not get it, but it is only human to be bewildered
and sometimes frustrated by the fact. It is the pain of the enlightened. It is
a life-long struggle to deal with it. ".

What the fuck dude? Does he really think he is the first and only intelligent
person on the planet?

------
devilmoon
Just skimmed through it but the main thesis seems blown out of proportion
IMHO; Google still works very well (read: better than all its competitors),
what bugs me a bit is that it tailors result to my previous history hence if I
look for something that is different from what Google is expecting from me
results won't be _that_ good. There's also to consider the fact that people
have learned how to game the algorithm through SEO techniques and that's not a
problem with Google itself but it something that could be applied to every
search engine (at least with the underlying Information Retrieval theory that
we have now).

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jansan
Remember back in the old days, when there were discussion articles or blog
entries in the top results? Those were the best. Of course, there also was a
lot of garbage, but it was much easier to find the gems. Now the total garbage
and the gems are both hidden. The top results are usually mediocre main stream
crap or purchasing sites.

~~~
pmoriarty
Back in the old days search engines didn't have compete against an entire SEO
industry that's trying to game the system, so the results were much more
useful.

It seems that Google is losing this arms race.

~~~
luckylion
Imho, if Google adopted a "cheat once, get banned" policy, most SEOs would
drop most of their techniques. As it is now, they'll do whatever it takes and
if they catch a penalty, remove the most aggressive things and ask for
reinclusion. Voila, instantly back where they were before the penalty. If
there was a risk to burn the domain for good, that looks very different.

------
bad_user
What a poorly formulated opinion.

If you want to whine and moan about Google’s Search, I’m sure you can do so
around a better article.

------
cameldrv
I recently went to try to find a blog I'd read a couple of months ago on a
site called satcom.guru about the recent 737 problems. I remembered that the
blogger had written about MCAS, AoA vanes, and that he was somehow involved
with satellite antennas. I punched a bunch of keywords into Google and got a
bunch of recent news articles. After 3 pages of those, Google wouldn't give me
any more results, and I hadn't found the page I was looking for. No luck on
DDG either. It was the #2 result for my query on Bing. I can't believe I'm
typing this, but I switched my default search engine to Bing.

~~~
onlydeadheroes
There is an old saying that if you want to see the corpse of your enemy all
you have to do is sit in front of your house and wait. It worked well for
Bing.

------
emrox
I stopped reading after the first sentence

> Before Google, you just had to know the www address of the sites you could
> be interested in.

Before Google there were other search engines. Remember Altavista? Also Yahoo
was a thing to discover new sites.

------
playeren
While the demise of search result quality from Google, is a very relevant
topic to discuss these days, I find it a bit hilarious that we're using this
guy's ramblings as the basis for this debate. It includes gems like:

> Guess the bottom line and the core of my ARISTOCRATIC soul is this: people
> who work are fucking slaves and inferior to the aristocrat.

> Working is worthless. Creating art is superior. I do the latter. Bless me,
> and fuck everyone else. Fuck you. You are below. I am an aristocrat since
> birth, and I wish there were more aristocrats in this proletarian world. The
> middle class are nothing but enhanced proletarians who think the best thing
> in life is having money. THAT is the shit of the world. That. Not
> Trump...most people are the only pronlem in the world, the only thing that
> makes a man of wisdom puke. The only thing that has no interest at all.
> Everything else is good. Even pedophiles, being insane, they are
> interesting. Most people arent, and as such they have no logical reason to
> exist except to create a background on which the interesting sparklws and
> shies. The grotesque thing is that the backdrop, in their solipsism, believe
> they are the protagonists.

I looked hard for signs of sarcasm - none were found. I did however find:

> I want anyone who doesnt think he is a loser to die. He is insane and
> detached from reality.

Entertaining if nothing else.

------
Yuval_Halevi
As for 2018 Google receives over 63,000 searches per second on any given day.
That's the average figure of how many people use Google a day, which
translates into at least 2 trillion searches per year, 3.8 million searches
per minute, 228 million searches per hour, and 5.6 billion searches per day.

People are using Google because it's easy, the results are relevant and get
better and better every year (Google release an update to their algorithm
every few months)

Google doesn't become useless, it just becomes a better version of Google in
early stage

------
onion2k
_Before Google, you just had to know the www address of the sites you could be
interested in._

It was terrible. We only had Excite, AOL, Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista, Hotbot,
Ask Jeeves, and MetaCrawler to choose from.

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jonathanhd
My anecdata: I recently made a vim config, put it on GitHub, made a blog post,
and posted it on Reddit. Googling the project description puts the reddit post
on top with no mention of either of the others. DDG & Bing have the github on
top followed immediately by the blog and reddit posts

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arrakeen
looking at the other threads on this site's forum, this is a very, very bad
site and has no place on hacker news. flagged.

