Ask HN: Over the years, has Google Search gotten better or worse (for you)? - charlesism
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phendrenad2
It’s gotten better at guessing what I want when I throw a bunch of seemingly
random words in (I.E. “song this arms race”), but it’s gotten much much worse
at string literal searches, and fuzzy searches (string literal searches where
you’re a relatively small levenstein distance from the actual string.

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charlesism
I've had it with Google Search. It drives me up the wall these days.

If I'm on a mobile device, sometimes the entire page will be adverts styled to
look like results. Sometimes it will just perform an alternate search (if
there's no matches, show me an empty page!)

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.

At this point, there are too many gotchas for me. I would gladly revert to
Google the [+"way it was" +years +ago] I already know the terms that will show
me what I want. Yes, I know about "Verbatim search" to which I constantly have
to toggle and inexplicably breaks other features. Google just makes me jump
through hoops now.

