
Ask HN: Is Web Search Broken? - firatcan
These days I have been having hard time to find great content on search, too many irrelevant search results popping up whenever I searched for some subject I want to learn.<p>Do you think it&#x27;s because of search or SEO pumped content? Maybe both?
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gas9S9zw3P9c
For me, yes. These days, pretty much all my searches are prefixed with
specific domains, such as `site:news.ycombinator.com`. It's a small whitelist
of domains like, reddit, HN, stackoverflow, twitter, wikipedia, etc.

If I don't do this, I usually don't get what I'm looking for. Instead, I'm
overwhelmed by low-quality self-branding content on Medium, dev.to,
towardsdatascience, Quora, etc. There are too many of these now.

Overall, my search has shifted to largely social sites, especially semi-
anonymous ones like HN/reddit. The upvoted content (and comments) I find there
tends to be miles better than anything Google surfaces on their first page.
This has definitely changed over the recent years, it used to not be like
this.

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firatcan
Thanks for your answer. Yeah, I felt like the same way. There are too many SEO
pumped content. These days, I am starting check until 4th page of Google.
Before I only need to go 3rd search result.

I am only talking about content by the way, I still find what I am looking for
if I am searching something else

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Nicksil
My personal experience has lead me to believe yes, it's broken. Or at least
severely damaged. Thanks in large part to the SEO/marketing awfulness.

A week or so ago I noticed I've begun to adapt to this poor state of search
results by almost immediately navigating to the second "page" and beyond. Not
all that long ago, searching beyond the "first page" was almost taboo.
Nowadays it's become the norm for me.

~~~
firatcan
I started searching at my favorite sites first. For instance, If I am looking
some resource for my startup, most of the time I first check out YC, a16z,
first round or other reliable sites first.

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CM30
Yes, in both cases.

Web search via search engines is filled with low quality content, rehashed
stuff from mainstream media outlets and bad attempts at trying to 'guess' what
the user wants rather than showing them what they're actually looking for.

And on site search makes Google search look like perfection by comparison.
Trying to search a social media site, internet forum, blog or wiki is often a
complete nightmare, and gets you nothing close to what you actually want to
find. If your ideal page doesn't come up via auto suggest, then trying to find
it is probably going to be a miserable experience.

