Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they have all the same holes in the search results.
Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see something that organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text search (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever).
I feel there is a lot of untapped potential that gets missed by just trying to be a Google search clone.
You mentioned things I hadn't thought of. Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that. It treats its power users like kids, and offers no complex filtering to do things like removing search results that require logins. Librarians love when you come to them to specifically refine your search. Google still has the most useful search, but they've taken away methods to get better results. I remember I was pretty upset when i couldn't search for images by exact dimensions anymore. Bing allows this.
Google's product direction has been inching backwards for a decade.
It's worse than that: Google's power user features used to work reliably and repeatably. Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it.
I've recently noticed that Youtube has a similar feature. If you search for a video, you'll only get a small number of results before Youtube will start showing you "recommendations" which are only somewhat related to your original search. Somewhat ironically, the only way to avoid this is to query via Google (site:youtube.com [term]) where you will get a much larger set of results.
It just seems that raw search is disappearing, and "recommendation engines" are appearing everywhere.
Going backwards and standing still often look the same. I think its both in this case to varying degrees. Google is competing against itself, obvious competitors but also obvious refinements that appear so regardless of actually being implemented. The no-login filter is a refinement that would be useful to many.
There are so many obvious improvements that could be made to gmail but there's no real way to do them as a consumer.
I agree with you but I think the problem is that majority of internet users are casual users who don't care about complex queries. Maybe good business idea would be to make internet search engine which enables complex queries like the one you described. Google was made for masses not for power users.
Google had a "search only forums" filter. I was devastated when they took it away.
You can fake it by searching one forum at a time with "site:whatever.com", but you have to do one at a time and that doesn't help if there are forums you don't know about.
Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.
Shouldn't there be a way to only search multiple forums through some userscript? Only found out about userscript after messing around with an iOS app called HyperWeb.
At least in my limited understanding of userscript's capabilities, you'd still need to explicitly specify the forums you want to search, but I imagine that would solve lots of use cases for search filters.
Sure, in the sense that someone who had their legs broken sucks at running. Compared to yesterdays, Google today has to deal with a whole new level of the entire world trying to game their search. It's easy to fetch good water when the well is clean and no one is trying to actively poison it.
I partially agree with your comment, but it feels like in some/many cases the Google algorithm has large flaws that were not previously there and that (superficially) seem solvable. For example:
* If I search for recipes, the Google algorithm seems to heavily favour recipes with a short novel prepended to them. The “novel” does not have to be particularly relevant to the content - I’ve seen recipes with “novels” that I’m not convinced wasn’t partially algorithmically generated. Every human being I’ve ever spoken to hates this.
* Google will search for what it believes to be alternatives to terms, even when those terms are placed into quotes (which used to prevent this behaviour). This can be very irritating when Google’s alternative terms are incorrect.
Both of these are regressions over earlier behaviour, and don’t seem to have any obvious benefit to them.
> a whole new level of the entire world trying to game their search
I think their #1 problem is their product managers trying to do "something" to add said something to their resume and making the product horrible to use in the process
Examples include:
- Grid view tab switcher in Chrome Android
- Removing dislike count on YouTube
As a xoogler, it was clear when the original search quality folks left and were replaced with people whose goal was to grow the product (and the company) without much care for quality.
Different types of these strategies have been around since before google existed. Hell, even web directories (like early yahoo!) had to deal with spam, early google had to deal with keyword spam. Paid backlinks, spammed comment sections with backlinks, copied content sites as backlink farms, all of this existed at least as early as 2005-ish. For some sites (some of them with legitimate info) the meta keywords tag (even though google stopped using it very early) was the bulk of their size for just this reason.
What has so radically changed the last couple of years to make spam take top spots on the SERP?
Exactly. Google sucks because the internet that we remembered died long ago, hoovered up into social media.
The person passionate about beetles who would have a great website in 2002 now posts 38 post Twitter threads (at best) or Instagram/Facebook posts that are lost forever.
It’s sad as we had this amazing “long tail” effect where a company like Google could set out to organize the worlds information.
Unfortunately the economics drive new behavior, and the next cohort of big web companies sought to monopolize human attention. The more profitable ones like Facebook are masters of psychological manipulation, and the second string cohorts like Reddit who aren’t very smart/manipulative adopt a more hands off approach where undesirable content like porn juices engagement.
Am I the only person on earth who hasn't noticed any decline in Google results that everyone keeps talking about? To me it seems like people conflate the fact that there is now significantly more stuff on the internet (what's the data volume today compared to 2010, 100x? 1000x?) than there was years ago with the performance of search engines.
People say they now have to append "reddit" to their search and they didn't in 2008. Which is obvious because in 2008 there was only reddit and like 3 other sites, now there's dozens of relevant ones.
Yes. There is massively more spam, and they’ve made it do a lot less direct search matching (many results don’t include the actual word that matters for instance)
I’ve noticed more spam and shit sites but I’m not sure if that’s entirely googles fault. There might just be 1000x more spam sites now then a few years ago.
I've also not noticed. But this is the most common topic on HN so I probably had/have different search habits to have missed the wonderful experience of Google 10 years ago.
Google meets my expectations for a search engine but maybe I'm not expecting enough from search?
> (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever).
These are all truly excellent and refreshingly imaginative ideas, in a conversation too often starved of critical thinking (elsewhere in this thread commenters, unable to imagine any alternative at all, are incredulously asking "what would you even replace it with?").
I would just say that search in it's traditional form is valuable too, and highly efficient. Or at least it can be when done well. I think millionshort search results are a good example of what traditional search can be.
Yeah well, that's what you want, and probably a decent couple of power users. And I totally agree.
But here is the thing:
My mom, dad and even my brother, they don't need that. They need the limitations aka borders, the "simplicity", the synchronisation and the search results. They still stick with Facebook, Google and Amazon because it's easy to use and their gate to the Internet, where all the smart people are living and the "future is real". They do not understand the drawbacks or they just don't care.
And I dare to assume that this pictures the vast majority of Internet users.
Good thing there's more of a market than your mom, dad, and even your brother, or alternative search competitors like duckduckgo and others would be completely screwed.
I'm browsing with Firefox on Mac with adblockers, and have some knowledge of what the potential scams are.
Is Google actually helping the average user more than a hypothetical alternative?
Don't know, tricky question to answer, but whatever the answer is it's likely a society wide change, involving regulation and new business models and ethical consumer choices, not just a new search engine.
I've been starting to use kagi for search. I'm still using google by default, but when I get a screen full of ads and clickbait articles I turn to kagi and it's almost always better.
Google is still my default as 9 out of 10 I get the answer I need quickly. Bing does my other 10% where Google provides junk or stale results.... Google Search really is declining. I'm tempted to move my default over to Bing for month or two just to experiment. On the Maps front, I'm really enjoying Apple Maps as it has less junk - I just want a map!!
Untapped potential. exactly. To me the biggest problem isn't the results (even the ads) it's the lack of innovation. The lack of making search an experience and something that generates a value I can store and share.
I've been looking at several of the options talked about here. My favorite so far is Neeva (https://neeva.com) due to their "spaces" concept and how it provides a simple building block I can explore to address many of the use cases I have for search.
Search needs innovation and people trying new things.
> I want to see something that organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text search (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever).
Yes, I would love this. I was recently looking for reviews of a certain woodworking tool. The vast majority of websites googled returned were clearly bot created sites. I came away thinking I wanted a curated list of a few sites actually created by humans.
I really missed those days that I could write URLs I visited frequently on notebook. Unfortunately, we might never be no way back to the good old days. There is literally way too much info on the internet, and thus impossible to index contents manually.
Google works great for most daily tasks software questions, looking for a service/company etc
But when I want to do serious research on things like eczema, diet, backpain, exercise. Google absolutely fails (also Google scholar) I have to buy books, go through Reddit,listen to YouTube lectures etc that point to the correct literature and then you get to know the experts, different opinions etc.
All you find is these generic sites with basic advice which is common knowledge lik WebMD. Not bad, but they dominate the entire search.
I would think a heavy version of Google focused on in depth/experts would be great.
It generally even fails when you are looking for a product. If you don't know certain brand. I have been hunting reasonably priced stainless steel meat grinder(the grinding parts, not the body), but with google due to all SEO spam it feels like impossible task...
Today we have more possibilities to manage that than in the early days. Many things can be automatically generated/crawled/MLed or crowdsourced. Browser extensions can help to categorize almost all important websites.
Data sources like Reddit, Stack Overflow or Wikipedia already have many websites categorized. We just need to combine the data.
I did a few experiments myself trying to drive hierarchies from tag data. It works surprisingly well. There is even some academic work in this direction.
Honestly at this point I don't think bing sucks vs google. Bing has less random junk in SERPS for a lot of searches, and seems less gamed by SEO companies, but it isn't really better enough to make a point of switching my chrome url bar over and breaking my habit of just going to google. If things keep going like they have been I wouldn't be surprised if I switch in the near future though.
I wonder what do you mean by "vastly superior". For search i use Kagi, for a browser i use Firefox. For mail you can use Protonmail or i guess there are other alternatives also. Only thing i miss is Gmail message threading. Other than that nothing else. So i think people are only used to Google, that's all. I don't think it's vastly superior in any area anymore
It would be funny if some site with youtube-style recommendations got popular because that's basically what I believe google is using under the hood already and it would be so easy for them to pivot to that style and then take over all the momentum the recommendation-style site got.
Why would an average user use such service? I was thinking about creating such "internet recommendation engine" so to speak but as my hypothetical project was progressing I realized that it started looking more and more like internet search engine as and when I started adding more advanced features. But looking from costs point of view it is cheaper to create internet recommendation engine than internet search engine.
I see the problem with Google search of today vs Google search of 10 years ago being that the first page of search has already become a "Youtube-style recommendations for websites". It's more like a curated list of "approved content" now.
I think companies have tried, but it simply hasn't worked. Yahoo tried to do a lot of this, and simply failed. Arguably they could have done it better, but I don't think many will have a better shot than them for a while more to come.
I'm going to second that. Since switching off Google a couple years ago I have had fewer and fewer "failed" searches which required me to go back to Google to try the search.
The more people who use Brave Search (they own their own index), the better it will become. And right now I'd say it's orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others.
I made an earnest effort to switch to Brave, but I'm back with Google for almost all searches because 1100ms+ result page loads are simply unworkable here.
Reddit is heavily biased towards new content and you have to know what subreddits to look for to find the interesting stuff. The nice thing with Youtube recommendations (after recent updates) is that it pulls out a lot of older content and it also has a pretty good understanding of contexts and topics, even pretty niche stuff. Plain Google search really has no way of exploring the web in the same way you can just do with Youtube recommendations. Also helps that Youtube is extremely low on spam, you get ads and product placement, but not the bot generated filler that is cluttering up Google search.
How much of that is based on general incompetence, SEO gaming, growing complexity of searches or manipulation (e.g. filtering "disinformation")? Or something else.
This makes it basically unusable for anything that isn't a technical question, for which it is still reasonably good if you restrict to sites where it will likely get a reasonable answer.
If special interest groups aligned with google have a position on what you're searching though, it will simply be spammed outright and any evidence to the contrary either concealed or "fact checks" which consist of minor modifications on the core underlying fact in question spiked with something that is obviously false so that the fact check can say "false" whilst actually the underlying fact in question is not at all false. Even when those special interest groups are right, google is still useless because it will give you such a slanted view of the territory you will be utterly clueless as to what other sides of the debate even exist as anything more than silly strawmen. Most questions in this class people would be better served by just petitioning Blackrock and similar directly and asking them what they should think.
For commercial stuff it's almost as bad, I find myself having to figure out the underlying financial realities of the industry that produces x, then getting a summary of the market space by volume and associated data, then speculating on stuff that might exist within that market space that might be nice in light of whatever flaws afflict the market space in question, and maybe if I get lucky I'll find something through the reams and reams of valueless SEO optimised pop-up spewing complete and utter bullshit desperately attempting to capitalise on my assumed stupidity with their cookie cutter a-b tested "sales pitches". Most of the time I end up just going to alibaba or similar, finding vendors shipping actual large units with decent reviews, and then working backwards from there to what I'm looking for.
Watching google fall from something amazing to probably-worse-than-microsoft-all-things-considered tier was quite the eye opener.
The author missed the most important reason that Google search results often suck: tens of thousands of people are working very hard to make it suck. They call themselves "SEO specialists", and their job is to get their shitty site to the top of the rankings. It's an ongoing battle. Sure, Google wants to make money, but to do that they need to protect their search moneymaker and keep it dominant, so their incentive is to make the users happy. They aren't sucking on purpose.
I miss the days when SEO was only focusing on a decent HTML semantics, meta tags in order, organic backlinking, a good title that aligned with the content, and a good enough performance.
Right now SEO it's an arms race between google and every SEO agencies, with a keyword being attached to some company that may have 0 relevance to the user.
Doesn't help, that depending on the query, the first results are ads only superficially related. You can search for the name of a popular brand of a car/hotel/insurance, and the first results are the competitors. If you don't want to be below the fold, you need to pay, even if your website it's exactly what the user it's looking for.
> I miss the days when SEO was only focusing on a decent HTML semantics, meta tags in order, organic backlinking, a good title that aligned with the content, and a good enough performance.
It was never the case. As soon as google started to be popular, people were hired to manipulate its search results. "Natural" SEO was never a thing. You always had to use shady tactics in order to get a good ranking because everybody was doing the same.
That would not help. Those kind of effects are inherent in the system. As long as Visitsv lead to any kind of revenue, no matter if by Ad Impressions or Affiliate Programms or whatever, there exists a motivation and people will try to drag visitors to their sites. You will have to remove eCommerce from the Internet to fix that.
Search isn’t Google’s moneymaker, advertising is. And those shitty SEO’d sites are choc-a-bloc with advertising. Google has little incentive to downrank them.
While true, this isn’t actually a complicated issue to solve: humans and a heavy hand. Get humans to review everything on page one of every search. Get caught massaging your site? Permanent ban.
Google refuses to hire humans to do stuff like this. Their service is terrible. Maps requires free labour of millions of users to get information updated.
Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search.
These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that democracy has failed so lets replace it, replace with what? Its the best we can get given the alternatives, and its flaws will always be exploited.
No. Google is an actively hostile experience. Try it without adblock and get a taste of how most people get treated by Google. And for the search results, Kagi is already better for 90% of my queries.
It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)
Came here to mention kagi.
Very happy user here. The no-spam results make it so much more useful as a tool.
Also, "block this site from myresults forever" gives so much more agency to the user than anything Google has release in years. Googles "we know better" just reads as a big middle finger to me.
Kagi requires users to sign up (even though it's currently free?) which is 1000x more user-hostile than anything Google does and makes it a nonstarter as far as I'm concerned.
Kagi is probably a lot more usable, right now. Nobody’s trying to game it.
As long as it remains niche, it might actually stay that way indefinitely. I’m just worried about Google taking inspiration from them. I bet whatever “tricks” they use now would get a lot less effective if they did.
What’s the story behind Kagi - are they somehow related to Google?
To my knowledge besides the old experiments with client side search, Google has never allowed (even paid) api access to their search. I thought they did not do this, because it would have allowed somebody to jump start a search engine that might eventually become a competitor.
Kagi seems to be open about their Google relationship, so I assume they have agreement in place.
This even feels like some experiment from Google to create a premium, paid, search product (like what they did with YouTube).
Do I have to wait for their invitation to join the beta list before I can try Kagi? The comments here are promising and I tried to take a look for myself but apparently only beta users are allowed in at the moment.
I think that with current technology, beating google at the scale they run at is impossible. I think with advances it NLP, its possible. But right now, its pie in the sky.
1) New system comes out that indexes/controls/regulates a naively created dataset
2) Data consumers adopt that system and experience benefits
3) Data suppliers learn rules of system and take advantage of it to improve the positioning of their data, thus breaking the intent of a system built on the assumption of naive creation
4) Users complain about the broken system
5) New entrants realize that the original system actually solved the core problem really well, and there are no easy ways to solve the 'gaming the system' problem
6) Flawed system remains the best available option indefinitely
It's like entropy, there's just no fighting it.
EDIT: And to extend this beyond Google - do you see a lot of long text blocks in 7 second tik tok videos? That's because the creator found a way to game the algorithm.
I believe blocking an honest discussion is never going to do more good than harm. The original post doesn't even suggest that we should overthrow our Google overlord to replace it with whatever we find interesting. It's just pointing various limitations and issues that Google users are facing right now. And apparently from the replies here, there are even more aspects that people are have troubles with.
It's true building a good search engine is an gigantic undertaking but if Google (or someone else entirely) is aware of the current issues, they may have ideas to tackle those problems and then we can all share a better internet.
Same for the argument with democracy and any other similar arguments, pointing out problems within our current institutions doesn't remotely mean that we want to abolish everything and start from scratch.
> Nobody is coming along with a better search engine
https://neeva.com/ better than pretty much any solution (Qwant, DDG, etc) I've personally tested. It also indexes specific websites like StackOverflow, GitHub, and GMail.
Edit:
Neeva does require an account to create because eventually the product is going to require a subscription.
Neeva has a free tier (with only access to the search engine, so people can still test the search aspect), but when you pay for it now you ALSO get LastPass premium and Bitdefender VPN Premium as well, along with all their integrations into your system.
If you trust these people are doing what they say, it's a pretty good deal for securing your internet spaces and trying to get away from google, imo.
I experimented with neeva, because I'd really like an alternative to Google, even a paid one. However, I found its results pretty disappointing. At least for my work, I had to go back to Google, because I don't want to waste time "on the clock."
"pizza near me" - Google suggested a well rated place within 5 miles. DuckDuckGo suggested a pizza place 91 miles away??
"busted kids lip" - Google says gauze and a cold pack. DuckDuckGo says salt water??
"best monitor for mac" - Google says Dell Ultrasharp with 4.5 stars and 738 ratings on amazon. DuckDuckGo says BenQ 4 stars with 174 ratings on amazon?
> Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine.
No, they are underestimating the difficulty of funding a good search engine.
I liked the runnaroo search very much as did several of my friends. The guy who ran it couldn't fund it. He shut it down.
Altavista (Yeah, that far back) had a nice feature where it would draw a cluster graph of your search results. So, if you searched for "python", it would show your results but would also draw a little graph and you could see that "Hey, there are two clusters here--programming and reptiles." You could then click on the "programming" node and the "reptiles" cluster would go away. It allowed you to drill through irrelevant stuff really quickly.
Note how that feature doesn't exist today--in spite of orders of magnitude more programmers being thrown at search, graph algorithms, and nifty Javascript web UIs. I wonder why ...
(/sarcasm in case you missed it. I don't wonder why. Such a feature would let you drill through irrelevant Ad and SEO garbage too quickly and would impact Google's revenue.)
I strongly suspect that's a very large part of what is making everything worse. Or, at least, there does seem to be a correlation in time between the implementation of ML and the degradation of the quality of results.
There were many multiples less people online. The internet economy was almost nothing back then.
There’s no comparing how things were in the 90s and early 00s to now.
Every social media company before Facebook faltered or began losing a good chunk of their user base fairly quickly. Until that stopped happening with Facebook and IG for over a decade now.
Reddit’s position has also been here for a decade now.
Honestly I think people are completely underestimating
the difficulty of a good search engine
I suspect that is not difficult so much as expensive.
Boutique search engines pop up all the time here on HN, but they can't compete fairly against Google, without the resources to crawl a billion webpages day after day.
Democracy would be best replaced with cashless society. Society based on everyone value of doing what they love doing most (aka hobbyist), and virtually everything else replaced by robots and technology we already have. This is what's coming eventually, but its not something that can be installed on the top of your "operating system"; you will have to format the whole hard-drive (civil war)
I'll toss out a crazy idea to compete with Google.
1. You buy StackOverflow for $2 billion and Reddit for $10 billion.
2. You block Google from indexing the sites.
3. You start a new search engine that only searches StackOverflow and Reddit.
4. As the new search engine gains traction, you invite other high quality sites to join your vision and search engine. One requirement is they must block Google. You can guarantee them decent traffic because they'll only be competing against a dozen sites on your search engine, instead of millions on Google.
5. A large number of respectable sites leave Google and are only available on your search engine. Businesses start becoming eager to join your exclusive network and ask to join your mission.
6. Google is left with blog and affiliate SEO spam, and you become the hero of the search engine world.
As your search engine tips in to popularity all sites on it are overrun with spammy SEO content as marketers search for the next way to get more eyeballs on their ads.
Both Reddit and Stack Overflow have plenty of sites scraping their content and hosting copies. People would just go to those sites from Google instead of the real ones.
Also, I can see the value of Stack Overflow to Google but what value does Reddit add? Isn't most of the content on there disposable?
So in the last couple of days I've ended up doing a lot of research into equipment that I wasn't familiar with - commercial coffee equipment - and what I quickly found is that standard Google results are pretty much all blogspam. Not terrible info but it all feels like advertising while what I want is shared experiences from people who have actually used the equipment, not blogs that are actually ads from people who are trying to sell it to me.
So far I've found two places with actual useful info: YouTube and reddit.
YouTube has a reasonably working search engine so I just search directly there. Reddit doesn't so I end up adding site:reddit.com to all my Google searches.
Maybe there's some better forums than reddit that I haven't found yet, but this mirrors my experience from a couple of months ago when searching for new headphones, and a few months before that when researching a new laptop. All the interesting discussion is happening on reddit, and all the Google results are disguised sales pitches ("thanks for reading! Now click my affiliate link"). I'm close to automatically just adding reddit to all my Google searches when I'm researching something new.
Try an experiment. Think of a new product you might want to purchase, say, scuba diving masks . Search "best scuba diving masks" on Google. Now try adding "site: reddit.com" and check again. Which search do you think gives you more honest, useful info from people who are genuinely into scuba diving and not just trying to make a quick buck with a scuba blog?
Note: I don't know anything about diving and I haven't tested these terms, I'm just very sure it will be true for any random product you pick.
A lot of people add "reddit" to their search results for certain types of searches, including product reviews. It provides a ton of information from real people and cuts a lot of the garbage out.
If a site allows crawling by at least one public-Internet spider, is there any legal protection it has against other crawlers who choose to ignore robots.txt and crawl anyway? Because I feel like that's exactly what Google would do here, as long as it wasn't literally illegal for them to do so.
It's kinda unclear at the moment, but it's working its way through the courts! See HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn [1] in which HiQ was scraping public profiles and was blocked from doing so by LinkedIn. This made its way to court and the 9th circuit ruled they were allowed to scrape but SCOTUS later rejected the decision and sent it back. So—murky!
Google has prepared counter-moves for every step of your path. E.g. can you guarantee (2) against all moves Google could make?
Even if you succeed in securing an island of quality content: How big is your audience? I don't remember the exact quote but somebody said that television is the way it is because that's what people want.
Yahoo should have chosen to become a media company. Now they would have all the knowledge to mix search results in a way that is rewarded by the market. It's the academics of the early internet who want the best results. Everybody else wants to be entertained.
Huh? What counter moves? You buy Reddit, Google buys X? Why would that be inevitable, and why, if there is a counter move, would it function as a stopper or defeater rather than just as some separate thing that also exists? What even is the other reddit? Why wouldn't google's prospective counter acquisition just say no to their offer? And is it an acquisition, right, or does Google build something to compete? And why would that work, given googles history of abandoning it's own projects to the Google graveyard? And where even is the precedent for this kind of reactionary behavior as a strategic actor? Wouldn't Google just ignore it, focus on it's core products like it always does? This just sounds like a kid playing with action figures.
And that's just the first sentence!
It's also just kind of frustrating because it's the kind of response that comes from a place of refusing to engage with a hypothetical exercise. Failing to meet these exercises with the spirit of open-ended curiosity, as they loosen suspension of disbelief just enough to make it possible to canvas the space of strategic possibilities, is a misunderstanding of the exercise, and it's just the kind of sleepwalking response that turns potentially fruitful conversations into dreary dead ends.
Couldn't that backfire though. Most people imo would find it it infuriating to jump between search engines at first leading to plenty new alternatives taking over ultimately leading to the demise of the above mentioned sites.
I think this would spark all out search engine war. It would further degrade quality of search engines actually their usability since web content would be fragmented between different search engines.
But theoretically speaking Reddit for example can say "We don't like Google" and change their robots.txt rules in order to block Google bots.
My standard line on this is that Google today is not as good as Google of (at this point more than) 10 years ago, but it is still the best available option today because nothing is as good as or better than Google of (at this point more than) 10 years ago.
That said there have been a stack of new search engine posts on HN in the last few months and I may have to update my priors once I’ve had a chance to actually investigate the new options.
EDIT: Maybe I should note that I’ve also been relying a lot more on Reddit too in the past year since Apollo has a decent search interface for Reddit and I’ve gotten used to processing new subs quickly and getting information out of them. If nothing else I usually at least have a stack of new terminology to feed my search queries elsewhere.
I think it's also only going to get worse when the amount of bad content and blog spam is 1000 times the ratio it is today due to really human-like AI writing. I am sure Google will find ways to detect this, but it will be a cat and mouse game for decades because at some point we won't be able to tell apart bad, lazy human writing from AI writing.
At some point the internet has to go to a circle of trust model with real identities tied to online content of any sort. I see no other way to curb this pending disaster than being able to block bad actors and bad actors having very limited means to publish under an alias.
142 comments so far and no one is has mentioned the actual punchline of the OP: the Hypersearch chrome extension the author is pitching. Personally, I find the pitch compelling, but am very interested to hear from anyone who has used it.
Note: This extension "can read and change all your data on all websites". Perhaps that's necessary for what they are offering, but it seems very dangerous, especially for a 1-week old extension with 24 users and 2 ratings.
Also, the "website" link (https://insight.space) on the Chrome extension page just says "The domain name insight.space is for sale!".
Do other folks have reason to trust this?
(General discussion of why Google Search is bad that does not actually engage with the specific details of the OP's arguments seems inappropriate in this thread; there have been innumerable HN threads about the general issue.)
I can't speak to Hypersearch, but I've used their Hyperweb mobile extension and Insight Browser mobile app. They're great! I've even had the chance to chat/work with Abhinav a bit, and he's a nice and sincere guy.
I also like this concept — I once toyed with the idea of a search engine/extension that would run a search in one engine by default and then notify you if other search engines would have returned significantly different search results. I'm excited to try this out!
I agree that it's hard to trust an extension that runs on any website, and I guess one way you could work around this would be to manually limit it only to run on the domain where you do your primary web searching. It wouldn't have the full functionality, but it would provide the bulk of the functionality — without most of the risk.
The web itself sucks more and more, and Google results reflect that. Much good discussion migrated to siloed locations like facebook groups. There are thousands of pages of technical content that are barely redone versions of each other. Each SEO'd to within an inch of its life. These are quite similar to the dozens of identical off-brand products one finds on amazon.
I would love to see Google results get better. But the web itself is a mess.
This has a what seems to be a positive effect in my life though. I use the library much more than I used to. Instead of finding blogs using Google like the first part of my career, I find books at the local library.
Readit News
Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see something that organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text search (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever).
I feel there is a lot of untapped potential that gets missed by just trying to be a Google search clone.
Google's product direction has been inching backwards for a decade.
It's worse than that: Google's power user features used to work reliably and repeatably. Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it.
I've recently noticed that Youtube has a similar feature. If you search for a video, you'll only get a small number of results before Youtube will start showing you "recommendations" which are only somewhat related to your original search. Somewhat ironically, the only way to avoid this is to query via Google (site:youtube.com [term]) where you will get a much larger set of results.
It just seems that raw search is disappearing, and "recommendation engines" are appearing everywhere.
Google has removed features that it had 10 years ago.
There are so many obvious improvements that could be made to gmail but there's no real way to do them as a consumer.
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You can fake it by searching one forum at a time with "site:whatever.com", but you have to do one at a time and that doesn't help if there are forums you don't know about.
Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.
It is now evident Google is not in the business of making its search any better.
https://cse.google.com/all
At least in my limited understanding of userscript's capabilities, you'd still need to explicitly specify the forums you want to search, but I imagine that would solve lots of use cases for search filters.
Sure, in the sense that someone who had their legs broken sucks at running. Compared to yesterdays, Google today has to deal with a whole new level of the entire world trying to game their search. It's easy to fetch good water when the well is clean and no one is trying to actively poison it.
* If I search for recipes, the Google algorithm seems to heavily favour recipes with a short novel prepended to them. The “novel” does not have to be particularly relevant to the content - I’ve seen recipes with “novels” that I’m not convinced wasn’t partially algorithmically generated. Every human being I’ve ever spoken to hates this.
* Google will search for what it believes to be alternatives to terms, even when those terms are placed into quotes (which used to prevent this behaviour). This can be very irritating when Google’s alternative terms are incorrect.
Both of these are regressions over earlier behaviour, and don’t seem to have any obvious benefit to them.
I think their #1 problem is their product managers trying to do "something" to add said something to their resume and making the product horrible to use in the process
Examples include: - Grid view tab switcher in Chrome Android - Removing dislike count on YouTube
What has so radically changed the last couple of years to make spam take top spots on the SERP?
The person passionate about beetles who would have a great website in 2002 now posts 38 post Twitter threads (at best) or Instagram/Facebook posts that are lost forever.
It’s sad as we had this amazing “long tail” effect where a company like Google could set out to organize the worlds information.
Unfortunately the economics drive new behavior, and the next cohort of big web companies sought to monopolize human attention. The more profitable ones like Facebook are masters of psychological manipulation, and the second string cohorts like Reddit who aren’t very smart/manipulative adopt a more hands off approach where undesirable content like porn juices engagement.
People say they now have to append "reddit" to their search and they didn't in 2008. Which is obvious because in 2008 there was only reddit and like 3 other sites, now there's dozens of relevant ones.
Google meets my expectations for a search engine but maybe I'm not expecting enough from search?
These are all truly excellent and refreshingly imaginative ideas, in a conversation too often starved of critical thinking (elsewhere in this thread commenters, unable to imagine any alternative at all, are incredulously asking "what would you even replace it with?").
I would just say that search in it's traditional form is valuable too, and highly efficient. Or at least it can be when done well. I think millionshort search results are a good example of what traditional search can be.
But here is the thing:
My mom, dad and even my brother, they don't need that. They need the limitations aka borders, the "simplicity", the synchronisation and the search results. They still stick with Facebook, Google and Amazon because it's easy to use and their gate to the Internet, where all the smart people are living and the "future is real". They do not understand the drawbacks or they just don't care.
And I dare to assume that this pictures the vast majority of Internet users.
I'm browsing with Firefox on Mac with adblockers, and have some knowledge of what the potential scams are.
Is Google actually helping the average user more than a hypothetical alternative?
Don't know, tricky question to answer, but whatever the answer is it's likely a society wide change, involving regulation and new business models and ethical consumer choices, not just a new search engine.
Came here to write exactly that
Why are we still using it?
There's nothing better out there.
I've been looking at several of the options talked about here. My favorite so far is Neeva (https://neeva.com) due to their "spaces" concept and how it provides a simple building block I can explore to address many of the use cases I have for search.
Search needs innovation and people trying new things.
Yes, I would love this. I was recently looking for reviews of a certain woodworking tool. The vast majority of websites googled returned were clearly bot created sites. I came away thinking I wanted a curated list of a few sites actually created by humans.
I have also used some competitors. They are fine for most things (finding the hours of a local store, a restaurant's menu).
However, when the going gets tough (troubleshooting a technical issue, looking for a recommendation) I fall back to google.
But when I want to do serious research on things like eczema, diet, backpain, exercise. Google absolutely fails (also Google scholar) I have to buy books, go through Reddit,listen to YouTube lectures etc that point to the correct literature and then you get to know the experts, different opinions etc.
All you find is these generic sites with basic advice which is common knowledge lik WebMD. Not bad, but they dominate the entire search.
I would think a heavy version of Google focused on in depth/experts would be great.
Today we have more possibilities to manage that than in the early days. Many things can be automatically generated/crawled/MLed or crowdsourced. Browser extensions can help to categorize almost all important websites.
Data sources like Reddit, Stack Overflow or Wikipedia already have many websites categorized. We just need to combine the data.
I did a few experiments myself trying to drive hierarchies from tag data. It works surprisingly well. There is even some academic work in this direction.
The more people who use Brave Search (they own their own index), the better it will become. And right now I'd say it's orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others.
Reddit?
How much of that is based on general incompetence, SEO gaming, growing complexity of searches or manipulation (e.g. filtering "disinformation")? Or something else.
This makes it basically unusable for anything that isn't a technical question, for which it is still reasonably good if you restrict to sites where it will likely get a reasonable answer.
If special interest groups aligned with google have a position on what you're searching though, it will simply be spammed outright and any evidence to the contrary either concealed or "fact checks" which consist of minor modifications on the core underlying fact in question spiked with something that is obviously false so that the fact check can say "false" whilst actually the underlying fact in question is not at all false. Even when those special interest groups are right, google is still useless because it will give you such a slanted view of the territory you will be utterly clueless as to what other sides of the debate even exist as anything more than silly strawmen. Most questions in this class people would be better served by just petitioning Blackrock and similar directly and asking them what they should think.
For commercial stuff it's almost as bad, I find myself having to figure out the underlying financial realities of the industry that produces x, then getting a summary of the market space by volume and associated data, then speculating on stuff that might exist within that market space that might be nice in light of whatever flaws afflict the market space in question, and maybe if I get lucky I'll find something through the reams and reams of valueless SEO optimised pop-up spewing complete and utter bullshit desperately attempting to capitalise on my assumed stupidity with their cookie cutter a-b tested "sales pitches". Most of the time I end up just going to alibaba or similar, finding vendors shipping actual large units with decent reviews, and then working backwards from there to what I'm looking for.
Watching google fall from something amazing to probably-worse-than-microsoft-all-things-considered tier was quite the eye opener.
Right now SEO it's an arms race between google and every SEO agencies, with a keyword being attached to some company that may have 0 relevance to the user.
Doesn't help, that depending on the query, the first results are ads only superficially related. You can search for the name of a popular brand of a car/hotel/insurance, and the first results are the competitors. If you don't want to be below the fold, you need to pay, even if your website it's exactly what the user it's looking for.
It was never the case. As soon as google started to be popular, people were hired to manipulate its search results. "Natural" SEO was never a thing. You always had to use shady tactics in order to get a good ranking because everybody was doing the same.
Instead of targeting SEO per-se (as it's difficult to determine a good website with SEO vs a spam website with SEO), target how they're making money.
They're not doing so exactly because they have no incentive.
This makes it much harder to be a good search engine.
I have no idea how to quantify how much the decline is because of that.
Google refuses to hire humans to do stuff like this. Their service is terrible. Maps requires free labour of millions of users to get information updated.
These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that democracy has failed so lets replace it, replace with what? Its the best we can get given the alternatives, and its flaws will always be exploited.
It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)
As long as it remains niche, it might actually stay that way indefinitely. I’m just worried about Google taking inspiration from them. I bet whatever “tricks” they use now would get a lot less effective if they did.
To my knowledge besides the old experiments with client side search, Google has never allowed (even paid) api access to their search. I thought they did not do this, because it would have allowed somebody to jump start a search engine that might eventually become a competitor.
Kagi seems to be open about their Google relationship, so I assume they have agreement in place.
This even feels like some experiment from Google to create a premium, paid, search product (like what they did with YouTube).
1) New system comes out that indexes/controls/regulates a naively created dataset
2) Data consumers adopt that system and experience benefits
3) Data suppliers learn rules of system and take advantage of it to improve the positioning of their data, thus breaking the intent of a system built on the assumption of naive creation
4) Users complain about the broken system
5) New entrants realize that the original system actually solved the core problem really well, and there are no easy ways to solve the 'gaming the system' problem
6) Flawed system remains the best available option indefinitely
It's like entropy, there's just no fighting it.
EDIT: And to extend this beyond Google - do you see a lot of long text blocks in 7 second tik tok videos? That's because the creator found a way to game the algorithm.
It's true building a good search engine is an gigantic undertaking but if Google (or someone else entirely) is aware of the current issues, they may have ideas to tackle those problems and then we can all share a better internet.
Same for the argument with democracy and any other similar arguments, pointing out problems within our current institutions doesn't remotely mean that we want to abolish everything and start from scratch.
https://neeva.com/ better than pretty much any solution (Qwant, DDG, etc) I've personally tested. It also indexes specific websites like StackOverflow, GitHub, and GMail.
Edit:
Neeva does require an account to create because eventually the product is going to require a subscription.
"To continue searching and access all of Neeva's features, create your free account. Already a Neeva member? Sign in"
Yeah, no.
If you trust these people are doing what they say, it's a pretty good deal for securing your internet spaces and trying to get away from google, imo.
I can't find shit with DDG and the experience is like using Google from 20 years ago when it didn't have any of its bells and whistles.
"pizza near me" - Google suggested a well rated place within 5 miles. DuckDuckGo suggested a pizza place 91 miles away??
"busted kids lip" - Google says gauze and a cold pack. DuckDuckGo says salt water??
"best monitor for mac" - Google says Dell Ultrasharp with 4.5 stars and 738 ratings on amazon. DuckDuckGo says BenQ 4 stars with 174 ratings on amazon?
how is this better?
No, they are underestimating the difficulty of funding a good search engine.
I liked the runnaroo search very much as did several of my friends. The guy who ran it couldn't fund it. He shut it down.
Altavista (Yeah, that far back) had a nice feature where it would draw a cluster graph of your search results. So, if you searched for "python", it would show your results but would also draw a little graph and you could see that "Hey, there are two clusters here--programming and reptiles." You could then click on the "programming" node and the "reptiles" cluster would go away. It allowed you to drill through irrelevant stuff really quickly.
Note how that feature doesn't exist today--in spite of orders of magnitude more programmers being thrown at search, graph algorithms, and nifty Javascript web UIs. I wonder why ...
(/sarcasm in case you missed it. I don't wonder why. Such a feature would let you drill through irrelevant Ad and SEO garbage too quickly and would impact Google's revenue.)
we started out with topics and then moved to web, and are now folding topics into the web search experience, it's really hard stuff to get right
our first main filter was blogs, which is getting renamed to posts for a mix of reasons, adding forums shortly, along with other more specific topics
re: https://breezethat.com/ -- & better on laptop / desktop atm, premium version will be ad-free
However, I think Google has severely degenerated from just two years ago, when most of the problems were fully in effect.
Google is a bit of a product of the situation of scams being the easiest way anyone makes online.
Has anyone considered the possibility that all this Machine learning and AI models is what made Google and YouTube searches worse?
There’s no comparing how things were in the 90s and early 00s to now.
Every social media company before Facebook faltered or began losing a good chunk of their user base fairly quickly. Until that stopped happening with Facebook and IG for over a decade now.
Reddit’s position has also been here for a decade now.
Humans are incredibly good at solving engineering problems they can see from a mile away, although it takes time to solve.
Boutique search engines pop up all the time here on HN, but they can't compete fairly against Google, without the resources to crawl a billion webpages day after day.
1. You buy StackOverflow for $2 billion and Reddit for $10 billion.
2. You block Google from indexing the sites.
3. You start a new search engine that only searches StackOverflow and Reddit.
4. As the new search engine gains traction, you invite other high quality sites to join your vision and search engine. One requirement is they must block Google. You can guarantee them decent traffic because they'll only be competing against a dozen sites on your search engine, instead of millions on Google.
5. A large number of respectable sites leave Google and are only available on your search engine. Businesses start becoming eager to join your exclusive network and ask to join your mission.
6. Google is left with blog and affiliate SEO spam, and you become the hero of the search engine world.
As your search engine tips in to popularity all sites on it are overrun with spammy SEO content as marketers search for the next way to get more eyeballs on their ads.
Also, I can see the value of Stack Overflow to Google but what value does Reddit add? Isn't most of the content on there disposable?
So far I've found two places with actual useful info: YouTube and reddit. YouTube has a reasonably working search engine so I just search directly there. Reddit doesn't so I end up adding site:reddit.com to all my Google searches.
Maybe there's some better forums than reddit that I haven't found yet, but this mirrors my experience from a couple of months ago when searching for new headphones, and a few months before that when researching a new laptop. All the interesting discussion is happening on reddit, and all the Google results are disguised sales pitches ("thanks for reading! Now click my affiliate link"). I'm close to automatically just adding reddit to all my Google searches when I'm researching something new.
Try an experiment. Think of a new product you might want to purchase, say, scuba diving masks . Search "best scuba diving masks" on Google. Now try adding "site: reddit.com" and check again. Which search do you think gives you more honest, useful info from people who are genuinely into scuba diving and not just trying to make a quick buck with a scuba blog?
Note: I don't know anything about diving and I haven't tested these terms, I'm just very sure it will be true for any random product you pick.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
Even if you succeed in securing an island of quality content: How big is your audience? I don't remember the exact quote but somebody said that television is the way it is because that's what people want.
Yahoo should have chosen to become a media company. Now they would have all the knowledge to mix search results in a way that is rewarded by the market. It's the academics of the early internet who want the best results. Everybody else wants to be entertained.
And that's just the first sentence!
It's also just kind of frustrating because it's the kind of response that comes from a place of refusing to engage with a hypothetical exercise. Failing to meet these exercises with the spirit of open-ended curiosity, as they loosen suspension of disbelief just enough to make it possible to canvas the space of strategic possibilities, is a misunderstanding of the exercise, and it's just the kind of sleepwalking response that turns potentially fruitful conversations into dreary dead ends.
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But theoretically speaking Reddit for example can say "We don't like Google" and change their robots.txt rules in order to block Google bots.
That said there have been a stack of new search engine posts on HN in the last few months and I may have to update my priors once I’ve had a chance to actually investigate the new options.
EDIT: Maybe I should note that I’ve also been relying a lot more on Reddit too in the past year since Apollo has a decent search interface for Reddit and I’ve gotten used to processing new subs quickly and getting information out of them. If nothing else I usually at least have a stack of new terminology to feed my search queries elsewhere.
At some point the internet has to go to a circle of trust model with real identities tied to online content of any sort. I see no other way to curb this pending disaster than being able to block bad actors and bad actors having very limited means to publish under an alias.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojag...
Note: This extension "can read and change all your data on all websites". Perhaps that's necessary for what they are offering, but it seems very dangerous, especially for a 1-week old extension with 24 users and 2 ratings.
Also, the "website" link (https://insight.space) on the Chrome extension page just says "The domain name insight.space is for sale!".
Do other folks have reason to trust this?
(General discussion of why Google Search is bad that does not actually engage with the specific details of the OP's arguments seems inappropriate in this thread; there have been innumerable HN threads about the general issue.)
I also like this concept — I once toyed with the idea of a search engine/extension that would run a search in one engine by default and then notify you if other search engines would have returned significantly different search results. I'm excited to try this out!
I agree that it's hard to trust an extension that runs on any website, and I guess one way you could work around this would be to manually limit it only to run on the domain where you do your primary web searching. It wouldn't have the full functionality, but it would provide the bulk of the functionality — without most of the risk.
I would love to see Google results get better. But the web itself is a mess.
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