If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? (opens in new tab)

Google's product direction has been inching backwards for a decade.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.)

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?

Humans are incredibly good at solving engineering problems they can see from a mile away, although it takes time to solve.

  Honestly I think people are completely underestimating 
  the difficulty of a good search engine

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

If this is because Google has gotten worse or Kagi is better I can't tell, but either way I think we are at a point where Googles dominance is threatened for the first time, at last from my sample of one.

But there are other signals like how many of these "google isn't good anymore" posts we see on HN nowadays and the above example of a user not even noticing they aren't using Google.

For example one software platform I use all the time has community forum that is almost useless because every post to the forum is simply met with "open a ticket with support" with no actual resolution, these post flood the google search results, however other search engines bubble up blogs, other forums, reddit, or other sources not just the set of sites over and over again.

"google search sucks" message might lack finesse, but I think it conveys something real--like, a search engine completely optimized to the user using state-of-the-art algorithms, etc. does not exist, perhaps because Google hangs out around "good enough" and would kill anything on the way up.

The competitor website is not a slightly suboptimal result for the query: it's literally the wrong result if I'm not adding "alternative" to the search query. I'm sorry.

People have forgotten that Google searches for tech stuff 10 years ago used to exclusively returns results from sites like Experts Exchange with solutions behind paywalls. I'm glad Google did something about that. And, of course, thankful that sites like Stack Overflow came along.

Google was never good for much else. Generating good content is expensive, so most of it is not on the free Web. Never has been. People are expecting it to provide buying advice, or intelligent counsel for their problems, or wisdom from experts. Google was never good for that.

> They don't need to worry about becoming more mediocre when they've made sure to put themselves in a position where they basically have no competition.

Two may not be ideal but there is still competition there…

If enough people use Bing/O365 instead of Google/Gsuite, that Google sees a significant shift in traffic, they should feel pressure to be less unfriendly and start innovating again.

I think people not carrying is the saddest part.

>People have amassed too much data on Google services and the cost of moving/switching is too high

I think this shouldn't be a problem since query is the only thing you need when searching. You should be able to personalize and narrow down the search from UI of search engine not rely on search engine amassing data about yourself to do it for you.

I would disagree. It is nice at the start but it shows the same things on the same search result forever. That is not something that you'd want in a Porn search engine, you'd want it to have some amount of randomization.

Huge social costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706

Huge economic costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237

Its amoral/cynical/evil practices and business model affect everyone.

Maybe the real truth is "the top N% of everything sucks?"

1) I personally use Google, because it works for me. I will admit freely that part of this may be that I've gotten used to framing queries such that it works with the search engine that I'm used to using, and that's probably true for many people commenting on HN.

2) Every so often, these posts will inspire me to do my own non-scientific experiments such as using the same query, say, "Dua Lipa Levitating" or "Go modules vs packages" on say, DDG, Bing, and Google. When I did this experiment most reently, I generally find that Bing and Google are both more personally useful for me and DDG is less useful (but as the old latin saying goes, "De gustibus non est disputandum"). I will note that DDG had the more obstrusive advertising at the top of the results (Stubhub and Urban outfitters), and Bing and Google did not have any adds that I could find for that first query.

Given my personal evaluations, it tends to cause me to discount what many of the DDG enthusiasts have to say about DDG being is way better, simply because it doesn't accord with my own quickie experiments. But hey --- maybe it's because they enter in search queries differently than I do.

3) Given the hyperbolic and/or highly emotive nature of some of the comments about "holding users hostage" and complete lack of nuance over "violating users' privacy", again, it causes me to have a hard time taking everything else that rhwy have to say seriously.

4) I sometimes suspect people are remembering the past with rose colored glasses. I remember the search quality of Alta Vista (and with all due respect to the people who worked on Alita Vista and having had friends who worked there), the results were pretty crappy, and Google's results were heads and shoulders above somoe of the other competitors that were available back in the day.

5) All of this is my personal opinion; and users should feel free to use whatever search engine they want, and competition is a good thing.