I think I have the same problem.

I used to be very good at google-fu, but now I can't find anything any more. The neural networks just reinterpret my carefully designed keywords and return back the popular results that I try to filter out.

yes, hard to explain but I noticed their filter bubble keeps showing me my latest preferences, so there’s the need to make it “unlearn “...

This is the worst thing about google products! One egregious example is Maps always showing you some random place you looked up a year ago. I don't want it to learn from me.

there’s a way to erase history but you also lose personal info, or it has to relearn your places

Something I have felt for a couple years (that I continually feel more strongly) is that over time all the independent content, high-quality bloggers and forum discussions have gotten pushed out of the top results.

They're replaced with nothing but top, recognizable brands like yelp, pinterest, thewirecutter, forbes, usatoday, etc.

I miss when I'd google something and find a bunch of actual, normal human beings' experiences.

I think that they probably got bumped out as they triggered some blog-spam filters, but the alternative of just having results full of brand after brand isn't really any better.

I've been having the same thoughts recently, to the extent where I've wanted to post "Ask HN: How do you search for independent bloggers and forum discussions?".

I may as well throw that out here now, how do I find individuals and their thoughts/comments/articles/websites rather than the typical results which are full of big companies?

They got bumped out as part of a deliberate strategy by Google to promote the results of trusted brands like newspaper and magazine websites, which have become low quality content farms.

Eric Schmidt said in 2008 "Brands are the solution, not the problem… Brands are how you sort out the cesspool"

Maybe this was true back in 2008.

Nowadays brands are the cesspool itself.

Yes, this is my primary pain point also. I want to see independent bloggers, forum discussions, people's views, detailed articles. As you pointed correctly, the top results are brands or heavily optimised sites - which you can figure out by looking has been optimised for SEO. They hardly have any useful insights.

I've found that Google tries too hard to "fix" all my search queries for me now. The top results often don't include one or more of the words that I entered, even if they were crucial for what I was trying to find.

I can switch it to "Verbatim" and that helps sometimes, but they really can't expect anyone except very technical users to even realize that's an option (or what it does).

How do you do that?

I've noticed Google no longer even fully respects keywords/phrases in quotes which used to force exact matches.

EDIT: NVM, found it by uhm.. googling : https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2126346/google-introd...

Had no idea this existed though..

After you search, you have to click the "Tools" button and then change the "All results" dropdown to "Verbatim".

It's bad UX, there's no indication at all for why I'd want to click on a dropdown that says "All results".

You can append !gvb to a DDG search to directly perform a Google verbatim search. It's the fastest way to do a Google verbatim search - faster than Google's own UI.

Not only does appending !gvb to a DDG search perform a Google verbatim search, it also directly reveals the Google UI for searching a date range.

The combination of normal DDG plus easy access to Google verbatim and date range seaches gives a pretty nice search experience.

I find it particularly frustrating when the top results literally contain none of the words I entered, and Google makes sure to show me that by listing my entire query with all the words crossed out. If it's not all of them, it's all but one.

This happens to me regularly. More often than not, it seems like.

I've noticed that as well, but then I just realized there just aren't many places where people are talking about the specific thing I'm querying about... which is a lonely feeling :(

I have found that if you prepend phrases or words with a plus sign ("+"), at least on Bing, but Google uses the same syntax, those words are forced to be included.

They definitely have. Removing the main keywords from my query is the most frustating thing ever. I just want them to do kind of "dumb" search, without any machine learning magic about 95% of the time.

I swithed to DDG sometime ago and it is way better atleast for me. I still switch to google for localised information(local restaurants etc.) though.

I've found that I often get better results on google if I click "Tools" under the search bar and change "All results" to "Verbatim". It seems to force it to just do the query without as much of the magic.

They still haven't enabled Verbatim for Image searches though. The difference in results when switching from verbatim-text to images is shocking.

Yeah I have tried verbatim and it does seem to help a little in some cases. In others, it either shows totally irrelevant results or does not turn up any search results.

I wish I could do a grep style search on the web after removing all the social media and popular brands.

Even in verbatim it often results in it taking semantically similar words instead.

I'd much rather have it return no results.

Anecdotally I've been noticing a steady decline in the quality of google search results for the last ~6 years. The decline has seemed to be accelerating rather than slowing.

I started having trouble about 10 years back. It was like a switch flipped from one day to the next, literally. Searches that worked one day failed the next. I was digging through 10 pages of results, having to select `verbatim` and other options before I found literally the same thing I'd read a week before. It improved again after that as I relearned how to use this new, failing, Google. But it's certainly gotten worse again. For instance, searching for a tv show title will now give you a frontpage mostly showing current, topical articles on it. This isn't wrong, but sometimes the IMDB link or even the show's own homepage will be on the second page of links.

If I want news I'll go to the news tab. This also means that my results will shift from day to day very rapidly as new content gets created because it gets precedence in the display.

Of course, news searching is also horribly broken. I tried to find an article (previously found through google news search). I knew when it was published but couldn't recall the site, selecting those date ranges returned 0 results. Selecting all time returned results that included dates within that range, but not the desired article. I eventually found it, by going home and looking in my browser history.

I don’t know why, but I’ve noticed a decline in relevancy from google search results. Particularly annoying when google returns results that are basically the opposite of what I searched for. I’ve started using other search engines simply because google doesn’t return what I’m looking for. I haven’t kept a log, but I’m fairly sure this includes searches related to technology.

Yes I think that exact matches have suffered but perhaps semantic matches have remained the same. Qualifiers (is that the word) like + and "" are completely broken compared to how they used to work, so https://duckduckgo.com almost always gives better results now for programming-related queries. Question searches no longer work as well as they once did maybe 10 years ago.

But hey, Google's search is still infinitely better than Facebook's and GitHub's (the only other two that I use with any frequency). The StackOverflow search that kicks in when you're writing a new issue is generally superb and I really wonder how they did it (sometimes I begin writing a new issue to get it to really dig deep and find similar issues).

This reminds me a blog by PG where he proposed that Google can be disrupted by building search engine for techies (for e.g.) At that time it sounded preposterous to me, as Google worked perfectly fine for me - but now I really see this as a possibility. I think DuckDuckGo is following this strategy.

Facebook's search function actually just doesn't work for me. I'll search for someone by name and it just returns me a list of friend suggestions that's the same no matter what name I search for. It may as well not have a search function at all.

Yeah, I use DDG and then switch over to Google when DDG doesn't give me good results. Got used to using !g a lot.

However, lately, I've been finding that I'll do a !g first, and then switch back to plain DDG since the Google results were terrible.

It's been dodgy and worsening towards dire ever since they did the brand and recency updates.

Mind I'm finding I need Google less at all lately. When I first switched to DDG maybe 20% of my searches were pushed to !g. Now it's very rare, maybe a few percent, and when I do Google almost never gives better results.

I agree, started to notice in google search last year about this time (maybe i getting older) or maybe DDG started to serve better results. Nowadays, I use google rarely in this year i can't remember when get better results than DDG, but maybe it just my bias

I am preaching this for months now. It's getting so bad that I again started thinking about writing my own search (crawling my top 20 sites and a search depth of 2 for linked sites + wikipedia + IMDb + Wiktionary).

Google "correcting" or flatout ignoring search parameter is infuriating to say the least and I'm finding myself more and more relying on my bookmarks and synched history for visiting sites I knew I visited.

> crawling my top 20 sites and a search depth of 2 for linked sites + wikipedia + IMDb + Wiktionary

I have been thinking something along similar lines. One thing I wanted to add is independent (static site)bloggers and content creators, forums like HN and reddit, stackoverflow etc. But I have no idea how to find these bloggers. Maybe whitelisting the sites to be indexed is the solution?

Everytime I a stackoverflow answer links to some really amazing blog post, it saddens me that google wouldn't have shown me that result even if I searched the exact same topic of the blog post.

No idea, DDG is my search. I only use google for vague searches where my search terms are very poor but I don't know the subject enough to refine my search more clearly. Sadly, this is somewhat frequent.

Regardless, DDG represents easily 70% of my searches.

It might not only be the search engine's fault. Another reason might just be that the amount of shitty content is growing exponentially...

Another reader quoting a passage from Neal Stephenson's Anathem about crap on the Reticulum:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/01/the-follower-factory/#comme...

But this is the point of the algs, to sift through the crap and give you relevant search results.

I don't think the internet has changed that much in the last year or so. If that's true, then it must be alg changes or that content creators have figured out how to beat the algs.

I'm guessing it's the algs, since quoting every single word I want to search for is usually the only way to get reasonable results.

Exactly. Even if the internet is to blame, this is a moving window. Good yesterday doesn't mean good today, and keeping up with that is needed to be considered "good".

Or the incentive to create quality content has diminished since it's become much harder to monetize?

That's an excellent point for searches on new things. But for things that had a lot of existing content, I also find them more and more drowned out.

I think the reason is that Google rewards following it's instructions for mobile, security, etc, and existing quality content is often kept online merely as a donation to the public. Having the incentives of a spammer and following through on every rumored 2% rank improvement is almost a requirement to get near the top results.

I really hope someone working on Google's search algs thinks about this. So, so many incredible sources of information are found on un-optimized pages.

I'd go so far as to say that an optimized page is often an indicia of low quality / unoriginal content.

Was it ever easier to monetize? AFAIR good content was always free. If content is created only out of monetary incentive it's rarely good.

Yeah, fair point.

I just thought of something. With all the privacy issues going on lately, how many of us that are complaining about poor search results have also installed some sort of add on to block Google from tracking us? Can that have something to do with it?

For example, my search results tend (or used to tend) to be skewed towards results dealing with programming or computers in general. If I search for "exception" I generally get results for "Programming Exceptions" rather than any other type of Exception that can exist.

From most complaints I've seen, it would seem to be Google's attempts to decrease the priority of pagerank and exact keyword prominence in trying to offer more "helpful" results that make it less helpful in many situations. There should be a 'dumb search' mode for that.

For cases where you don't want a dumb search, maybe analytics blocking could have an impact, as you suggest.

Personally, I'd like a mode where they interleave dumb/popular and personalized/relevant results.

I too have noticed this and have also gotten in the habit of prefixing technical queries with site:hackertimes.com. I’m glad it’s not just me. It’s an imperfect solution and I hope Google is invested in offering a better one.

Things have changed since the days of Matt Cutts & Co. People complain about search quality but Google now appear not to care?

Google search is getting worse, certainly. I'm noticing many google products are slow and clunky too- Keep, Inbox, Voice, and even Gmail. Most of these services are the slowest tabs in my browser.

It's the perpetual curse of popular, profitable software - bloat. New features keep getting piled on until the software is slow and complex. See also: iTunes, Microsoft Office.

I absolutely have seen a decrease in quality. I used to be able to use keywords to divide the search space very effectively (ie "programming language" "concept" "version"). Now it seems that Google is concerned with over fitting and they've relaxed the power of each keyword to filter results (sometimes ignoring them altogether). The end result is I tend to get articles that are more general and it's difficult to get a highly detailed forum post or blog anymore.

One thing to consider: it may be getting worse for us, but better for 99% of the population.

I can't imagine Google releasing a new version if it wasn't better for most people.

How do you measure if it actually is better for people though?

Well, I imagine they use metrics like how many pages you sift through before selecting a link (presumably the page you were looking for), or whether you had to modify the search. As some other posters have said, observing a lift in 1% for these kinds of metrics can hide a massive loss of quality for niche queries or user groups. I imagine folks internally don't just look at aggregate stats before pushing changes, but refine metrics based on the type of query or the type of user.

Yes, it has been going steadily downhill for years as the ML transforms google search from a predictable and useful tool into one that tries to outsmart me and trips over its shoelaces every time. Very frustrating.

The one upside is that google's increasingly poor search performance helped me finally make the jump to Duck Duck Go, which I've wanted to do on moral grounds for some time.

I haven't noticed any significant recent changes and I don't really have the problem you describe in most searches that I do without sure restrictions.

I have for years seen something like what you describe on single-common-word searches where Google didn't have much for from my history to go on, but that's not new.

One of the ways around this conundrum is to use a meta-search engine, Searx [1] being a good example. Not only does this do away with the search bias (by not keeping any search history to base that bias on as well as by mixing up all searches from all users to make it harder to profile those users by other means), it also shows results from other engines besides Google. You can run your own instance of Searx [2] or use one of the public instances [3].

[1] https://www.searx.me/

[2] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

[3] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances

Yes. I first noticed about six months ago, and it's been frustrating.

The most annoying habit I've seen is google disregarding the most relevant part of the query, and returning low-quality news results that aren't at all relevant.

The "refine-your-search" techniques I was taught in school (the days of Alta Vista) are coming in handy again.

Careful, though. Refine your query enough times and Google will extract free labor from you...oops, I mean they'll give you a captcha.

Yes, for me it's been getting worse and worse over the past few months. I don't see as many quick answer boxes up-top and the results are almost never relevant.

It's hard for me to explain, but it's almost like Google forgot how to ascertain context for certain terms and now gives a more general result.

Just a theory: Google's user tracking is very advanced so they thought it is time to present search results based on your profile. So when you search for something outside your profile... the results are poor. This algorithm works for probably 90% of the users.

I've had a similar experience which is why I almost always use dork search queries now. You'll get pinged by Google's anti-bot recapcha often but you'll find things much more effectively.

Heres a cheat sheet I keep bookmarked, https://www.alienvault.com/blog-content/GoogleHackingCheatSh....

I think search has worsened for the layman, but improved for the average, non technical user.

My theory is that the ML powering search functionality is, predictably, learning to match the largest body of data, at the coat of niche and/or technical results. It is an emergent form of consolidation.

Personally, I feel this slow march began when google removed special search characters.

I’ve noticed this as well! I now use bing and duck duck go exclusively. I’m surprised that I’m saying this but Bing reminds me of where google wishes it was now 10 years ago. It’s as if all the good killer little features google had have matured at bing and google has fallen into some dystopian version of itself and has gone back to the stone ages.

Are you based out of US? I have heard that Bing works well for the US, but is not as good for other countries.

Have you tried qwant.com or startpage.com ?

I think Google sort of pushes content it thinks you are searching for based on what others who have used your query or similar queries have clicked. Do you really dislike the results you see or are you just unwilling to click them because you think they're heavily SEOed? Most users wouldn't notice this TBH.

Actually started using Bing the past few days and it hasn't annoyed me enough to switch.

Usually it sucks because the US version is so much better than their UK version (I'm British) but it seems closer to feature parity now. Even has their rewards thing.

Their world cup coverage is pretty good too.

Have you ever tried qwant.com ?

Looks a bit cluttered for my liking

Technical users are likely employing adblock and/or blocking tracking.

Google search team likely reviews metrics (of trackable users) to allocate resources...

They are blind to tech-savvy users and optimized for the crowd who will click an ad thinking it's a search result.

I fully agree and do basically the same. As an expert in some domains, seeing high-content websites pushed back by some marketing driven shitty websites lets me really doubt the quality of google's index, this applies especially fir niche tipics.

Whatever they do, they show me results not including my words first, only the 4th usually include all the words I written, making the first few results very pointless

Unfortunately that's true, the search results quality declined greatly recently. In many cases I get way better results using bing, yandex.com or duckduckgo.

Not sure if this is a google problem or an internet problem. But it’s not only over past few months. Their search results have been in decline for years.

I've noticed this as well, I've started to use other search engines to get better results when Google's results were a total wash.

OP - Do you get different results when you repeat the search in incognito mode (Chrome) or private browsing (Firefox)?

I do get different results on switching to incognito mode - but generally they are equally poor. My problem is not that google is trying to optimise the results based on my search history. Its just that the top results in Google I get are primarily optimised content marketing pieces which hardly have any good insight. Hence, I filter by default with hacker news.

To give some context I mostly research business(products, market dynamics, etc) or technologies

I've noticed this as well. So much so that I'm starting to use some of my alternatives to get decent results.

What are the alternatives you have tried? Curious, what are other strategies to get better results.

I would be curious which key-words people notice as suffering the most decline?

OP here - Don't remember keywords, but generally I want to understand technologies or markets. For example, how is the market for open source software evolving, what are the different business models around it, are there any new products in this space, what are the new technologies? In such scenarios, I want to see details about people's experience, their experiments, etc. The results which I get on Google are severely lacking in this regard. I get boiler plate content marketing articles for 2-3 pages of results, which really don't give any new insight.

thought i was the only one!! most of what i get back for specific queries (especially if they use search operators) is total garbage compared to before ~6mo ago