[qyi]

> 1. Use quotes to force an exact-match search

Almost never works these days. Google now usually just quantizes your search terms into an ad or ultra popular news article written 3 minutes ago. It also ignores all your operators most of the time.

Bonus: If you use something like inurl: You get blocked for a "hacking attempt". Google also has blocked Tor and VPNs since 2006 or so. In fact, they are the one big search engine who has done this the longest. Google search right now is like one of those dinky websites from the early 2000s that follows all kinds of insane practices like blacklists and filters.

What Google Search is trying to be is a thing you can ask questions and get an answer back. For example converting feet to inches, or where is Starbucks. I don't even understand why the niche (really, this is how academic research is done, but i guess you can just discount the entire web as an invalid soruce) of "searching for strings over a set of websites" is not even attempted to be filled. People are crazy.

[rcoveson]

I'm struck by the profundity of this loss. It's almost as bad as if something like archive.org were to just disappear. SaaS is so ephemeral. One day, you have access to a version of Google that works absurdly well. The next, it's gone forever.

I used to use Google so much that it felt like a border collie in those dog competitions. I knew how it behaved, I had a bank of commands/searches that I had half-memorized and which I could use to restore knowledge that had been evicted from my cache. It repeatedly surprised and delighted me with how smart and loyal it was. Like a good dog.

And then that dog got brain cancer. It doesn't know any commands anymore. All it can do is vomit up clickbait-y news stories from the last 4 years. And I'll never get to interact with the old one ever again. You can't archive.org a SaaS application.

[dereg]

It's really sad. There used to be a time when I'd try to recall a specific page on the internet and I'd be able to use a zillion search operators to narrow in to the page that I was looking for. Now, that's impossible.

I've noticed search for everything kind of sucks now as every platform has tried to become curators.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Every platform only wants to return links to sites that run ads or commerce sites that buy ads. Providing useful information is a loss leader that needs to be optimized out of existence so that the C levels get a bonus for a job well done.

[ebiester]

Providing useful information for free is a loss leader. Information may want to be free, but its creation is still expensive.

[annadane]

And there's absolutely no way to talk to the company in question. Both Google and Facebook have become, we will do whatever we want, no you can't talk to a human, no you can't dispute our decisions, no you can't have any control over your life

[qyi]

You can not use Google. The real problem is when you have to do tax or you go to jail and it has to be done with some smartphone garbage (not sure if we're there yet, my country still has paper filing).

[nwienert]

It’s nuts how every search comes up with covid results now. I search for some type of food? Covid. A supplement? Covid. GDP over time for a country? Covid.

They put so much weight on recent * news * mainstream. Very black mirror.

Even searching for explicit contrary takes will instead give you the same recent * mainstream * news.

[qyi]

This is _exactly_ what I'm talking about. You type "directions to adelaide", and you get something about Adele. I don't agree with the sentiment that it seems conspiracyish or "dystopian", though.

On a related note, I find it hilarious that websites - even e-commerece and services that don't seem to have any physical contact - now have a generic COVID-19 popup on top of their cookie popup and privacy police banner.

[docmars]

I believe Google is more concerned with combating the apparent world-ending risk of someone discovering misinformation and parsing that information themselves (gasp), than providing a useful search engine to the majority who are using it with good intentions, as you described.

[markdown]

You jest but USA elected Donald Trump to lead them, proving once and for all that misinformation spread by the internet is potentially world-ending.

You jest but if a pandemic 100 times as deadly as COVID came upon us, anti-vaxxers and the misinformation they spread via the internet could potentially end the world.

You either education your people, or you have to control the information they receive.

The GOP has long chosen to make Americans more stupid (privatisation of education, the teaching of fairy tales in the science classroom, etc) so that they can continue to be manipulated into voting for charlatans. As a result, the only way to keep the country from completely going off the rails on the backs of dumb fucks is to manipulate the information they receive... try and protect them from misinformation, disinformation, and lies.

[docmars]

I wholeheartedly disagree with just about everything you said (much of it is misinformation and/or hysterics), but I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. :)

[licebmi__at__]

Heh, I wholeheartedly agree with most of what gp said and I still wouldn’t trust google to protect people from misinformation. But I also disagree with ggp, as I don’t see google doing anything other than push ads.

[markdown]

I probably was a bit hysterical there, but I think the underlying point that an uneducated populace just can't cope in the modern world centered around information on the internet.

I know someone I consider intelligent who started with one Joe Rogan video and a year later was a raving pro-Russia, pro-China, holocaust denying anti-vaxxer. Youtube took him from fun, reasonable guy who you'd love to have at a party to the bore who found a conspiracy in everything and who just oozed bile and anger at this new world that millennials had destroyed.

If he couldn't fight the propaganda, your average person on the street can't. It's a recipe for disaster, and to my mind the only short term solution is to censor the propaganda.

Of course over the long term, the only real solution is to create a smarter population who aren't just trained in arithmetic, but in logic and philosophy.

[qyi]

I've never studied logic and yet I have never agreed with any conspiracy theory (the logical flaws are still obvious even if I can't name them).

If you want people to think logically about topics, the first step is making them not be taboo.

[nbardy]

Whatever problem your describing, the answer isn't to control people

[scrollaway]

Putting a lid on propaganda isn't "controlling people". When propaganda is thrown at you from foreign states, those states are the ones attempting to control your population. Fighting that is defending your citizens.

How you fight is tricky and i don't agree that censorship is the right fix in the long run, but i don't think the person you are replying to thinks that either, it's just one easy way to combat some of it.

[markdown]

Not people, just lies and propaganda.

[1cvmask]

So google search got Trump elected?

[inakarmacoma]

Most of these statements are just patently false, right? It's the top comment on HN, but I'm pretty I've successfully used all of the features mentioned in the just month with no issue at all. I don't understand how these are getting rated so highly?

[iagovar]

Because it happens to people? It happens to me, that's why I have a bookmark folder with a bunch of search engines. Do you think that I'll put that much effort on searching in several engines if it wasn't because it happend to me time and time again.

[skinkestek]

It is sadly very true. See my comment here or what a lit of others write: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26926309

Also I'd like to know what I should do to get your experience.

[8note]

Likely there's some a/b testing and google has decided that you're more profitable without access to those tools

[skinkestek]

But on different machines, under different accounts, logged in or logged out?

Maybe.

> google has decided that you're more profitable without access to those tools

Well for any googlers here: this among other things is why you only see a fraction of my queries compared to before: I actively avoid Google now.

[qyi]

It's been happening since before 2010, but sure.

[toper-centage]

There was a time when I disliked bing and Bing-based engines because Google was just always superior. Nowadays, Google is so often trying to decide what it thinks I actually mean (e.g. Straight out removing search terms and asking if I really want to stick to them), that I feel Bing is often more straightforward and more successful...

[narag]

Exactly. Google should get better at googling.

[gnicholas]

Yeah, it seems that you now have to go into Tools > All Results > Exact Match to get this behavior. Double quotes doesn't cut it anymore.

[iagovar]

This. Sadly it works poorly in other search engines too. I have a bookmark folder with a bunch of search engines, and use it like that.

[AndrewChamp]

  "What Google Search is trying to be is a thing you can ask questions and get an answer back. For example converting feet to inches..."

Wolfram Alpha does that better anyways. https://www.wolframalpha.com/

[fao_]

Not really. Try asking it "how long does water take to freeze 300m above sea level" or "how much time does water take to freeze when 300m above sea level"

It's a simple enough question -- it's able to show me a gradient curve when i give it "water freeze", but it's not able to parse that data into a simple format, which is the entire point of using a search engine like that.

It's been the same for a number of simple queries lately. Just absolutely useless.

[mikewarot]

Water only freezes when it is cold, it isn't time dependent.

[fao_]

The time it takes to become cold enough to freeze is pressure-dependent. "Room temperature" can be assumed in the case, or hell, I could have told it it was 21°C. I only wanted a ballpark figure to base a rough plan around ("This will take around this long, so I have this much time before I can do X"), which was certainly within the power of Wolfram Alpha to give me.

The point that this example is trying to illustrate is that Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine ("Find this out for me"), it is a definition engine ("Given these definitions, what is X"), and while it advertises itself as the former with the examples given, doesn't especially succeed at it to any specific degree.

[tomjen3]

>Google also has blocked Tor and VPNs since 2006 or so.

I just Googled when was Bush born while on Private Internet Access and the only thing google did differently was giving me results in German.

And no cookies either: I opened a temporary container tab so it shared no cookies with Google.

[gnoll_of_gozag]

works with some, breaks with other

on one vpn i use sometimes it doesnt work

[leoh]

> Almost never works these days. Google now usually just quantizes your search terms into an ad or ultra popular news article written 3 minutes ago. It also ignores all your operators most of the time.

I'm sorry, this makes zero sense and even if it did, is patently false. This feature works and I use it all the time.

[skinkestek]

> I'm sorry, this makes zero sense and even if it did, is patently false. This feature works and I use it all the time.

Lucky you.

I can confirm qyis observations: it started to ignore me sometime around 2008 and hasn't worked reliably since. We have tried to tell them since then.

I know Google runs a lot of experiments all the time but this one has been morenor less consistently ignored for me.

[leoh]

Can you offer a concrete example?

[skinkestek]

Here you are, that is unless Google has misspelled their own name a bunch of times on their own pages in a tiny font, white on white or otherwise unreadable:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=nn&q=%22goolge%22

Edit: this used to work before and sometimes works now in some settings. This was just the first thing that popped into my head and I don't care about jow many people misspell Google, but it is infuriating when they do it as you try to find information on a rare error message or something.

[skinkestek]

Hi again leoh. Did you try searching for "goolge" like I suggested yesterday?

If so can you confirm my results?

If not, can I have your cookies (just joking).

If you happen to work at Google, can you tell them that this is another way that they drive even previously ardent fans to hope that Google will sooner or later be split up so they can start focusing on search again instead of plotting for world domination.

[qyi]

Give me access to a machine that isn't blocked from Google, and I will.

[de_nied]

Google also has verbatim search, which works a lot better than quotes, but still fails with some symbol keys.

[spurgu]

Which you cannot seem to be able to set as default.

[rozab]

Everything in this comment is verifiably false. Like, easily.

[skinkestek]

Much of it verifiable true. As in: I've sadly verified it myself for over a decade. The doublequotes thing for example has just been a habit for me, it hardly worked.

Getting captchas for inurl (or similar "advanced" techniques has also happened to me, but only two times that I can think of now.