[tomatofrank]

Last night I watched a YouTube video that had a song in the background that I hadn't heard but really liked. I pulled up Shazam but it didn't recognize the song, so I took to Google. I entered the lyric and added the search terms "lyrics" and "r&b" at the end. Google returned 4 YouTube videos to songs that didn't contain the lyric, a link to a Boyz II Men song on Genius that didn't contain the lyric (good job Google, you know an R&B band), a link to peterbe.com to find a song by lyrics, and a bunch of other useless links. I clicked on to page 2, which hilariously presented 3 of the 4 YouTube videos that were on page 1.

I was immediately turned off, so I pulled up DuckDuckGo and Bing, entered the same exact query, and both engines returned the song I was looking for in the first result. I laughed out loud.

I then thought to myself, "I wonder how many pages I would have had to flip through in Google to find this result." Eventually, I found it. It was the 68th result on page 7.

[heavyset_go]

I'm still bitter that they've deprioritized results from SongMeanings.net in favor of garbage like Genius. The former is one of the only sources for lyrics from smaller acts, especially from the 90's to early 2010's. Since it's from the pre-Web 2.0 era, it's disappeared from Google's search results.

[shiftpgdn]

Same with Sheldon Brown’s website on bicycle maintenance. Much of the information on his site is still the best resource on the internet but instead Google would rather serve irrelevant results that show ads.

[stavros]

Same with all organic content. It's just all bullshit SEO spam now, I haven't landed on some dude's blog in ages, and some dude's blog is my favorite part of the web.

[hetspookjee]

It’s only a matter of time till it gets ripped and hosted on another ad filled website like all the fake stack overflow websites these days. So at least the material is not lost.

[gregmac]

> but instead Google would rather serve irrelevant results that show ads.

Does showing Google Adsense ads actually result in a higher ranking in organic search results?

It makes total sense for their business model, to the detriment of users. I've just never considered that before.

[vocram]

Gosh! It’s been a while that none of my searches ended up on that site. Now I know the reason.

[prox]

Same with images, I used to search for historical images, but it’s all a wave of stockimage this and that, and ofcourse flipping pinterest, which usually is just a link to real content anyway.

Google Search is aptly named, for finding something relevant and without ads plastering is almost impossible.

Anyway, I am happy with DDG now.

[Tenoke]

I get songmeanings from Google sometimes but I personally like Genius due to the annotated and upvote/downvoted comments and it is a more visited site so I get why it's ranked higher.

[llamataboot]

Maybe someday web 7.0 will remember than engagement doesn't equal quality and there's a long enough tail of people that would pay for a good search engine that they'd support your small company just fine, and the hockey sticks, venture capitalists, and the masses can go drown in adwords.

[tomatofrank]

Totally agree. Genius is such a great app. I remember being pretty upset when I read this article a few years ago, which shed light on Google's anti-competitive behavior against small companies that make a difference that Google can't make themselves.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius-law...

[lumost]

I don't know anything about google internals, but in many other applications the search engine is optimized on long-term engagement and profit data. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out google optimized page rankings based on the profit google earns from it's ad business on the page.

[tomatofrank]

The evidence supporting this is the 4 YouTube videos at the top of the list, followed by 3 of those 4 YouTube videos on page 2 (LOL).

[gambiting]

Google results have for a while stopped having anything to do with the actual search query. In the past they were magical, like Google could almost read your mind and guess exactly what you mean, but nowadays you can type in the exact search string, and still have the first page of results where Google just ommited half of the string to give you sponsored content. Like even for simple "C# <name of class>" why are the first few results for pages that sell programming courses?????

It's gone to absolute shitter and it's just not worth using outside of a very narrow set of circumstances(when you actually do want to buy something I guess?)

[hda111]

Seems like the SEO people have successfully reverse engineered Google‘s algorithms.

[stevenicr]

I must disagree with this notion.

For one, google now encourages and helps SEO - it's no longer a taboo term that leads to lifetime blacklisting - so google is publicly explaining and apologizing sometimes to SEO's (and others who listen/watch/read john mueller and co)

secondly in reference to the bad results and SEOs ruined google - um no. Google ruined google. Google went to war against SEO and disappeared much of the good on the web as collateral damage.

Google also got creative with ranking things based on things that push youtube up and other google properties for many results - as well as news type publications - which means for many queries it's now pay to play - pay adwords to rank 1st page or lose 90%+ visibility. And many good sites can't afford to pay per click to be on the first page.

Google is giving you results it wants you to think are 'good' - which has been pushing many of the results we actually want far and away. (Which interestingly sends more traffic to google properties adding to their value, and forces other to pay for adwords or not be seen by most in the world)

in my humble, and yet biased, and not very broadly researched (fairly focused), opinion.

[Guest42]

That’s an interesting point. Was this passively intentional from Google? What methods could be used to generate more accurate results? How accurate do they want the results?

[nicce]

If the business model would be somehow changed to non-ad based, then there might motivation for the change.

[thfuran]

Everyone selling something would still have strong incentive to SEO themselves to the top.

[nicce]

You could filter those sites manually by yourself, if that is the only negative point.

[anaganisk]

Or google, they’re just interested in making more money

[PragmaticPulp]

I have the opposite experience most of the time. I’ve been trying to use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine but I end up clicking my Google bookmark a lot of the time because the DDG results are so low quality.

I have no doubt there are edge cases where Bing/DDG outperform Google, but most of the time I have better luck with Google.

[tomatofrank]

Yeah, Google is still my default browser, though I haven't used other engines enough to develop a strong opinion here.

I'll add that I could have been more clever with my query. For instance, if I surround the lyric in quotes, Google returns the right result first.

Original query: like you didn't care I don't know why lyrics r&b

Improved query: "like you didn't care I don't know why" lyrics r&b

At the end of the day, I'm not frustrated with Google. I use it every day and it saves me lots of time. It just amuses me that in some cases, other engines that probably use simpler search algorithms are objectively better. And in this case, I think it's fair to expect Google to produce the right result on page 1.

[ryantgtg]

Most of the time duckduckgo doesn’t even acknowledge quotations. I can’t tell if it’s because there aren’t results for when the query contains quotations or if they simply don’t acknowledge them most of the time. Either way it’s annoying and it makes me go back to google every time.

[zelphirkalt]

I think you also need to put a + in front, for ddg to pay attention.

[tomatofrank]

Do you have an example query?

[ryantgtg]

These are some I found in my search history, where I then switched to !g. Not sure if all these examples still fail to produce results with the matching string (but they still seem to have issues, upon a quick glance):

"packages not in the aur"

rake "invalid session id"

"pacman -Qm"

arch "The pgAdmin 4 server could not be contacted"

"previous definition of HTML_NAMESPACE was here"

illustrator "print preview" is darker

systemd Loaded: bad-setting "has a bad unit file setting"

[tsimionescu]

Funny enough, when I search for your second query on Google right now, the top result for me is your comment right here.

[hunter-gatherer]

I'm still on dogpile. It gets me where I need to go most of the time.

[tomatofrank]

I'll check it out!

[Semaphor]

I’m now using Kagi (beta paid search engine), but I have used DDG for some years and rarely had to fall back to google. Most of the time it was only to make sure there really is no result, as DDG ignores what you searched for even more aggressively than Google.

[kauguste281]

Same here, one thing I find especially annoying with Bing/DDG/Brave is that they not only return worse results, but sometimes completely nuke certain search terms, e.g. try "aoi jav" (NSFW) in Bing image and video search. It gives zero results. Regular text search gives a few, but also looks heavily censored. Try the same thing in Google and you get millions of results.

Don't fully understand what is going on here. Safe search is disabled. Worse results would be expected, but zero results seems like an excessive amount of censorship. Other similar search terms work fine.

[yeuxardents]

I have found that for technical results, and niche programming, and anything really to do with IT, google gives top results. For just about everything else, use any other search engine.

[gambiting]

Absolutely opposite of that in my experience. Search for anything technical and Google gives me pages selling programming courses, or it just omits the technical part of the query(like the name of the class) and serves pages upon pages of generic results that have absolutely nothing to do with what I'm searching for. It used to be the top engine for programming-related searches, now it's easily the worst.

[yeuxardents]

Its possible that the VPN I am typically on changes my results from yours, as my VPN is quite specific to a research institution, and it is known how google curates results based on that information.

[pja]

Has to be pretty niche for that still to be the case in my experience. If I search for help on, say, a bit of python syntax I get endless low quality webpages from Google.

[geysersam]

Maybe they get the most of their user feedback from their own engineers.

[a_victor]

have you tried Bing recently? I tried DDG for almost a year and in every other search I had to switch to Google. I started using Bing a couple months ago and now I only try Google as a last resort (and most often than not I end up not finding what I want)

[Tenoke]

For what is worth, DDG's main provider is Bing so it's nor surprising they returned similar results.

[tomatofrank]

Oh that's interesting, TIL.

[rattray]

Source?

[Tenoke]

>We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing[0]

They add more than just Bing results as they mention but it's the main provider. You can also confirm by checking results for different queries.

0. https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

[colordrops]

It's getting bad enough where I'll put in a two word search, and one of them is unique and the obvious main keyword, but not necessarily obscure, and somehow the first several results still don't have the word. It's frustrating to the extreme.

[nefitty]

You can recreate this behavior with HN's Algolia search API. The common parameter that behaves how we expect is "query". Using "similarQuery" causes all sorts of weird behavior. I think it drops words until it find results, and considers each token optional.

It kinda gave me insight I to why Google is sucking so bad. Give us the option at least.

[sbierwagen]

The same thing happened to me! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544730

Google results for lyrics used to be filled with hundreds of scummy SEOed sites that stole content from each other. I wonder if some SEO-blocking algo change has had the effect of blocking all song lyrics from google results.

[pps]

I tried for few months, but unfortunately DDG results are really poor for local searches. Whenever I want to find something in Polish, half of the results are from some autotranslated websites. Also Google is the only one that shows local business in a useful way.

[vanderZwan]

Sounds like a pretty easy division of when to use which search engine though, no? Better than the hit-or-miss issue being completely random at least

[pps]

Absolutely! I switched back to Google as default, but still search things also with DDG.

[dec0dedab0de]

Under Search tools there is a toggle for all results/verbatim. If you switch it to verbatim it will give you something closer to you want. I hate that it is this way, and that most of the old google hacking tricks don't work.

The problem is that Google is no longer a search engine for the world wide web. It is an app that can answer questions, that happens to also have a web front end

[mv4]

but they reported great financial results.

[tyingq]

Now that they are taking every spot above the fold for ads for any lucrative query, it will be much harder to maintain YoY % revenue growth figures that exceed viewership growth. Or bigger video monitors, I guess, that make the 'fold' taller.

[tomatofrank]

fuck yeah they did :P

[FpUser]

I do not hold any love for Google but to be fair when I look up songs by lyrics, or lyrics by the name of the song or the combination it works just fine for me.

But they probably know that I never klick on ads unless specifically searching to buy something

[gundmc]

What was the lyric?

[tomatofrank]

"like you didn't care I don't know why lyrics r&b" was my query

[nkurz]

It would be nice if this worked, but in Google's defense, this is an odd combination of an exact search phrase of common words and then a couple categorical terms that don't have to actually appear on the page. If you help it by searching for just the quoted phrase you want without the additional terms it puts the result you want both as the top result and in a pullout at the top of the page: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22like+you+didn%27t+care+I+...

[Lewton]

But google used to be able to handle cases like this without quotes...

[tomatofrank]

Haha yeah, I was wondering when someone would suggest this. Last night, after I got the result back immediately from DuckDuckGo and Bing, I returned to Google and added quotes around the lyric itself, and it returned the right result immediately.

[nitrogen]

A simple keyword search wouldn't get so confused.

[gfxgirl]

I'm going to point to this from yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185229

It's easy to judge but AFAIK if they prioritize order it's possible more searches come up with bad results than good. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try to do better but we, or a least I, really have no idea which is better, on average, order dependent or order independent.

[rhizome]

Or if they assumed the order was meaningful, which they apparently don't.

They only hire the best of the best!

[CRConrad]

What, did you really have 'lyrics r&b' inside the double quotes? That's not part of the phrase in the lyrics (I'd guess), so your own fault then.

[fsckboy]

I wouldn't expect that "r&b" would help the query.

and DDG, first result

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=like+you+didn%27t+care+I+do...

[heavyset_go]

Was it Save Your Tears by The Weeknd?

[tomatofrank]

Yup! The version I was looking for was a slowed & reverb version that I later found on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkXCAKgqD3M

[heavyset_go]

I was able to find it with this search: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22like+you+didn%27t+care+I+...

[gundmc]

Wow, same results here. That's pretty poor.

[deanCommie]

Weirdly the problem is "r&b". If you take that off you get the song immediately...