[l33t2328]

> Frankly, if it’s not reliable as a tool, it has no real value

This is exactly the ridiculous kind of hyperbole I come to HN for.

If you honestly can’t find any value in using Google despite its unreliability, you were probably expecting too much of it to begin with.

[colordrops]

Your expectations are too low. We all remember google in it's heyday when it returned honest results, so we know what's possible.

[dirtybird04]

That was when silicon valley was still run by computer nerds. Those days aren't coming back buddy, time to move on

[omoikane]

I remember the days when internet as a whole were simpler in terms of contents and users, and search engines reflected that simpicity. I am not sure if it's possible to go back to those days.

[car_analogy]

If only there was a large, old search engine, that still had a web index from the days before SEO spam, that it could prioritize over newer results.

[colordrops]

Or a search engine with zetabytes of data and the world's largest collection of AI PhDs. It could be possible that they have the advantage over some scam artist smoking cigs in front of a screen at 3am, considering it's their system.

[kevin_thibedeau]

A more complex web landscape doesn't explain why the entire first page of results is very often just ads and e-commerce sites.

[vkou]

> we know what's possible.

We know its possible to do in the Internet of 2004.

The Internet of 2004 no longer exists, the Internet of 2022 is a very different problem for search to solve.

[thatguy0900]

I wonder if google could even return to its heyday if it wanted. Even if they stopped playing dumb games with search there a alot more malicious actors whose entire career is to fuck up search results now.

[ImPostingOnHN]

I feel like low-quality advertising results, low-quality-match results, and scammy results are at least 3 different bad search result types to get, and folks here are talking about the former

of course, google gets paid to show them, and I don't think anyone here realistically expects google to voluntarily stop intentionally fucking up search results unless it somehow means a larger paycheck to them

[colordrops]

Reducing yearly revenue from 250 billion to 200 billion seems like a reasonable tradeoff for not hobbling and annoying more than half the population of the earth and also maintaining brand longevity. Right now they are further and further ripening for disruption by an upstart.

[malfist]

Ah yes, the good ol' days of content farms copying from stack overflow, or did you mean the good ol' days of buying back links? Or the good ol' days of web rings?

Let's face it, the heyday of honest results are just as mythical as the political "good ol' days".

[sph]

> the good ol' days of web rings

I honestly don't get your snark. Those were the good old days of the Internet, when SEO spam and PageRank wasn't a thing. Then Google came and made the Internet even better, then it turned to shit, and here we are. And web rings were great, you take that back.

So yes, there was a period of time when the Internet was in some ways better than nowadays. Now I'm not saying that everything that happened since is bad, but Internet search and signal-to-noise ratio has definitely fallen off a cliff.

Let's enjoy the good days of siloes and SEO optimization. I doubt it'll get better.

[strbean]

Eh, there were a few periods of "glory days". Usually in the months after Google's latest crackdown on one of the SEO techniques you mentioned.

[corrral]

Notably, around `08 or `09, these cycles stopped. From the outside, it looks like Google stopped trying to fight spam and just gave a bunch of huge sites a permanent boost in rankings instead, so at least some of your results might not be spammy garbage.

[naravara]

Also honest content moved into video and podcasting formats (that are harder to index) or inside walled gardens like Twitter or Facebook. It's like if the internet was a sea and Google was the ship used to navigate it, the water has dried up and now it's just craggy shoals we have to navigate around to get anywhere.

[Croftengea]

google.stanford.edu :)

[sitkack]

https://altavista.com it runs on the latest top end Alpha processors.

[dizhn]

http://altavista.digital.com

I honestly switched to google from alltheweb and altavista initially because of the easier name and muscle memory taking hold. To this day I believe Altavista was better when google first took off.