[michaelgrosner2]

I literally only hear that Google search is bad from HN. No one else in my daily life - my family, friends, people out at my gym or grocery store - ever complain that Google search is bad. In fact, Google is still the default for looking up information anywhere. It's sentiments like this that make you realize how much of a bubble HN exists in.

OTOH, people have trouble using GMail, google home, or ban YouTube in their house for their kids. Next to no one uses Android, etc.

[bobinux]

Haven't you noticed how search results quality has changed let us say from 2007-2013 and comparing recent time period? I used to get the best information, websites, media material that I was looking from the rarest sources on the web, even probably rare to find given my geo location. Today I usually get information not by the quality, but from "the biggest brands" on the web. I was surprised that I didn't find one specific forum in over 20 search pages, but then I had checked my bookmarks and the site was still running and functional and contained what I was exactly looking by the keywords and other possible search factors. These days I just feel I get the information sources that are the most advertised or well branded, but do not reflect the accuracy of what I'm looking for.

[pxoe]

it's starting to get really hard to believe that, as people repeat 'wow, search used to be better and now it's trash', remembering only the good parts, rewriting their memories of it, and just having it literally be 'well somebody said it, so it must be true'. 'i remember how it used to be a decade ago', well, sure you do. and yeah, somebody could dig out their search history takeouts and do some kind of opinionated pondering about it, but this ain't it.

and if one wants to experience real search results difference, just switch back to, say, duckduckgo for a bit, and see how many times you just end up giving up and googling stuff instead.

[Jochim]

Google results are markedly worse than they used to be. SEO spam routinely pushes the site/content I'm searching for down/off the page. These sites are often just straight up copies of StackOverflow.

My perception is that search queries need to be much more specific in order to avoid SEO trash as well. It used to be fairly common to find special interest forums when looking for product reviews. Now the first page is almost exclusively auto-generated spam sites referral linking to Amazon product pages. Adding "Reddit" sometimes provides helpful advice but there's often a lack of in depth insight that was present before.

[doublepg23]

DDG just uses Bing though, it’s bad but Bing was never particularly good.

[mikymoothrowa]

DDG uses bing only for images AFAIK. Has that changed?

[xnx]

DDG is a reskin of Bing web search.

[TheHappyOddish]

I pondered on this for a while, unsure if my memory was false. Then I switched to Kagi and it felt like Google 15 years ago. I was served the content I was looking for, not the content Google wants me to look at. It's not perfect, but 9/10 cases (and I do 50+ searches a day) it's great, and validates my perception of the quality of Google going down (or less cynically, the likelihood that Google is optimising for the general public, and I'm an outlier).

[Barrin92]

because the rarest sources of the web were relatively speaking much more popular back then when the internet had about 20 pages in total. The entire scale of the web has been growing x-fold every year.

So what was relatively relevant back then is now irrelevant to a general audience and as a result has been pushed back. You could argue Google should bias search much more towards individual history but that has its own pitfalls, both in terms of results and privacy wise.

Basically blame your fellow searchers for clicking and wanting big brand stuff, Google just gives you what the internet considers relevant.

[Jochim]

I blame Google and the third party ad model for profiting from and encouraging the creation of the lowest quality cash grabs. Search for any kind of product review and you're faced with a sea of auto-generated shit, the only purpose of which is to serve you an ad and hope you click an amazon affiliate link. It's a prime example that the "value" delivered isn't value to society or the individuals using the service.

[eitland]

Can't be the whole explanation for why you cannot find them with Google anymore: search.marginalia.nu manages to find the

[marginalia_nu]

To be fair Marginalia Search is very much not a general-purpose search engine.

If I was trying to cater to a broader set of use cases and users, I'd probably have more of Google's problems as a result.

[moultano]

Send me your queries to debug if you remember them.

[eitland]

I stopped using google a while ago, but try searching for something unusual, add doublequotes around it and notice how your search engine blatantly ignores double quotes (and even your verbatim operator) in order to inflate results.

This cost many minutes most times and is seriously annoying because the search engine ignores me and lies to me.

Machines shouldn't do that.

[gspetr]

>Next to no one uses Android

Wait, what?

Who's in the bubble now?

[anifru]

I thought it was clear the poster was talking about their daily life, and not commenting on world statistics.

[college_physics]

The fact that somebody writing on HN doesnt know this shows you how low information the world really is.

We generally assume too much about the shared knowledge basis. There would be much less friction if we could improve on that

[scrollaway]

American bubble. US people don’t realise the world runs on Android.

[simplotek]

> American bubble. US people don’t realise the world runs on Android.

It's not even an American bubble. Some sources show that the iPhine market share in the US is only slightly above 50%.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/north-amer...

[koube]

This could be a regional experience. Some states have 70% apple market share, with Rhode Island having 80%[0]. The difference could be even greater for smaller regions within a state.

[0]: https://deviceatlas.com/blog/mobile-os-popularity-by-us-stat...

[godelski]

If Android users are roughly 50% in the US, then the likelihood of knowing zero people that use Android is quite small. We can think of this as roughly each of your friends tossing a coin and all of them landing heads. If they do, that's a pretty biased bubble (because it isn't a pure random process, but you also don't have a representative and random sample)

[charcircuit]

The statistics of a population are not unifrom across it's subpopulations.

[mikymoothrowa]

especially because of this whole imessage/rcs thing, your friends are extremely more likely to be using the same OS as you.

[mike_d]

> If Android users are roughly 50% in the US, then the likelihood of knowing zero people that use Android is quite small.

If you mostly associate with people who are on pre-paid cell phone plans they got at Walmart or a gas station, you'll see a high concentration of Android. Among people who are in technology or often purchase luxury goods, most your friends with have iPhones.

[TheHappyOddish]

Is this downvoted by salty Android users, or actually disagreed upon?

Obviously it's a bell curve - not all Android users are cheap and not all iPhone users are luxary goods providers, but my experience (Australia) reflects this generalisation broadly.

[Entinel]

This is the answer here. I believe iOS wins the US but world wide Android has a 72% market share.

[bobbyrullo]

Even in the US it's like 45% Android, so "no one uses android" is absurd in any context.

[chihuahua]

"I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him." - famous quote from 1972

[rubatuga]

Maybe OP is saying nobody important uses android

[stocknoob]

You need to multiply the market share by the wealth of the participants.

What fraction of the world’s wealth (easier to measure than influence) runs on Android? Elon using iOS has more influence than how many impoverished billions?

This is why German and Japanese are often localized before other languages with more speakers.

Not saying it’s right, but just pointing out the reality. The world runs based on the decision makers, who use iOS.

[vineyardmike]

> Elon using iOS has more influence than how many impoverished billions?

Does he buy that many phones? /S

I agree with your point, but catering to luxury users certainly has an advantage. Android, globally, is doing ok.

[killingtime74]

Lol. If you want to talk wealth, then it doesn’t matter again because people with enough money have multiple phones, iOS and Android.

[talleyrand]

I've heard this over and over on HN in recent years and I simply don't understand it. Almost any Google search I run has just what I am looking for as the first or second choice. Google frequently knows what I am looking for after I type in the first few words of the search! Are HN people not logged in when they search?

[eitland]

For me it is not a problem with ordinary searches: directions, recipes etc, no problem.

But try to find a specific error message from an npm package!

First you get useless results because Google found something it rather wanted to show you.

Then you add doublequotes and realize the Google results are full of utterly irrelevant pages lacking half my keywords.

[unsui]

> Next to no one uses Android, etc.

Seems like a self-selection bias, possibly based on socio-economic factors that determine who you surround yourself with.

In my personal circles, I only know 1 person who uses iPhone, everyone else uses android.

[ifyoubuildit]

In some sense, it could seem better to a lot of people just because for whatever query you can imagine there is probably a top N listicle that search will happily present to you, even if it is auto generated nonsense.

> Next to no one uses Android, etc.

That is sarcasm right? I can't quite tell.

[Iwan-Zotow]

US is mostly apple world

[metamet]

"Mostly" being a minor majority, only recently established (September, 2022)?

> For the first time ever, there are more iPhones in use in the US than any other type of smartphone. Citing data from analytics firm Counterpoint Research, the Financial Times reports the iPhone overtook the entire Android ecosystem in June to claim 50 percent of US market share

[...]

> By 2010, two years after its debut, Android overtook iOS to claim the larger install base. Ever since then, Google’s mobile operating system has been the dominant force in the global smartphone market, claiming more than 70 percent market share as of 2022, according to Statcounter.

https://www.engadget.com/iphone-overtakes-android-us-market-...

[ssnistfajen]

Android has a 48.2% mobile OS market share in the US as of November 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

Claiming "next to no one uses Android" is just plain wrong even in the US.

[IAmNotACellist]

In my daily life, all my tech coworkers and zoomer (and older) friends in VRC say it's horrible, myself included. The only people who don't have a problem are it are my very casual-use family members.

TikTok search is apparently better. My version of that is "site:reddit.com", but even that's gotten worse as the culture there becomes more censorious, echo-chambery, and more insane.

[swarnie]

To expand on this how often do you have a conversation with someone where you evaluate or recommend search engines? I'm going to assume never because that would be both weird and boring.

[eitland]

I work in an environment where this might come up once a month or something on slack or in meetings etc.

[lappet]

Most people I know use Android. I have noticed Android and IPhone users have their own bubbles.

[aksx]

Maybe because other people search in different places. Events/Businesses: Google Maps, Instagram Trend/Tutorials: Tiktok, IG Reels News: Twitter/Social Media/News Outlet of choice

Google is for searching new sources of information and either it’s instant (google info box) or takes too long which makes a lasting memory about it being painful.

[ummonk]

My mother (quite the opposite of a techie) complains about how hard it is to find stuff on Google - especially unbiased stuff that isn't being promoted by a company or individual with a promotional / commercial agenda.

I don't think the issue for this is with changes Google has made, but rather with the increasing extent to which it's targeted by SEO spam.

[westernpopular]

Because non-tech people don't think about which search engine they're using. Doesn't mean it's not bad.

[TheRealPomax]

People care when things are bad. They don't care when things are fine. Not good or great, but fine. It gets normal folks the information they were looking for the vast majority of the time. Whether the results "got worse" is irrelevant when the results are still what people were looking for.

[eitland]

Many continued to use Altavista or something until a friendly sysadmin or another early user showed them Google.

Same with IE, if no one showed them Firefox they just stuck with IE.

[lta]

I was wondering and started asking around me, and while they probably don't express it the same we people here do, a significant proportion of the people I asked (~50%) noticed that they spend more time avoiding bad quality connect

[hypnotortoise]

You should probably listen to this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/

[mda]

Your second paragraph points that you are living in a bubble as well.

[epolanski]

I hear it often in my circles that search has degraded.

[xwdv]

It’s not a bubble. If you want to hear basic opinions from the everyday person then sure, go talk to your gym bros and grocery store Facebook moms about Google. That’s if you’re not met with blank stares. They don’t know what they don’t know.

HN is a much more distinguished community possessing vast technical knowledge. We can approach products from beyond the level of the everyday person and can give deeper appraisal of their worth. Some here may have even built those products, or at least could build a distilled version of them in a weekend for fun.

[eitland]

Maybe because we were early power users and knew how well it used to work?