[christoph]

The internet feels like a desolate waste ground to me at the moment. I give up pretty quickly these days "surfing the web", as I just get fed up with the constant never ending search results filled with blogspam, news sites that constantly pester you with modal dialogs from the microsecond you land on them, every site begging you for money, your email address or moaning at you because you're running an adblocker. Or sites just plain not loading, because you forgot you're still connected to a VPN, or using Apples private relay.

I occasionally like to look at the DailyMail but when it complains and blocks me for using an adblocker I just nope out. I've seen what that site looks like without serious adblocking and I'm astounded any sane person could ever endure that experience. It's bad enough with adblocking.

The only places I really visit now are small forums, a few Reddits, HN obviously and not much else.

As an example of just how broken and manipulative it all is. Open Google. Search for apples.

It tells me it found 8,540,000,000 results (0.38 seconds). Wow. Big DATA! Click to page 10. Click to page 11. That's the last page for me now and it now says at the top: Page 11 of about 103 results (0.70 seconds).

That seems pretty broken to me for the biggest search engine on the internet. Oh and forget trying to manipulate the query string like the good old days, it's now just a big old long list of encrypted garbage.

[eddythompson80]

> It tells me it found 8,540,000,000 results (0.38 seconds).

Lol, that takes me back to CS101 in college circa 2004. Our professor Loved Google at the time. When he was introducing binary search he opened google and did a search a showed us that top number. Then said “This is the POWER of binary search!!” Ngl, I was impressed at the time. It’s a funny memory.

[drpixie]

You got 11 pages of apples - you did well ;)

I'm told I got 8,760,000,000 "results" but only get to see 1 page of 45 links (some being ads). The "more" page shows only 8 recipes, another "more" another 8 recipes, then my only choice is "less"!

Of 9 billion results, I can see only 60.

Google is broken. I thought it would happen, but I did think they would last longer than this.

[charcircuit]

>That seems pretty broken to me for the biggest search engine on the internet.

Not really. There isn't much value to be gained in ranking and sorting a bigger top N of the 8.5 billion results. It is better to encourage people to refine their queries to something less general.

[christoph]

I'm sorry, I don't like to argue on HN, but this is a really silly thing to say.

For instance, search for: "how voltage affects metal in a frozen liquids"

About 15,100,000 results (0.41 seconds), but you can't get past page 10. Page 10 of about 92 results (0.44 seconds)

And on page 10 is a result with this as it's description:

"lyrics to let it go. wolf pup for sale. the taste of chicago 2015 hours. crash landing auto water. prefect des yvelines france. 90s music hits playlist."

Sorry, but it's broken. You can argue until you're blue in the face, but it didn't used to work like this.

[reportgunner]

The amount of results is probably made up at this point.

[eddythompson80]

> It is better to encourage people to refine their queries to something less general

My search experience has been consistently the opposite. Google rejects more defined queries. The more terms you add to your queries, the more likely it’s that it’ll just ignore them.

This is a recent trend btw. It wasn’t that use 4 or 5 years ago, but it’s certainly increasingly random the more terms I add to my search query.

One of my biggest pet peeves with ChatGPT is how conversational I have to make my query to be. I can’t just type terms and let it figure them out. But that’s to be expected I guess. Google search seems to struggle with both atm. I have no doubt they are aware and working on it, but it just sucks atm

[drpixie]

I've observed the same. And the last few results might as well be random - no clear relationship to my search.