[jasonjei]

Google today feels nothing like the Google 24 years ago. It was magic and reliable and no nonsense.

I understand technology needs to change with gamification of SEO but I get so much frustration in my searching and often have to use Google in combination with site filtering keywords (e.g, site:stackoverflow.com). But it would be even more difficult to use if I didn’t even know what sites were trustworthy ``authorities.''

I just wish somebody would disrupt Google like Google did with search and email 2 decades ago. Searching on Alta Vista or Yahoo was a nightmare until Google came into our universe.

[safety1st]

I joined Facebook pretty early on, back when you needed to have an email address issued by a university to join. My posts from back then are pretty wild, all very personal stuff and conversations with friends.

I logged in today, not a single mention of a friend in any way, shape or form on my feed. No posts from friends. No comments from friends. No "here's what your friend liked."

Half of the content wasn't even stuff I was following, it was posts that were "similar" to something I liked or to some group I was in.

It's amazing what a bait and switch these companies pulled. They really leaned into it. Google barely resembles a search engine now. Facebook is basically just a billboard.

[underlipton]

It's immensely frustrating, as if you're of a certain age (I am), a non-trivial amount of your formative young adult relationship-building took place through Facebook. I remember having the prescience to lament that this wouldn't allow old relationships to fade away quietly, but instead, through the magic of social media, rot slowly. Joke's on me, it was that and worse.

Zuckerberg and co. muscled their way in and extracted value out of the dismantling of traditional social dynamics and cohesion, and left us with a hole where the scaffolding of youth should have been. Very Uber-esque. Actually, it describes any number of start-ups from the last 2 decades. Maybe "disruption" has a negative connotation for a reason.

[joenot443]

I think we just grew up. When I joined Facebook as a teenager in 2008, we essentially had no filter. Every thought, every photo, every relationship update - all of it was immediately shared to Facebook because at the time it was fun and novel and innocent.

For better or worse, millennials have become much more discretionary in what they post online than they were 15 years ago. I imagine Facebook had organic content from your real friends to show you then it probably would, the well's just run dry.

[the_snooze]

Those in-the-know use private group chats as social media. No "useful" recommendations that tend towards selling you stuff. No trolls swooping in to derail conversations. No capricious design changes. Just simple human-scale interaction.

[underlipton]

You used to have niche, semi-public forums. This had the combined benefit of a sustainable culture and moderation for those in the conversation, and an accessible knowledge-base for everyone else. Discord et al. are not a replacement for this.

[dpig_]

ShowHN: Automate your group-chat banter with ChatShitGPT.

[ben_w]

I've noticed the same with Facebook. It's why I've stopped even bothering to log into the website.

[rjbwork]

Been using Kagi for a couple months. Seems pretty good to me.

[al_borland]

Been using it for a year and I hope I never have to go back. It is so much better in every way. It’s amazing how many nice features can be added when there isn’t any worry about how it will impact ad revenue.

[chrisweekly]

I got tired of poor search experience on Google and switched to DDG, used it by default for a couple years (resorting to !g maybe 10-20% of the time). But for the last 6? months with Kagi, it's literally 0 times I've even been tempted. Paying $5/mo to be a customer and not the product, having my privacy respected, and enjoying consistent access to excellent search results is IME equivalent to switching from browsing without an adblocker to using ublock plus, or trying reader mode for the first time. It's transformative.

[ziml77]

I started using it 2 years ago. In the first few months I would flip to Google when I wasn't getting results out of Kagi. However I now have enough experience with Kagi that I trust if a query returning nothing useful on Kagi then it wouldn't on Google either. I have no reason to ever return to using Google search.

[CaptainOfCoit]

Same here, ~7 months with Kagi and replaced Google search 100% for me. Felt weird at first to pay for it, but after trialing it for a month or two, I now feel like I'm proud to pay for it, to ensure long-levity and sustainability. Best feature for me is probably the ability to rank domains up/down as I wish.

[lolinder]

I have high hopes for Kagi precisely because they're not trying to disrupt Google. As long as they stick to their current niche, they can do things to filter out the nonsense and surface good content without ever running the risk that their algorithms become the game that every website must play to compete.

[graboid]

Yup, to anyone reading this, I want to second-recommend Kagi. Also super-customizable.

[ofrzeta]

Sounds great, although it is not super cheap. Also interesting to note that they are creating the Orion browser (I recently downloaded on iOS).

[ramenbytes]

Yet another vote for Kagi. When I was on the free plan it felt like a secret weapon that I pulled out for tough searches. Happy to pay for it now. Now, they do have a similar AI summary feature, but it actually links the sources it used to come to its answer so you can check its work. You can turn it off too. I've also found Kagi staff to be fairly quick about bug fixes, though I've only reported one bug.

[pmlnr]

> It was magic and reliable and no nonsense.

The web was different as well.

[the_snooze]

The garbage web today is partially Google's own doing. They're the ones who created the incentives for websites to have cruft to satisfy the Google bot. They're the ones who capture all value from news outlets by aggregating and summarizing articles so people don't need to click on links.

Google isn't some dainty little startup. They're the dominant interface (search and browser!) through which most of the planet uses the internet.

[ssl-3]

Web pages are optimized for the most popular search engine.

If any of Ask Jeeves or Lycos or Webcrawler or AltaVista had risen to the top of the heap instead of Google, then web pages would have been optimized for that respective bot instead.

[the_snooze]

What you say is true, but it doesn't excuse Google for failing to take steps that mitigate what we're seeing today. All it would have taken was some restraint: some combination of being less dominant in the market (i.e., optimizing for a 90%-market-share search engine is different vs. 60%-market-share) and giving users more control over search results (e.g., allowing users to blacklist entire domains for themselves).

We have a garbage Google-specific web because websites didn't have to satisfy anyone else; not other search engines, and not even the users themselves. Instead of Google delivering customers to websites, Google positioned itself to be the only customer.

[ssl-3]

While it would be absurd for me to say that an advertising behemoth like Google has no influence on the decisions of users, it would also be absurd for me to say that Google is somehow empowered to force users to do...anything, at all.

Free will still exists. Nobody from Menlo Park has put a gun to anyone's head to make them use Google to search the web instead of Bing or DDG or Yandex or whatever.

> All it would have taken was some restraint: some combination of being less dominant in the market (i.e., optimizing for a 90%-market-share search engine is different vs. 60%-market-share)

So, let me get this straight: The idea is that Google Search sucks, and the suggested cause for this level of suck is that it is so popular that it causes many publishers to deliberately poison the well using Google-optimized SEO. (Or, more simply: That Google has reached critical mass, and that this is problematic for Google users.)

And, well: I don't disagree. That does appear to be the state of things.

But the apparent proposed corrective action is for it to somehow make itself less popular? By doing what, exactly? Sucking harder? Does it not already suck hard enough?

What a confounding paradox.

Wouldn't a simpler and less paradoxical plan of attack -- that anyone can accomplish completely and absolutely, starting right now -- be to just not use Google search at all for one's own dealings in life?

[underlipton]

Also: AMP.

[jasonjei]

I agree, but I remember when I was a university student I was easily able to search for answers for my queries. I was actually reliving some of my past and I tried to find the same info for a useful epiphany from many decades ago, and I couldn’t find it (even though the same engine gave me the answer decades ago)

[milesvp]

Very much this. It kills me when I search for something that I know for a fact still exists on the web, and there is no way of finding it through google. I used to comb through page 10+ regularly for hits for things related to my search, and now I’m pretty sure google doesn’t even compile hits after the first few pages.

[DavidSJ]

What was the query and epiphany?

[jasonjei]

One of them was looking at my old AP US History tests. I don’t have the exam question right in front of me, but I remember getting the answer wrong. I found the correct answer on Google pretty quickly. It was on an obscure fact of some former president. I didn’t find the answer in the first several search result pages. I remember getting the answer within the first 3-4 results when I had looked up why I got it wrong 22 years ago.

[DavidSJ]

Thank you.

[agmater]

Another good operator to know now is `before:2023`

[steve1977]

AltaVista was actually pretty good if you knew how to use its search operators. Google just enabled search for the masses so to speak. A bit like the iPhone of search engines.

[bluGill]

AltaVista was great until they quit running the crawler for a few months - I gave up when I searched something and the first 10 results were dead links. I'm told they got it running again just after I left, but I never looked back to see. (there is a lesson here)

[mrtksn]

I actually remember the first time I begin struggling with Google results and it turned out that Google was simply switching to an answer machine instead of a search engine.

As a long time Google user, I was used to search for phrases that might be written in articles related to the stuff that I’m looking for. I had to switch my mental model on how Google works, so instead of typing what might have been written in an article about the stuff I’m looking for I had to type my question.

Maybe it’s time for another unlearning phase and learn how to use the LLM dominant Google? I’m not sure yet, LLMs seem too unpredictable.

[mancerayder]

Google won because it was simple. Just type in the text box. Yahoo was a page full of junk and alta vista had a difficult to navigate search results. If I remember, it's been a while!

Google remains simple, but its output is corrupt.

[marcosdumay]

Google won because it didn't fill your result pages with trashy unrelated answers on the hope to show you more ads.

There were plenty of engines where you could just type a query and they would list sites for you.

[bluGill]

I'm not sure we can. In 2000 everyone had a homepage that they (poorly) maintained with links to places they found useful. This gave google a large set of data to mine for places that are useful and worth searching for. Not such things are not common and so google can't find the signal as easily. (people share links on social media but that isn't google searchable)

[underlipton]

You used to be able to see Twitter results in real time on Google. Facebook, too, early on, IIRC. Google could pay them to get access again, but... won't.

I suppose Google would have to somehow exit the personal data broker business to pull this off, too.

[masfuerte]

According to this article [1] last month, Google deliberately made search results worse in 2019 because they get more ad revenue from the spammier sites.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976