Ask HN: have Google search results worsened?

It seem like over the last 6 months to a year the quality of google search results has gone down significantly.

It's not really subtle either. I'm coming across outright broken links on the first page of results fairly regularly. Other times, the quality of the linked site is so bad that I can't even view the content (e.g. popups that obscure the entire view of the page that I have no way of closing, broken javascript that doesn't let me view the content, or forced subscriptions that prevent me from viewing the content).

Sometimes it's a little more subjective, but it's things like ranking spam, ad-riddled sites over official documentation when googling for exact API terms.

Has anyone else noticed this?

13 points | by d23 1766 days ago

9 comments

  • ksaj 1765 days ago
    I share the first and last name of the father of a well known celebrity. If I ego surf my name, even in quotes and including -<celeb-name>, it still very rapidly degrades to articles about that negated celebrity name.

    A search of

    > "myname commonlastname" -celebname

    should never return results for "celebname commonlastname" and the search pattern quite clearly forbids the connection of these two pieces of the search clauses in that way.

    It has only been the case in recent years that I noticed "-" went from "minus" to "only for the first couple hits, then do the complete opposite." IMO it is a huge and annoying bug.

    Also, for a while Google's results page used to show a pic of me and a link to my twitter account, but with celeb-father's personal data. That was weird.

  • java-man 1766 days ago
    Yes, they surely did. I've seen google return a few results to common programming topics. I've seen google return results where the first page contains not a single relevant link. I've seen google return results which contains none of the query keywords.

    Get what you paid for, I suppose.

  • gesman 1766 days ago
    It became extremely hard-to-impossible to find non-commercially inflated opinions about places, products and pretty much anything else.

    Pretty much first 1-10 pages of google are filled with ads disguised as "organic" results.

    Many of these pages are coming from adwords "sponsors".

  • CM30 1766 days ago
    Yes. The amount of times I've seen Google return results with one or more terms removed alone is proof of that. In the old days, they at least tried to find relevant results when your query had no quotation marks around it. Now any remotely specialised query leaving them off will find half the page filled with irrelevant results labelled 'missing [term you actually cared about]'.

    Large sites certainly seem to be overrepresented in their results now too.

  • jfoster 1765 days ago
    I think this is real. In my niche, I've seen some sites that are obviously gaming Google and getting away with it, as well as Google being biased toward older (but aging) sites.

    I don't think it's necessarily that Google's algorithm has become worse as much as it is just sites gaming Google a whole lot more. A lot of the most basic blackhat SEO techniques still seem to be working quite well. I think that problem leads Google toward trusting the older results more, which results in the second effect. I imagine it's a balancing act for them.

    I think there will be a third wave of search engines some day. Google's approach has worked great until now, but I can't imagine it will continue to work well in 10 - 20 years from now.

  • BjoernKW 1765 days ago
    I think this depends on what you're searching for. For anything with a consumer appeal this is probably true.

    When searching for software-related information, however, the search result quality has largely stayed the same or got even better (from my personal point of view, at least).

    Yes, there are ad-riddled sites with notification requests, popups, newsletter subscriptions and whatnot but for the most part the results still consist of Stack Overflow answers, trustworthy sites (such as Mkyong.com or Baeldung for Java-related information) and official documentation.

  • tmm84 1763 days ago
    I've noticed the search results get more and more centered around hot spot sites. My most hated is when xyz site is shown and it just runs a search on that site's internal search that shows 0 results. I just don't understand the idea of making it seem like that site had something when it totally didn't.

    What is even weirder are the Chrome recommended pages. I have noticed more and more ads disguised as articles being recommended.

  • codingslave 1765 days ago
    I think its the case that the spammers have won the battle against google. If you read google's last earnings report, they list internet spam as a risk to their business. As far as I am concerned, google is already borderline useless, the search results are all generic articles that provide no value. I find myself using reddit for information much more often.
    [-]
    • Jonnax 1764 days ago
      I think Google's utility took a huge drop when they removed the discussions filter.

      I think their goal was to centralise internet discussion into Google+ but Reddit took it instead.

  • mgamache 1766 days ago
    Google has moved to boost sites with high rank. This gives few 'bad' results, but leads to less authoritative and complete results from the long tail of internet sources. I think this is a response to Black Hat SEO.