Ask HN: Is Google's search quality declining?

1 pointsby dc957a31348 anni fa2 comments

A few minutes ago I wanted to find the table of contents for a book from high school—a collection of short stories called Characters in Conflict. I knew a few of the story titles, so I did a multiple-phrase search, like so:

  "to build a fire" "harrison bergeron" "characters in conflict"

The results from a Google search are near useless. Curious, I tried DuckDuckGo (which I've heard of but don't regularly use). The fifth result was this page, https://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA09833406?l=en, which had a nice text table of contents.

How is it possible that Google, with its vast resources, isn't showing me this page for my search? Is it possible that it was missed in the crawl?

The only reason I tried DuckDuckGo in the first place was a hunch that for research, Google has actually gotten worse. It seems almost too clever for its own good. It can interpret natural language queries and I can use it to zero in on a celebrity's name I don't know just by typing a few related words—and yet when I want to use it to find a needle in a haystack, it's hit or miss.

Anyone else experience the same thing, or is this an n=1 situation?

2 comments

qnsi8 anni fa

For me, the problem is with how search is being gamed with content marketing.

Lately I cant manage to find any good articles using search - I very often do subsearch on hackernews to see discussions

rajnp8 anni fa

Recently I started using DDG and I find it surprisingly good. I do parallel searches between DDG and google, DDG returns much more relevant results than google. Based on my experience I find DDG has improved drastically.