At some point it seems like Google switch to ML-based search instead of index based search. You can search for very specific combinations of lyrics and scenes: "eyes on me pineapple bucket of water house of cards chess time loop" and you won't surface a link to the music video featuring all of those things (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlzgDVLtU6g), you'll just get really generic results of the average of your query.
Has google completely stopped working for anyone else?
I can still search things, i get results but, they're an ordered list of popular places the engine is directing me to. Some kind of filtering is occurring on nearly every search i make that's making the results feel entirely useless.
Image search stopped working sometime ago and now it just runs an AI filter on whatever image you search for, tells you there's a man in the picture and gives up.
Youtube recommendations is always hundreds of videos i've watched already, with maybe 1-2 recommendations to new channels when i know there's millions of content creators out there struggling who it will never introduce me to. What happened to the rabbit holes of crazy youtube stuff you could go down?
This product is a shell of its old self, why did it stop working?
Google search is completely broken IMO. I stopped using Google search years ago and every time I go back on the off chance that it's bigger index has something that DuckDuckGo couldn't find for me.
Image search isn't great either but it still often gives me something close and that usually satisfies my image searching needs.
I still find YouTube recommendations quite good for me, but there are occasional ones I've watched already. I still go down its fun (and educational!) rabbit holes all the time.
Exact same experience, YouTube recommendations (in incognito without being logged in!) usually give me stuff related to the video in watching.
However when they don't, it's invariably to push some alt-right slop down my throat. Video is about a comedian? Suggestion "feminist woke takedown compilation". Video about news? Suggestion "$european_far_right_party's channel says gypsies are subhuman". Video about economics? Suggestion is Jordan Peterson ranting about something. And so on and so on. It's pretty tiring.
I see this argument in HN a lot, so I checked my search history (googled "search history") it seems I use it ~10-20 times a day, looked at individual searches e.g. last week, and except a few queries, I have found what I was looking at.
Yes it is hard to find some stuff in internet because it is filled with generated affiliate spam and walled gardens, Has Google stopped working for me? Nope It seems still alive and kicking.
> Has google completely stopped working for anyone else?
Yes. However, I found that https://scholar.google.com still works perfectly well. It feels just as the old Google without all the crap they've been adding in the last years.
Very small team, only still exists because they are a rounding error to the CFO on the balance sheet, but otherwise they could go at any time.
Oddly their biggest strength is being irrelevant to the decision makers, if the bean counters noticed the few million they are losing on running Scholar there will be ads + Gemini all over it.
In my experience as a published academic author all the LLM will make up all kinds of plausible papers I “wrote” that don’t exist, academic positions I’ve never held, and the like.
Even if you give it a paper directly I’d not believe it to be reliable. Maybe it could help search for papers, but that’s it.
Despite all the comments it still works pretty well for me. I feel like they've improved it a bit in the last year or so so you don't get way too much Quora and GitHub/Stackoverflow clones.
The level of sponsored results for some queries is way OTT, and obviously any kind of search like "best laptop 2024" is never going to give you good results (probably because they don't exist), but other than that I'm still pretty happy with Google Search.
Genuinely interested: have you tried to spend a few weeks on an alternative?
I decided to try DuckDuckGo a few years ago. Not because it was obviously better, but to see if I could get used to it. After a few weeks, I had completely stopped falling back to Google when not finding what I wanted. I stayed on DDG for a couple years. Then same thing with Kagi: I just decided to try. It's been 1.5-2 years now and I'm disappointed when I can't use Kagi (which has my customizations, like some websites I ignore and some that I pin).
I guess my point is that it's not necessarily that you have to try something else when Google is unbearable. Maybe you can try something else and then realize (or not) that Google was not better.
That's not where I thought this was going. I tried using DDG and Kagi and went back to Google. Google had more relevant, fresher results than DDG, and Kagi didn't have the same integration with Google Maps and often a smaller set of results for very niche queries. Google is still basically the internet - the entire internet - though in many ways they do still fall short. But breadth of content indexing and information about local places, Google is still king.
> information about local places, Google is still king.
I try to use OpenStreetMap as much as I can (I have a deGoogled smartphone and OpenStreetMap works well enough) but it is true that Google Maps is better (at the cost of privacy of course).
But in terms of search... I can't remember of a time where I tried Google because I couldn't find with Kagi and ended up finding something with Google. On the contrary with the Kagi lenses it's often a lot easier to get specific results.
Here's an easy test case on a topic which is HEAVILY modified by Google. There are many such cases Google distorts searches but the following query is purely for illustration of the problem because it is so obvious.
1. Search Google for "ukrainian who shot his commanding officer" without quotes
2. Google serves me nothing but MSM articles of Russian this or that. The word Russian wasn't even in my search string.
3. Add the Google operator MINUS SIGN Russia
4. Results:
a) Policeman feared Chris Kaba would kill, court told
b) Media: Russian Repeated Offender Kills Five More His ...
c) President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and First Lady Olena ...
d) Ukrainian Galician Army
e) Article from 2017 entitled Killed Defense Intelligence Officer Was "The First Donetsk Cyborg"
f) Shots fired at car carrying Ukrainian President Zelenskiy's ...
5. Go to yandex.com and search the original query
6. It comes up on Yandex immediately with the original query
The only relevant result I get on Yandex is a website, which supposedly is a Russian propaganda outlet. Maybe that is why it is not showing up on Google, and isn't necessarily a distortion?
Yandex is indeed a Russian company. But do you really need to go to media bias fact check dot com—everyone's confirmed universal source of absolute truth, of course—to learn that?
good "best laptop 2024" search results, absolutely exist, but they have to be heavily personalized towards user and i dont think we adjusted to such levels of in search (we have expectations of median/commonality there)
There's a difference between searching for a topic and searching for an item. All of those are topic searches.
Try searching for a particular video, one that is not super popular. What I want is a complete list of results that match my query. What I get is YouTube trying to recommend videos to me.
I don't understand your use case. If I know the exact title of the video, it finds it. Everytime.
If you try to describe a non-popular video it just becomes a crapshoot on what to give you if there's no word/tag watching. You'd need some hint of the channel name or something. The volume of low viewership videos is incredibly high.
Can you give me a real example of something you've tried to do?
> If I know the exact title of the video, it finds it. Everytime.
This is unfortunately not true. I have a little channel and there have been times when searching for the exact title of some of my videos did not return it in the results at all (searching with quotes or not). Cannot reproduce now because the search algorithm has now started liking me.
When the videos are completely unrelated to your search, but just happen to be new/popular videos, then yes it's useless. Surfacing relevant videos would make sense.
For example, searching for climbing comp videos and getting a completely unrelated video about some new tech gadget released within the last couple days from a random popular content creators makes no sense.
Clearly, it works for Google (content creators intentionally make click-baity thumbnails and titles because Google encourages it), but it's user hostile: it's designed to suck you into a vortex, which is not what the user was intending in the first place.
That said, all content platforms do this right now, so my intention isn't singling out Google. It's frustrating nonetheless.
Here's a good one I just saw because Joe Rogan complained about it. Search youtube for: trump podcast. You won't find the most important one. It's all MSM and useless clips of other interviews.
The top search result for me -- below German news snippets complaining about US politics -- is Joe Rogan Experience #2219 - Donald Trump on Youtube, presumably what you're looking for. It's also number 3, the same thing on Spotify.
I guess people's perception becomes extremely skewed when they are disappointed with something. After this you give them examples and they swiftly move the goal post.
It feels like YouTube search doesn't even deserve to be called search anymore. If I'm lucky, I get 1–3 not-totally-irrelevant videos, a row of shorts, then a couple tangential videos, then a bunch more shorts, then "Explore More" or "Previously Watched" or "People Also Watched"... and shorts. It's pretty disgusting all around, because it totally does not seem like there is any intent to surface actually relevant videos.
It works in the same sense that you try asking a stranger for directions and he wraps you into a fishing net and drags you to the nearest mall whose name resembles your question if shouted into a bucket.
Back in the day, Google searches could lead you down unplanned paths, into niche forums or fascinating rabbit holes that felt organic and less commercial.
I switched to DDG couple of years ago without knowing what to expect. Once I got used to their UI there was no turning back.
And on rare occasions now when I do search on Google I feel so happy I switched to DDG. To an extent that it does feel to me that Google has indeed stopped working completely for me. And yes I’ve stopped their search history, recommendations etc on YouTube.
it seems google switched to some kind of semantic search instead of word based search. It doesn't search for what your words are, but instead what your words kindof sortof mean. Which means you always get 'average' results instead of precise results.
This may make it better for the non-tech folks who search for things in unclear language, and likely make it worse for those who search with precision (i.e. much of the HN crowd).
Most importantly, they make their money off ads, and it probably makes sense to optimize for the non-tech folks. The ones that don't run ad blockers and accidentally click the barely differentiable ads.
In short - I suspect they're just using new tech to make more money.
People have been throwing up the, "You're just too technical," canard for years, and it's just not true. Google search does not find what anyone is looking for; it finds what it wants to sell, in a way that makes it more likely that a purchase will be made. Full stop.
This comment is just laughably wrong. I use google a hundred times a day, from programming stuff to news stuff. I have never felt like it wasn't finding what I was looking for.
Google is extremely good if you search for a product they can advertise to you. I've recently wanted to buy lost sunglasses. Just selected them from the photo and google found exactly brand and model, with a link to the store.
If there are no sponsored links - the result is crap.
Google is good at searching, they just have no incentive to show you results.
Much like Google itself, Youtube has been trending towards ushering users to a minute collection of blessed official/popular sources, often news channels. Maybe it's in response to kvetching over ``disinformation?" Idunno, but it's absolutely infuriating for some of my interests.
If I search "Mullica Hill tornado" on yt itself, I get nothing but useless 1 min local news clips. If I search the same term on Reddit, I get first person footage of the tornado passing over people's houses—hosted on Youtube! Tornado enthusiasts still occasionally dredge up "lost media" of events like the 2011 Alabama outbreak that have been on the site this entire time, but are effectively impossible to view via the algorithm, even with the precise date and location specified.
FWIW, ChatGPT Search didn't surface the video either with that query
> Based on the elements you’ve described—eyes, a pineapple, a bucket of water, a house of cards, chess, and a time loop—it’s challenging to identify a single music video that encompasses all these features.
Same here. I've generally found complaints about Google's recent decline to be overblown, but lyrics are one area where it's truly gone off the deep end.
Even if I type in 2-3 lines worth of nearly-exact lyrics that show up on multiple lyrics websites, it'll give me completely unrelated songs that match several words at most.
On that note, if anyone needs a good browser-based song finder, the "Aha Music Identifier" extension is pretty good. It's a life saver when watching Twitch streams that don't list the currently-playing song.
I think this is a separate issue although it also exists.
What the parent is referring to is favoring annoying ad-filled garbage over an equally relevant but straightforward result.
The hidden variable is that ad-riddled spam sites also invest in SEO, which is why they rank higher. I am not aware of any evidence that Google is using number of Google ads as a ranking factor directly. But I would push back and say that “SEO” is something Google should be doing, not websites, and a properly optimized search engine would be penalizing obvious garbage.
