How is search so goddamn bad? A ‘Case Study’

[aum]

Google Search is ridiculously, utterly bad. Before your brain starts recalling successful searches you’ve had, and before this turns into only a rant let’s see some examples.

 

 

This is a query for checking out what reddit thinks in regards to buying a phone, while specifying to only get results from the last month. Pretty simple I guess, yet none of the results achieved that goal, and none of them are actually from the last month, despite Google lying that they are. Let’s quickly go through them one by one.

 

1. ‘Best place to by a cheap new smartphone?’ from r/Berlin - this is about where to buy a phone, but I live in Berlin, so maybe it makes some sense as a top result… except the post is actually from 6! years ago.
2. Specific to Audiophile phones for some reasons, and a pretty average thread (only 31 upvotes for one metric) from 9 months ago. Not useful, and doesnt meet the query but still a lot better.
3. From 2018 (>1 year ago), even less popular and less useful post (17 upvotes) on the Pixel subreddit.
4. Phone for privacy, small thread from > 4 years ago.
5. 6 years ago, wtf.

 

I won’t keep going with the rest, but it doesn’t get better. Why are the results reported as recent when they are from years ago, I don’t know - those are archived post so no changes have been made. At any rate, I got annoyed at this point (mentioning for those who couldn’t tell), so I switched to DuckDuckGo.

 

 

Somehow the results are even less useful. 2 irrelevant subreddits at the top, a result from 2012, that they admit is from 2012. At this point I visibly checked on reddit if there’ve been posts about buying a phone from the last month and there are. They also show up on Google/DDG if you look for them directly so they are indexed.

 

Hm, maybe adding site:reddit.com will help DDG to get there?

 

 

Nope. As you can see, I didn’t even bother clicking on all of them now, but I can tell you the first result is deeply irrelevant and the second one leads to a 4 year old thread.

 

Maybe it’s my wording then - what about ‘recommend phone reddit’ or ‘which phone to purchase reddit’? I won’t even waste anybody’s time by posting the results I got.

 

Thoughts  

Part of the issue in this specific case is that they’ve started ignoring settings for displaying results from specific time periods. It’s definitely not the whole issue though, and not something new or specific to phone searches.

 

Now, I’ve always been biased towards the new - books, tech, everything, but I can’t help but feel that a lot of things which were done pretty well before are done worse today. We do have better technology, yet we somehow build inferior solutions with it all too often. Further, if they had the same bias of showing me only recent results I’ll understand it better, but that’s not even the case. And yes, I get that the incentives of users and providers don’t align perfectly, that Google isn’t your friend, etc. But what is DDG’s excuse? As for the Case Study part, and me saying this isn’t simply a rant - I lied, hence the quotation marks in the title. Don’t trust everything you read, especially the goddamn dates on your search results.

 

Source

 

 

[Karlston]

Thanks for that, I thought it was just me.

 

Same experience, I search for something I want to buy, and get plenty of US hits and a few Australian ones. Just one teeny tiny problem with that. I live in Australia and Google knows that well. If I add the word "Australia" to the search it NOW finds Aussie sites.

 

And while I'm having a whinge ... the number of times it just ignores one or more of my search words is increasing. Having to put them in quotes to force it in the search is ridiculous.

[steven36]

1 hour ago, Karlston said:

Same experience, I search for something I want to buy, and get plenty of US hits and a few Australian ones. Just one teeny tiny problem with that. I live in Australia and Google knows that well. If I add the word "Australia" to the search it NOW finds Aussie sites

With duckduckgo all you to do is switch it to your country  you want to search . if you switch it too Australia then  most all sites is AU it even works with USA IP  . I have no idea how Google does it but   i most likely would have use my vpn and test it for down under because  they  a very ip depended  site.

 

 

 

And for  reddit.com  phone to buy  it works better on DDG if you dont  use  :site thats for Google

 

[Karlston]

1 hour ago, steven36 said:

With duckduckgo all you to do is switch it to your country  you want to search . if you switch it too Australia then  most all sites is AU it even works with USA IP  . I have no idea how Google does it

 

To be fair, I just checked my Google search settings. Not using a VPN.

 

Region = Australia.

 

Perhaps US locations always get higher precedence. Who knows?

 

Search on all my devices show my location correctly.

 

Seems Google Calendar has the same problem...

 

Setting a haircut reminder, when typing the name of the local hairdresser into the Location field, it gives me several "helpful" business suggestions in Canada, the US, and Wales. The one here (in Australia) doesn't show in the list until I start typing its suburb. And it doesn't help that I've set countless reminders in the past at the same local business, Google still wants to suggest only overseas locations and ignores the local one until its forced to show it.

[steven36]

16 hours ago, Karlston said:

Perhaps US locations always get higher precedence. Who knows?

Some people  are complaining like in  Japan  if you use English  they only get results  from India in English . One guy said he had the problem for years . Some people say they get only USA results  source is here

https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/2812352?hl=en

 

It not like  Google dont know about because it been reported so really  only thing you can do is switch search  engines if you use DDG they even have business suggestions from Yelp  if you type the right keywords  in. I know back  a few years ago  if use  a  VPN  and used EU ip Google was always blocking  some results due to EU laws because it would say it was and they always blocking results because of  copyright take down everywhere  so they  block a lot of the deep web anyway  depending  on were you live they block even more .

 

Also  they  force you to Non English versions of there Search if you use IP in a non English country  it like if you use NL ip  they will switch you to NL version  if you change to English it NL in English  there geo-targeting in some areas it seems they not have it fixed  right like in your case for me  it would be  great if they did it because i live in the USA  and use a vpn  i wish they did force USA results everywhere but that  never been the case for me using the VPN  that one of many reasons i dont use Google very often  they switch regions if you change ips  even if you force it to  US English  only  they are blocking things . Some people get results to other countries like India  when they switch to English .

https://www.google.com/webhp?pws=0&gl=us&gws_rd=cr

 

Here are people having your problem in the UK

https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/11750634?hl=en

 

It seems Google give  US websites higher priority in other English speaking countries And India  higher priority in  Asia if you switch to English . We know they  dont have very good results for China  because  they banned  and they block  lots of Russian content  because of the Goverment makes them block it. Only thing you can do is switch  search engines to one that really let you change regions and dont prioritize USA websites  there Search  AI is like Microsoft  Cortana it not been optimized everywhere. 

[mp68terr]

Then, according to your experience dealing with these bad search sites, which search engine would you recommend?

[steven36]

1 hour ago, mp68terr said:

Then, according to your experience dealing with these bad search sites, which search engine would you recommend?

I dont have  bad results unless  i switch ips to another country   the only thing i have to do is use a ip for my country  and i get my country results  if i want real  local results  I dont use a vpn . That the price you pay for using USA services  outside the USA. That the reason most Russians use Russian Search engines and the Chinese use China search engines  it dont work for them good. In 2020 there no such thing as a good search engine . It just depends  on what your serching for on what works best. 

 

Because of censorship  Google results are no better anymore  than Yahoo was in the early 2000s . 2007-2011  Google had great results  but they been in decline every since . There OK for the results they have but if you want results  they dont have you have to use one of the others. In the EU Google was forced to put other search engines in Android  on a country by country bases .DDG won in most  all countries .

 

Ecosia dont like the way Google does it but i don't like Ecosia  they plant trees  but  they just a glorified  Bing they pay Microsoft  for results and planting trees wont give me better search results . Ecosia , Qwant and sometimes Google  are not VPN friendly  .  they get to much hits from same ip they block you for awhile. DDG always work.  Sometimes when using a vpn i have change ips just to access Google  Web search. Image Search will still be working they be blocking only web search.

 

Any of them work better than Google  you can set up startpage  to  give results  by your country  by siting it  up in  advanced search  testing Australia  with USA ip even  i get Aussie results  and  startpage  has only Google results.