Google Search Decline

Users complain about the declining quality of Google search results, including spam, irrelevant links, SEO junk, and poor relevance for specific queries like programming documentation, often preferring alternatives like Bing or DuckDuckGo.

📉 Falling 0.2x Other
4,981
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#7524
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
19
2008
93
2009
173
2010
260
2011
311
2012
291
2013
246
2014
219
2015
170
2016
230
2017
198
2018
230
2019
302
2020
378
2021
418
2022
541
2023
421
2024
258
2025
210
2026
13

Keywords

SES LLM JS dlang.org goodreads.com AWS robots.txt DuckDuckGo garbage.h MB results google search google search result results google search results page seo interestingly

Sample Comments

dennis_jeeves1 Jul 24, 2023 View on HN

You are correct mostly google search does not work any more.

esafak Nov 1, 2024 View on HN

Google instantly gives bad results, that's why.

adflux Jan 2, 2022 View on HN

I noticed the same thing... Googled the term yesterday, was notitified by google that "these search results are changing quickly". Then went on Bing and DuckDuckGo and found actual relevant results.Surprisingly the first video result in Google is a youtube video with little views.Smells fishy.

agumonkey May 13, 2015 View on HN

That's what Google returns when searching for the thread's article. Usually the first result is the right one.

tasn Jun 4, 2022 View on HN

Funny enough, searching for "Google" doesn't return google.com, at least not on the first page.

ryan_j_naughton Jun 16, 2019 View on HN

What Google search will give you such results?

bromuro Jan 3, 2022 View on HN

I am using Google to look for programming documentation or solutions to particular problems. Top results are very often unrelated spam from Medium, clones of SO, SEO website against npm, etcIt’s quite hard to make specific searches - it insists to show me generic results, either by “did you mean?”, or excluding the keyword I explicitly added, or because it thinks I am looking for something more common.If there are no results they should just tell me - instead of trying to keep me “engaged”

paul-tharun Feb 10, 2023 View on HN

Something I noticed today, google search is returning links to you.com 's search results, some times even in the quick result box.

baby Nov 14, 2011 View on HN

how is it better than google -> check the first result?

SECProto Nov 22, 2019 View on HN

Works fine for me, looks like any standard google search results. I'm curious why yours does not.