Comment by logicchains
15 days ago
I feel like Google is using a lossy backend for searching now. Sometimes I'll search some rare phrase that I know must exist somewhere, and Yandex (and often Bing) will turn up exact matches from some random blogs/forums, while Google will return zero results. If it's some kind of LLM-style memory it'd explain why Google can't find some rare terms. Or maybe Google thinks it's better to show no results than results from low traffic domains?
There have been several posts on HN about Google no longer indexing the entire internet. My understanding is that AI generated content has become so common that Google has become selective about which content it will index. If low traffic sites don't put effort into getting their content indexed then it won't appear in Google results.
It's not only a problem of not indexing.
Sometimes I search for a whole sentence, e.g. the title of a video I know to exist, and it doesn't find it. Then I look for a vague sentence related to the video, and with some luck it finds it.
> Or maybe Google thinks it's better to show no results than results from low traffic domains?
It can't be quite that, given that I've searched for exact phrases I knew exist on StackOverflow, and that Google no longer brings them up, but other search engines do.
> Or maybe Google thinks it's better to show no results than results from low traffic domains?
Google's poor search results drove me away years ago, so I wouldn't know if they changed this since then, but one of the many things that drove me away was that Google search refused to admit when it had no results and would instead just start including blatantly irrelevant results.