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Last night I watched a YouTube video that had a song in the background that I hadn't heard but really liked. I pulled up Shazam but it didn't recognize the song
by tomatofrank 5y ago
Last night I watched a YouTube video that had a song in the background that I hadn't heard but really liked. I pulled up Shazam but it didn't recognize the song, so I took to Google. I entered the lyric and added the search terms "lyrics" and "r&b" at the end. Google returned 4 YouTube videos to songs that didn't contain the lyric, a link to a Boyz II Men song on Genius that didn't contain the lyric (good job Google, you know an R&B band), a link to peterbe.com to find a song by lyrics, and a bunch of other useless links. I clicked on to page 2, which hilariously presented 3 of the 4 YouTube videos that were on page 1.
I was immediately turned off, so I pulled up DuckDuckGo and Bing, entered the same exact query, and both engines returned the song I was looking for in the first result. I laughed out loud.
I then thought to myself, "I wonder how many pages I would have had to flip through in Google to find this result." Eventually, I found it. It was the 68th result on page 7.
- colordrops 5y agoIt's getting bad enough where I'll put in a two word search, and one of them is unique and the obvious main keyword, but not necessarily obscure, and somehow the first several results still don't have the word. It's frustrating to the extreme.
- nefitty 5y agoYou can recreate this behavior with HN's Algolia search API. The common parameter that behaves how we expect is "query". Using "similarQuery" causes all sorts of weird behavior. I think it drops words until it find results, and considers each token optional. It kinda gave me insight I to why Google is sucking so bad. Give us the option at least.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoI have the opposite experience most of the time. I’ve been trying to use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine but I end up clicking my Google bookmark a lot of the time because the DDG results are so low quality. I have no doubt there are edge cases where Bing/DDG outperform Google, but most of the time I have better luck with Google.
- tomatofrank 5y agoYeah, Google is still my default browser, though I haven't used other engines enough to develop a strong opinion here. I'll add that I could have been more clever with my query. For instance, if I surround the lyric in quotes, Google returns the right result first. Original query: like you didn't care I don't know why lyrics r&b Improved query: "like you didn't care I don't know why" lyrics r&b At the end of the day, I'm not frustrated with Google. I use it every day and it saves me lots of time. It just amuses me that in some cases, other engines that probably use simpler search algorithms are objectively better. And in this case, I think it's fair to expect Google to produce the right result on page 1.
- ryantgtg 5y agoMost of the time duckduckgo doesn’t even acknowledge quotations. I can’t tell if it’s because there aren’t results for when the query contains quotations or if they simply don’t acknowledge them most of the time. Either way it’s annoying and it makes me go back to google every time.
- tomatofrank 5y agoDo you have an example query?
- ryantgtg 5y agoThese are some I found in my search history, where I then switched to !g. Not sure if all these examples still fail to produce results with the matching string (but they still seem to have issues, upon a quick glance): "packages not in the aur" rake "invalid session id" "pacman -Qm" arch "The pgAdmin 4 server could not be contacted" "previous definition of HTML_NAMESPACE was here" illustrator "print preview" is darker systemd Loaded: bad-setting "has a bad unit file setting"
- zelphirkalt 5y agoI think you also need to put a + in front, for ddg to pay attention.
- sbierwagen 5y agoThe same thing happened to me! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544730 Google results for lyrics used to be filled with hundreds of scummy SEOed sites that stole content from each other. I wonder if some SEO-blocking algo change has had the effect of blocking all song lyrics from google results.
- dec0dedab0de 5y agoUnder Search tools there is a toggle for all results/verbatim. If you switch it to verbatim it will give you something closer to you want. I hate that it is this way, and that most of the old google hacking tricks don't work. The problem is that Google is no longer a search engine for the world wide web. It is an app that can answer questions, that happens to also have a web front end
- mv4 5y agobut they reported great financial results.
- tyingq 5y agoNow that they are taking every spot above the fold for ads for any lucrative query, it will be much harder to maintain YoY % revenue growth figures that exceed viewership growth. Or bigger video monitors, I guess, that make the 'fold' taller.
- tomatofrank 5y agofuck yeah they did :P
- mtgx 5y ago
- Tenoke 5y agoFor what is worth, DDG's main provider is Bing so it's nor surprising they returned similar results.
- tomatofrank 5y agoOh that's interesting, TIL.
- rattray 5y agoSource?
- Tenoke 5y ago>We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing[0] They add more than just Bing results as they mention but it's the main provider. You can also confirm by checking results for different queries. 0. https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
- gundmc 5y agoWhat was the lyric?
- tomatofrank 5y ago"like you didn't care I don't know why lyrics r&b" was my query
- fsckboy 5y agoI wouldn't expect that "r&b" would help the query. and DDG, first result https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=like+you+didn%27t+care+I+don%27t+know+why+lyrics&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=like+you+didn%27t+care+I+do...
- gundmc 5y agoWow, same results here. That's pretty poor.
- nkurz 5y agoIt would be nice if this worked, but in Google's defense, this is an odd combination of an exact search phrase of common words and then a couple categorical terms that don't have to actually appear on the page. If you help it by searching for just the quoted phrase you want without the additional terms it puts the result you want both as the top result and in a pullout at the top of the page: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22like+you+didn%27t+care+I+don%27t+know+why%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22like+you+didn%27t+care+I+...
- FpUser 5y agoI do not hold any love for Google but to be fair when I look up songs by lyrics, or lyrics by the name of the song or the combination it works just fine for me. But they probably know that I never klick on ads unless specifically searching to buy something
- heavyset_go 5y agoI'm still bitter that they've deprioritized results from SongMeanings.net in favor of garbage like Genius. The former is one of the only sources for lyrics from smaller acts, especially from the 90's to early 2010's. Since it's from the pre-Web 2.0 era, it's disappeared from Google's search results.
- lumost 5y agoI don't know anything about google internals, but in many other applications the search engine is optimized on long-term engagement and profit data. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out google optimized page rankings based on the profit google earns from it's ad business on the page.
- tomatofrank 5y agoThe evidence supporting this is the 4 YouTube videos at the top of the list, followed by 3 of those 4 YouTube videos on page 2 (LOL).
- shiftpgdn 5y agoSame with Sheldon Brown’s website on bicycle maintenance. Much of the information on his site is still the best resource on the internet but instead Google would rather serve irrelevant results that show ads.
- hetspookjee 5y agoIt’s only a matter of time till it gets ripped and hosted on another ad filled website like all the fake stack overflow websites these days. So at least the material is not lost.
- vocram 5y agoGosh! It’s been a while that none of my searches ended up on that site. Now I know the reason.
- stavros 5y agoSame with all organic content. It's just all bullshit SEO spam now, I haven't landed on some dude's blog in ages, and some dude's blog is my favorite part of the web.
- gambiting 5y agoGoogle results have for a while stopped having anything to do with the actual search query. In the past they were magical, like Google could almost read your mind and guess exactly what you mean, but nowadays you can type in the exact search string, and still have the first page of results where Google just ommited half of the string to give you sponsored content. Like even for simple "C# <name of class>" why are the first few results for pages that sell programming courses????? It's gone to absolute shitter and it's just not worth using outside of a very narrow set of circumstances(when you actually do want to buy something I guess?)
- hda111 5y agoSeems like the SEO people have successfully reverse engineered Google‘s algorithms.
- Guest42 5y agoThat’s an interesting point. Was this passively intentional from Google? What methods could be used to generate more accurate results? How accurate do they want the results?
- nicce 5y agoIf the business model would be somehow changed to non-ad based, then there might motivation for the change.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pps 5y agoI tried for few months, but unfortunately DDG results are really poor for local searches. Whenever I want to find something in Polish, half of the results are from some autotranslated websites. Also Google is the only one that shows local business in a useful way.
- vanderZwan 5y agoSounds like a pretty easy division of when to use which search engine though, no? Better than the hit-or-miss issue being completely random at least
- pps 5y agoAbsolutely! I switched back to Google as default, but still search things also with DDG.