Preach ergothus - it's making me crazy.

Google has turned an Ocean into a pond - I think we'll all be the better for it once they're gone.

Regularly cannot turn up results that I know exist - a modest change that has no relation to the query meaning and the results often turn up.

This is not the Google Search Engine I remember.

I had to google turn an ocean into a pond as I was not sure what the phrase entails. I got few images of small cars and your comment. QED

And googling it now brings up your comment!

I have no trouble believing Google is going to fall.

Their results have gone into the toilet - I ragequit Google search about once a day and do something else like forum searches.

I stick with Google but increasingly try to tweak my searches to hit forums. They're just that much less likely to be made-for-AdSense content by a copywriter paraphrasing other information from the web.

Do you have any tips for this sort of search tailoring? It's something I try for, but I've yet to find any particularly good keywords to leverage.

Usually I add "reddit" to the search phrase and try to find threads / user-generated and hopefully more organic content this way.

reddit is good, and so is just "forum" which will turn up specialty forums that haven't been absorbed by one of the Borgs yet.

I often just add "whirlpool" which is a fairly reliable Australian forum that started covering telcos but these days will have things about cars, home maintenance, personal health, etc. Or I add "forum" and that can be enough to tilt the results.

I usually add site:reddit.com or site:news.ycombinator.com etc. Actually google had a way to search discussion gruops, but they removed this feature as forums don't pay for their adds I suppose.

Same. I cant tell if my questions are just getting more specific and technical, but Google search results have been getting pretty useless in the past year or so

I love how google likes to completely ignore what I'm trying to search for. I wish I could think of an example because it happens to me often, but I can't so I'll make one up.

Imagine you're searching for tail lights for your car or something, but you don't know the size, so you search "Astra tail light size". This might bring up headlights. Wrong but no matter, you'd go on to google "Astra tail light size -headlight -head" or something.

What Google seems to have been doing to me recently is ignoring those negated terms, ignoring quotes, and just giving me the same results again and again. It's really getting annoying. Google seems to assume it knows what I'm looking for, and that my search query is just completely wrong and not what I want.

Note that the car stuff is just an example, I'd expect Google to not give you headlights the second time. It generally but not exclusively happens to me when searching things that are more technical. ESPECIALLY when it's a consumer level thing I'm trying to get info on, Google likes to assume it's giving you errors and you're trying to fix it. Which makes sense for most users, but god it's frustrating when every combination of advanced search parameters you try does nothing!

Google search needs a checkbox or something to turn off it's cleverness and just do an actual search.

Absolutely. I was trying to figure out something to do with timeouts in an SMT solver called Yices, so I had search strings about signals and alarm and Yices - of course. Google decided that this was a generalized programming question and displayed a lot of stuff about signals and alarm handling that didn't relate to Yices.

How likely a search time is "Yices", ffs? Feels like something that exotic ("statistically unlikely") probably is meant to be in the results by default.

I had no idea what Yices is. So I Googled it - the first link is SRI's Yices SMT solver. I tried "yices alarm" "yices signals" "yices timeout", and all of them showed only links related to Yices in the first result page (various manual pages, types, etc). So my attempt at reproducing your experience has failed.

The top Google hit for "yices alarm" is currently the exact Hacker News comment you've replied to. I wonder if Google adapted its search results based on that very comment? Maybe their algorithms shrewdly give more weight to fixing search results when the context mentions Google ("I googled for...", "Google didn't work when...", etc.) and the site is high profile (like HN). That would be very crafty.

I am kind of happy and sad in the same time to know that it is not just me.

This is SO annoying.

Same here. It seems the websites that show up top are become more and more spammy and less relevant to my query. I keep seeing all sorts of one sentence hipster 2.0 sites that want me to believe they are a credible source of information.