Cited on HN 7 times, 2023–2026, never outright recommendedscore 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Posted as a light, funny aside in threads about declining search quality and the habit of appending 'reddit' to queries.
A short claymation music video by animator savannahXYZ satirizing how bad web search has become, with SEO spam and ads crowding out real answers. It is comedic rather than analytical.
“For your amusement, a relevant music-video titled "The current state of search engines" [0]” (HN, 2024)
Overall search quality has been declining on all search engines. Maybe there's too much spam. Saw an entertaining video about it yesterday that echoes how I feel when I google stuff: [this video] . It's so hard to find content written by humans these days. Seems like only the top sites are being indexed.
While I don't think it's enough to drive people to a different product, the fact that Google search is noticeably worse than in prior years has definitely gained mainstream attention. The amount of ads and SEO junk has caused frustration, but the alternatives aren't well known for most people to bother to switch. An artist I follow on Youtube put out this (comical) video regarding it - [this video]
For your amusement, a relevant music-video titled "The current state of search engines" [0] Yes, I know about the quotes I know about the dash and OR It's all ass Google doesn't work... Anymore I have to add the word "Reddit" To every goddamn search to read Content made by humans Google doesn't work... Anymore [0] [this video]
[Recycled from related submission] For your amusement, a relevant music-video titled "The current state of search engines" [0] Yes, I know about the quotes I know about the dash and OR It's all ass Google doesn't work... Anymore I have to add the word "Reddit" To every goddamn search to read Content made by humans Google doesn't work... Anymore [0] [this video]
> I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often And even then, Reddit's "new" design is shit for usability, sine the actual text you were searching for is nowhere on the page. It's hidden somewhere behind one of a hundred "click to see more" interactions, some of which are nested, and some will cause a completely new new page load that erases your progress and makes you start over. (But look! Engagement metrics!) On a lighter note, a humorous critique that mentions the same mitigation: [this video]
> That would mean the death of at a minimum Meta (market cap $1.5 trln), most of Google (market cap $2.1 trln, lets say half would die). And nothing of value was lost. [this video] [link] > So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US military suddenly stopped getting funded. Not even. Market Cap is more like net worth than like GDP, GDP is more like annual revenue (both are still somewhat different, hence "more like") — Meta's global revenue is $164.5 billion, Alphabet's is $350.02 billion, so even if that's entirely in the USA (it isn't), and the money spent was purely positive-sum (it isn't), even combined that's less than the US military budget of $849.8 billion.
Google's search results defaulting to starting with an LLM; and by the power of SEO, so are many of the search results themselves. Having to add "reddit" to get genuine results was already a meme 3 years back: [this video]
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