Google Search is Dying

Michael Tsai:

I’ve noticed two separate things:

• If I know the right Reddit or Stack Exchange to search, or if Amazon or Hacker News applies, I get much more useful results than searching Google (or any other general search engine). This avoids SEO spam issues and can surface posts that don’t seem to be accessible otherwise.

• Google results, at least for me, are no longer trustworthy, in the sense that I always wonder whether something is missing. Sometimes it does a great job. But sometimes the page I want will not be in the results at all, whereas it’s at the top of the list in Bing.

So, whereas I used to rely almost exclusively on Google, I now do site-specific searches where possible. Otherwise, I use Bing by default and Google as a backup.

For me DuckDuckGo is the go to, but if I’m searching for coding topics, I would use Stack Overflow. I’ll have to try using Stack Exchange and Reddit more.

This is a very interesting trend, especially how it is very similar in China. Due to the closed nature of manu platforms in China, Chinese users actually search in different apps for different topics. But a popular place for finding answers to certain questions would be Zhihu, the Chinese equivalent of Stack Exchange and Quora.

Douban is very popular for movies, drams and books. I’ve personally found movie and drama ratings to be very accurate on Douban. This is similar to Rotten Tomatoes.