Developer calls out search degradation across platforms
A retiring tech entrepreneur details how Google, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook and other services have made search worse by prioritizing engagement over accuracy.
What to know
- Major platforms including Google, YouTube, Gmail, and Facebook Marketplace have degraded search by deprioritizing exact phrase matching and user-specified filters in favor of relevance-driven results.
- Commenters identify the pattern as intentional: platforms ignore search parameters to maximize engagement metrics and ad impressions, even when it frustrates users.
- Solutions discussed include paid search engines (Kagi), human editorial moderation, local alternatives, and explicit "literal match" toggles to restore user control.
- The issue spans both consumer-facing search and specialized domains (dating apps, marketplaces, Discord), suggesting a systemic trend rather than isolated technical problems.
The dispute Whether search parameter ignoring is deliberate platform strategy (to boost engagement/ads) versus unintentional technical failure in fighting spam at scale. · positions read across 15 posts and comments
Platform search degradation is intentional to maximize engagement and ad revenue.
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“They are obviously and purposefully keeping the feed full to get as many ads in front of you as possible, not to give you accurate results.”
superxpro12 · Hacker News
Search failures may be unintentional; platforms are fighting a losing technical battle against SEO spam and scale.
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“I can't think of any reason why ignoring search parameters would be intentional, especially for a classifieds search! Even if it's for sponsored listings, they're just bogging down the conversion rate.”
graypegg · Hacker News
Paid alternative search engines and tools with human editorial control or literal matching are viable solutions.
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“I'm increasingly thinking that the only solution may be to have a search index with human editorial control… The only way to get ahead is to ensure that all content has to pass through human moderation before it can be included.”
gtowey · Hacker News
“Give me a "literal match only" toggle. Kill the fuzzy suggestions, ignore the semantic guessing, and just run a dumb, reliable grep across my data, boss.”
Siddarth, Blog author · 0xsid.com blog
Siddarth (ssiddharth) Author, retired entrepreneurGoogle Web search providerMeta (Facebook) Marketplace and dating platform operator
The record 2 articles and posts · last 30 days
What people are saying 15 voices from 2 sites · verbatim
- Why would platforms deliberately ignore search filters if it harms conversion rates and user satisfaction?
- Can human editorial moderation scale to compete with spam and SEO gaming?
- Are users willing to pay for search engines that respect exact matching and filters?
- Aug 23
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When was the last time you saw an ads-esque box and be like I am so glad you shoved it into my face! I guess Never at least if you are reading this.More often than not you know exactly what you are looking for, you're not browsing to see what's out there. The systems should optimize for that instead of whatever this is.
- Aug 22
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This problem is at least 26 years old. At the end of the last century there was an application called "Copernic" that executed searches in the search engines of that time, Go, Netscape, Yahoo, etc., downloaded the results and executed the search in them, deleted those that did not match and then showed the valid results in an order pre-selected by…
- Aug 21
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I have the same complaint but with Facebook Dating (yes, of course that's a thing). The app itself is less enshittified (so far) than many other dating apps (thanks, Match Group) but the filtering is just dumb."Hey FB I live in a major city and don't want to match with anyone further than 25 miles away" okay here are a bunch of matches from cities…
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CL is one of the final bastions of sane computer communities. Mostly by not trying to be a community.
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Google search still has that feature where the little preview blurb will bolden where it matches parts of your query so you can see what context the pattern appeared in. Always very useful but now it gives you a pretty good look at what google replaced your actual query with. Since I started paying attention to this, I've realized that most of the…
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> what if we just show people the results we think they wantAuthor is on the right track but it's much more actively evil than this. The real algorithm is "what if we just show people the results we want to show them, because showing them those things makes us more money*?* Except for services like Spotify, which shows you the songs that cost them…
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Maybe I'm just dense and there's some weird psychology thing FB is doing here. but I can't think of any reason why ignoring search parameters would be intentional, especially for a classifieds search! Even if it's for sponsored listings, they're just bogging down the conversion rate.If FB marketplace is showing me a thing I can't buy because it's…
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Yeah, but as you're "going mad" at Facebook, you keep engaging with the site.You try to peer through the noisy results to see if any of them are actually a match, you try again with different terms, you give up and engage with a result outside your parameters, or (best of all) you give up and engage with an ad or get distracted by some other…
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Amazon has gotten that bad.Yesterday I searched for "3/8 inch handles", and got several ball-shaped ones, plus some things that included (but were not) handles.I added the term - "3/8 inch ball handles" - and only the not-actually-handles remained.
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It’s wild how broken search has become, LLM made it worse but it was already downhill prior to that. Even Reddit forces you login to search within a subreddit and displays the annoying “Best place on internet” overlay after staying on the site for 2 min. I just use AnythingLLM with DuckDuckGo + local LLM model to do searches now.
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I've been going mad with facebook search. It ignores every search parameter. Geofence? Here's results from 500mi away. Length of item? nah here's soemthing 50% shorter Price? Merely a construct.They are obviously and purposefully keeping the feed full to get as many ads in front of you as possible, not to give you accurate results.Contrast this…
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I had a huge rant a couple weeks ago about how I couldn't find anything in discord's search, it used to be pretty decent, but it's been getting worse as well...Paraphrasing, but is it too hard to "SELECT FROM 'posts' WHERE 'text' LIKE %search%"?
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While the article is more about specialized search (videos, shopping) for general web search, Kagi has to be mentioned. It's been so long since I've used another search engine (years), I'm generally shocked to see what they look like and how they behave now. It makes web search just work, including things like exact phrases with quotes, logical…
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I'm increasingly thinking that the only solution may be to have a search index with human editorial control. As much as I think Google deserves scorn for how badly they have made the search experience on the web, we have to remember that they're fighting a battle against SEO and spam. It feels like they have mostly given up. Any automatic solution…
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I Just Want to Search L: https://www. 0xsid.com/blog/just-want-to-se arch C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9390099 posted on 2026.08.21 at 12:00:54 (c=0, p=5)