Ryan George
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2022–2023
5:27 · 2.5M views · Jun 13, 2022
A Ryan George comedy sketch about the experience of using Google search in 2022, where results are full of ads, spam and Reddit and Amazon detours.
HN links it as a joke about the decline of Google search, as comedy that captures a widely shared frustration.
4 comments from Hacker News
Do you track yourself? Do you check, what you are reading, and verify your own progress? Some time ago I started thinking about my problems with Google search, and was inspired by other project to write a program for myself. Throughout my life I have found many resources worthy of my time, but which I have lost, or forgotten about. I wanted to change that. I wanted to be able to look back. I have started my project in Sept of 2023. The core functionality is: to store, browse, and search for links. Additionally I added RSS sources as sources, so every hour I ping sources to check if there is anything new, and I expand my database. Does that replace Google search? Nope. On the other hand it expanded my horizons. I found most of RSS aggregators lacking: - some provides ability to bookmark entries, but some do not allow to insert links manually - some do not provide ability to tag links - some are on-line, and I strongly prefer local NAS web apps - most do not provide clean ability to search link database (as it may involve heavy operations) I found Google search lacking: - 10 pages each with 10 links for a searched keywords is not enough. If I write 'covid' into google search I would be expecting millions of links in results, from variety of sources. Even Fox news, even daily mail - I have results curated by big tech, I prefer to curate output myself What I have found about archive.org: - it is slow and unreliable - does not store RSS sources often enough - author of RSS program
Fighting with formatting... Do you track yourself? Do you check, what you are reading, and verify your own progress? Some time ago I started thinking about my problems with Google search, and was inspired by other project to write a program for myself. Throughout my life I have found many resources worthy of my time, but which I have lost, or forgotten about. I wanted to change that. I wanted to be able to look back. I have started my project in Sept of 2023. The core functionality is: to store, browse, and search for links. Additionally I added RSS sources as sources, so every hour I ping sources to check if there is anything new, and I expand my database. Does that replace Google search? Nope. On the other hand it expanded my horizons. I found most of RSS aggregators lacking: - some provides ability to bookmark entries, but some do not allow to insert links manually - some do not provide ability to tag links - some are on-line, and I strongly prefer local NAS web apps - most do not provide clean ability to search link database (as it may involve heavy operations) I found Google search lacking: - 10 pages each with 10 links for a searched keywords is not enough. If I write 'covid' into google search I would be expecting millions of links in results, from variety of sources. Even Fox news, even daily mail - I have results curated by big tech, I prefer to curate output myself What I have found about archive.org: - it is slow and unreliable - does not store RSS sources often en
> PS I was reading (sceptically) 'google search is broken' already for a year or so in HN comments and have to admit I believe it now. Even ignoring results, mainstream started to notice a while ago. Perhaps the biggest social proof at large is when it is shown distilled as comedy and people can laugh about it: this video
It is becoming hard to find anything trusted online. Here is the equivalent Ryan George video for Google: this video Same problem. Different clothes