Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Web search
Raised as a usability problem by 15 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2010–2025), in 14 threads.
People raised many different problems with Web search, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 15 complaints
- Search fails with a CORS error, so the commenter can't use it2025-08-12
- Searches often return near-miss results, e.g. liberapay page instead of fediverse2025-08-12
- Need to press tab repeatedly, open new tabs, and wait for network results2025-07-14
- Can't search for wanted and unwanted keywords, or match non-alphanumeric characters2025-06-09
- Changing default search engine is fiddly and hard for consumers, with manual multi-step setup on Linux2024-08-05
- Must repeatedly google for simple utils and can't find easy-to-use ones2023-09-04
- No useful search, so finding programming tutorials meant navigating through webrings2022-04-12
- Articles in search results force account creation or app downloads before reading2022-02-20
- Searching heavily for how to publish Ed25519 keys failed to find this guide2021-04-23
- Can't find obscure song lyrics; popular artists flood results despite poor match2019-06-23
- Must go through hundreds of search results to find the right email2016-08-31
- Generic names like Go make it hard to find information online2014-09-12
- Searching for the Go language returns irrelevant pages because "Go" is a common word2012-05-04
- Web search and non-mobile sites are a real pain when on the move2011-04-26
- Hard to find relevant apps; searching yields pages of unhelpful results2010-10-21