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> Through experimentation they have arrived at these algorithms to maximize the probability that you find what YOU were looking for.

Depending on the query, 60-80% of Google Image results point to Pinterest, which no one is looking for and is not the original source of anything that shows up.

For regular searches, in the past few years there has been a continuous and significant decline in both the accuracy of results and the ability to communicate to Google what you're looking for in the first place.

Quoted phrases are frequently reinterpreted, destroying the intent.

On a query with 3 words, Google will frequently ignore one of them entirely, based on an opaque and constantly changing set of rules, and will return results for the other 2 words that have no relevance whatsoever.

Perhaps most frustrating is the constant irritating battle to trick Google's many different query "filters", not all of which are NSFW "safe search" filters, to avoid the very strange situations where a query with a small number of common english words somehow returned no results whatsoever, despite Google's clear willingness to throw away even the most important words in a query in order to return something.

I think both yours and Jaruzels points are good. But...

> If there were a better way to find the results that users are actually looking for, then Bing and Google would be working their assess off to find it.

I don't think we should assume this. I'd only be wiling to assume that Google/Microsoft would change how they do search if it could make them more money. That doesn't mean 'better' search necessarily. If they could convince users to accept it, I could imagine an extremely ad bloated search service, or search service that just sells the top ranks of terms to the highest bidder.

For the most part, Bing and Google make more money if users find results that they're actually looking for.

Sure, that's not 100% true, but I think people overstate the degree that that's not true.

Google and Bing can't convince users to accept something like that. In fact, people abandoned search services like that in favor of Google and Bing, because they don't do that.

> That you presume they have any other goal in mind is frankly bizarre to me.

Google is an advertising company. They are not a search company. There is absolutely no reason to think that their goal is 'good' results. Their goal is 'engaging' results.

There is a very, very good reason to think their goal is good results:

If users believed they got bad results at Google, then Google could no longer show the advertising.