Perhaps they should pay more attention to their core, I see their search product as lacking vision, dated and misaligned with the needs of the user.
Then there's all those silly, frivolous overly-rounded corners mucking up the GUI.
On the up side: I do look forward to competitors stepping forward to fill the space that Google used to fill. That is inevitable.
Now when I hit a GSearch SERP (when in Chrome for a moment testing something), it feels like spam, and I close it faster than a Pinterest tab.
That is the whole point, old Google was easy to replicate and therefore didn't cement their market position, if they still had that then why not just switch to Bing or DDG? New Google requires thousands of top level experts to tune and test things until it gives sensible results to stupid queries and is therefore impossible to compete with.
I long for the return of an Altavista-like "dumb" search engine with proper "hard" boolean support. My brain is hardwired to think that way and I strongly prefer it. I understand that this wouldn't be useful for everyone, but I don't care. How on earth does it make sense to have only one kind of search engine for all of humanity.
Maybe it's a good time to be innovative here..
Is this some side effect from user-tailored search experience, for me personally Google still gives better results than eg DGG or Bing.
One quick tip: you can still access the old image size options on the Advanced Search
I agree 100%. Sometimes though it feels like the Web itself is deteriorating as the bulk of new Internet users increasingly only care about a handful of social media platforms. Where's the "sources of truth" about website quality when we need them? We used to have DMOZ/ODP providing something like that, it had a lot of problems but by and large it worked. But now DMOZ is dead, and there's nothing as of yet to replace it.
On the other hand, there’s no profit motive there, so why would executives sign off on that.
Back in the days I used to tweak search query a bit and was getting different results. Now when one tweaks a query, they get the same results over and over again, thus rendering any search attempts useless.
In 2019, Google Web Search optimised for ~10 billion users.
Expanding self-selected elite groups rarely sustains intelligence and skill levels.
This isn't a swipe at general intelligence, it's just a flat fact of mass media, one that's been widely recognised (though often lamented on a moral basis) for well over a century.
I've labled this "the tyranny of the minimum viable user".
The other factor is that manipulating the medium has become increasingly attractive. That's not just old-school SEO (black or white), but propaganda, psyops, and similar activities. Google are very much part of this battleground, and seem to have taken considerable time coming up to speed with even grasping this. I suspect they're now aware, if not sufficiently competent.
A friend, Woozle, has described this as a fundamental epistemic paradox as systems grow -- what was previously useful for a few becomes increasingly attractive to manipulators. Though Shoshana Zuboff's Three Laws predate their observations by about 30 years.
Example: https://twitter.com/ageitgey/status/1182308994968428544
Also given the fact that I worked for an SEO company I can definitely tell you that’s bot the money-making enterprise anymore since it mostly consisted of opportunists who happened to know about internet before anyone else before.
Between Facebook, Twitter and other content silos, the internet as it was in 2002 is mostly gone.
This really highlights the true problem of monopoly - even Google itself had much better UI in the early/mid aughts before they had really demolished all competition, now that they are the monopoly it's how can we just squeeze more ad dollars out of each and every search result.
To be honest, I don't understand how everyone can remember the "quality" of their Google searches from 7 years ago. I can't even remember the quality from a year ago. The things I find most frustrating with search (such as maternity blogs being the first options when looking for medical information related to a newborn or tutorial sites being at the top of the results rather than the official language docs) rank highly because those are the things people are clicking on.
As an example, I think the crown on HN is more likely to read the official documentation rather than go to a site such as TutorialsPoint or StackOverflow. On the other hand, the average programmer most likely just wants to go to TutorialsPoint or StackOverflow and copy-paste the solution they are looking for. And I think there are many more average programmers than there are visitors to HN. From Google's point of view, they are giving the user what they want.
All that being said, it is easy to criticize Google, but dealing with search at the scale of the internet is non-trivial. It isn't clear to me that Google's algorithms from 7 years ago would do just as good of a job today as they did 7 years ago. There is a lot more junk and abuse online, people are figuring out ways to hack their search ranking or spamming useless articles.
One thing that’s worth pointing out, that most technical users miss, are the ads. If you are blocking ads in the results, you have a totally different search experience.
Actually, the fact of search >> Android would be something of a surprise, and raises the question of whether or not mobile nets increased ads exposure or if it's just a profiling data collection platform.
It's not very different from FB: acquire eyeballs to look at ads, acquire usage data to target ads, with whatever accomplishes that goal. Search is a way for the user to, more or less, "pull" content from the platform - and everything else is a way for the platform to push content at the user. Nowhere in there is "being a good search engine" a core priority.
Search is the content, advertising is the product. Much as with traditional media -- newspapers, radio, television. The "content" (news, music or talk, programming) is the draw, the advertising is the revenue generator. Newspapers spent a century experimenting with the "news hole" (the blanks in the advertising template into which news items were placed, with news going from as much as 90% of the space to as little as 20%. Traditionally, a 40/60 split (40% news, 60% ads) was common from ~1950 - 1990 or so, at least.
Economically, content is a public good, advertising is rents income. It seems to me that successful public-goods marketing requires such a pairing, though many problems can still remain due to incentives conflicts.
Your theory suggests the problem is the top line, whereas the article suggests it's the bottom line.