I beg to differ here. Years ago I felt like I could discover useful information about a topic through Google with relative ease.
Results would contain informational links that let me explore the subject.
This basically impossible now; with Google Search at least.
The best open source mailing list archive is unquestionably https://marc.info . yet when you search things that are open source relevant, you get https://nabble.com which goes as far as to fake being a forum and fills content from mailing lists, is nearly useless feature wise, and is crammed with all sorts of nasty obnoxious advertising.
marc.info doesn't even crack page 10 with typical queries, because they don't play the SEO optimization game, and doesn't run ads.
This is a great example of Google becoming totally useless.
The last time I remember this being mentioned on HN, a few days later marc.info was at the top of search results for mailing list type posts, but it seems whatever manual tweak they applied has since been invalidated by the Googletron...
I don't know how many times I've had to add -nodejs to things I'm trying to search to eliminate irrelevant garbage from some of my searches.
Searches you do now on basically any subject you are not an expert in already give you the same subject matter level of expertise you can expect from a 5 minute segment on the nightly news, whereas before you could expect at least the quality of a 30 minute show hosted by James Burke.
What finally pushed me away from Google was its incorrect assumption of equivalence between different terms. I'd search something like "printer scaling draftsight" and it would return results with "printer" "scaling" and "autocad" all in bold. Because autocad and draftsight are 2D CAD programs, and autocad is more popular, so suuurely that's what I wanted.
Yeah I've noticed this a lot in recent months/years. Have been finding myself putting most of the keywords of the query in quotation marks to get any kind of results relevant to my actual query. Like 'printer "scaling" "draftsight"' just so that G wouldn't make some stupid assumptions.
One page of results with 8 of 10 completely unrelated.
It interprets what it thinks I meant instead of listening to the actual words that came out of my mouth.
I have the same problem with my wife... :-)
Language is used to convey meaning. The difference between my wife and Google is that Google tries to interpret language in the lowest common denominator which leaves all people who try to use language properly feeling like they need to learn a new one just to be understood by their search engine.
...maybe that's not so different.
The internet is always going to be in constant flux: SEO trickery, the rise and fall of sites which contain the most relevant data, context of the search (browser -> phone), etc.
Google's main job is to make it as easy as possible for a user to find what they want. For example, as a techie, 15 years ago that might have meant making sure to constantly index usenet and various mailing lists. Today most of that content is at StackExchange, Github, Reddit, etc.
And it's not just tech searches - everyone will have their own niche which Google once got right and often returned as the very first result (when was the last time you were confident in using the 'lucky' result?), and now, not only do they not return relevant results, whatever they do return is mixed with tons of ads and (probably) paid results that aren't marked as ads.
The fact that Google doesn't yet pay dividends while the MBAs there are apparently intent on destroying the company's main product as fast as they can, doesn't bode well for their share price going forward.
Try searching for just the name of a supposed whistleblower, then add another term, and get all the censored results. Even more true in the news tab, which initially returned -0- results.
I’m in the latter camp and wondering if their inferences are just getting better if they have more of your data. Still not willing to give it to them willingly to get better results, but it would at least explain a few things.
I definitely have concerns with the amount of data Google has about me and, in particular, the idea of Chrome monopolizing the browser landscape. As a result, a few months ago I tried switching to Firefox, complete with container tabs and scripts which removed Google analytics from everywhere. The difference in search results was very noticeable. Most notable was that my Google news feed (on my Android phone) and YouTube recommendations quickly became filled with generic junk, whereas before it was so relevant I would often find the answer to something I had been researching earlier mixed in with my news feed.
I ended up going back to Chrome, mostly due to battery issues with Firefox, however even if I hadn't switched back I think I would have voluntarily turned off all the anti-tracking stuff. It is a data privacy concern, and moreover I hate the idea of giving Google all this data, but the benefits for me were very palpable.
I can see a world in which the parent comment is correct, and we've "dumbed down" our queries because it gets us good enough answers most of the time. For example, perhaps I used to google "halo game walkthrough OR tutorial" and now I would type "halo tips."