I really hope they have plans to improve this or find an approach that works as a middle ground for generic SEO content.
When I run that search on Google in Canada, there is a Panasonic link on the first page (third link), but it's for the US store listing, which has less info on it than the normal product page.
But as you say, search is in a horrendous state. So is video discovery on Youtube. It seems like my front page recommendations on Youtube have turned to garbage in the last 12 months.
I use Youtube in a very specific way: I subscribe to a bunch of channels that I like and only watch what those people post. My recommendations tend to be very focused around things related to my interests. Occasionally I will look up a random video for whatever reason and I'm always careful to delete it from my history unless I actually want more recommendations related to it.
Youtube can make me do work to improve my experience, but I do have another option, stop using Youtube's front page and just discover stuff via Reddit or search engine results.
I had a similar experience with Google News trickling up garbage news sources, and I spent way too much time blacklisting sources, and have basically given up on it.
But you're right, they outright sucks. They are definitely dynamic because I only have to show my son a single Roblox video to change it, but at the same times there are stuff that is repeatedly showing up that I have no interest in. Even stuff that I've told YouTube that I'm in no way interested in...
What I REALLY miss is a random category - for stuff that I would never otherwise see.
Maybe ten or fifteen years in the future, paying to Google (or Facebook, or...) will be the only way to have your web page delivered to anyone.
I mean, why should Google display your page to anyone for free, if someone else is willing to pay to have their page displayed instead. It's not like people are going to switch en masse to something else, just because Google results become slightly less relevant. And when paying becomes the new normal (e.g. it will become normal to pay to have Hacker News on the first page for "Hacker News"), the results will return to be more relevant again.
The onus is on the search engine to produce good results, because they're the one providing the service. Hell, that's why I started using Google around 2000, they had the best first page search results.
I ran into this over the weekend.
I had a question about something I took a photo of in a small village, and I knew a priest I met there would have the answer.
I went to Google to find the parish web site, and it's simply not in Google. Not at all. Lots of sorta-kinda matches in places thousands miles away, even when I specified the very unique village name, state, and ZIP Code.
So I dug through the pile of dross that comes home with me after I travel and found an old parish bulletin that had the web address printed on it. It turns out the church has a web site — a pretty nice one — but Google doesn't know about it. Or it's so heavily down-rated by Google that it didn't come up in the first seven or eight pages of results, no matter how I formed the search query.
So I went to the parish's web site to see if he has an e-mail address. The web site indicated that he is no longer the priest there. So I put his name into Google to see where he'd been moved. (I've been told by other priests that unless you're tied to a school or other institution, priests in America are shuffled around every four to six years.)
His name is fairly uncommon, so I expected Google to show me links to church bulletins or announcements about arrival or going away parties, or even church employee rosters, of which there are thousands on the web. But instead, it was page after page after page of SEO spam for "Complete phone number for $priest_name!" "Is $priest_name cheating on you? Find out!" "$priest_name in your city want to meet you!" The few I clicked through just in case had none of the promised information.
I gave up on Google, and phoned the parish office when it opened this morning. He retired six months ago. Here's his phone number.
Time wasted with the company that promised to take all of the world's information and make it available to everyone: 20-40 minutes.
Time spent getting the information the old fashioned way: 2 minutes.
Thanks for nothing, Google.
Now there is just spam.
I bet they simply optimized for the average person on the web, and we're outliers.
I wonder how much of the search abuse / manipulation they are dealing with given the current situations and upcoming elections?
[badgers in montana], [while loop python], [how to fix noisy refigerator], [nude stallman] all do just fine. Are there veins of queries that are particularly polluted? Even [homeopathy covid] is pretty good.
For example, when I search anything HTML, CSS or Javascript related, W3Schools manages to be the top link in many of the cases.
While W3Schools is fine, I guess... I have to ask if they truly represent the best result for my search query.
I would prefer not to see W3Schools, Tutorialpoint or GeeksForGeeks to be so highly ranked. This problem is even worse when I search for ML stuff, with pages upon pages of Medium blogspam.
SEO hackers are taking advantage of Google's biggest weakness: they are an advertising company that makes money on search ads.
If search were run by a nonprofit like Wikipedia or the Internet Archive, it could be made to filter out sites with ads on them. SEO hackers would have no way to get their foot in the door unless they drop all of their ads, removing their own revenue source. This would create a space on the internet for non-commercial activity to flourish without ads and all of the tracking garbage that comes with it. A form of cultural ad blocking that, in the long run, could be a lot more effective than the technical arms race of client-side ad blockers.