I recall being amazed at the seeming clairvoyance of their search results up to about 2014. It seems like when they reorganized under Alphabet, the division of responsibility became sharper. Alphabet to Google: you are an _Advertisement_ company. Your goal is to get as much info as possible on all people so to target and sell ads for maximum profit. The search engine, and other Google products, are to focus on that goal. The other innovation stuff may be done some by you, but we'll shift a lot to the other subsidiaries. I think the clarity and narrowing of purpose is wise, from a business perspective.
As a consumer, though, I've switched to DDG.
It's like with "engaging", which sounds good on paper, but by now we all know that "engaging" just means "addicting".
Bing is not upto mark but my office browser default is edge and Bing. Well somebody has to feed that MS machine learning search bot....
Quality of Google search been dropping...
One of the immediate effects was quoted strings became less relevant, sometimes completely ignored, and a lot of the other tools for negotiating with system were lost. It's only continued to progressively get worse since then.
Ye it has got worse alright. I don't know the timeframe since it has been a slow boil.
Easy queries like "who is the king of Spain" has got priority over hard queries making hard queries even harder.
“best espresso grinders reddit” -> good, relatively unbrigaded discussions of pros and cons from r/coffee
“Best espresso grinder” -> plenty of “best of 2021” type articles that are patently paid for and gamed, often by publications that have nothing to do with coffee or by some kind of purpose built “www.bestcoffeegrinder2021.com” sites that don’t exactly engender trust. Most of these are so obviously written by low quality contractors or bots that it’s somewhat worrisome that they cant be filtered out by google.
It used to be possible to, for some topics, limit the search period to pre 2010 to help improve the relevancy of results. But I've started to notice that their index seems to be forgetting about the past as time moves on.
A few months ago I was trying to find an old mailing list post using Google. I tried every combination of search terms I could think of, but it didn't show up. Later, I managed to find a direct link to the post in my notes. It turns out Google just wasn't indexing it at all -- searching literal excerpts from the post in quotation marks didn't give any results either. I just tried it again (I believe the post was https://www.mail-archive.com/fonc@vpri.org/msg01802.html), and it still doesn't seem to be indexed, though now there's another archive of the same mailing list which does show up in the results.
IMO it looks more like advertising deal than SEO gaming.
For those wondering, this it what it looked like: https://searchengineland.com/google-brings-back-blocking-sit...
The irony is that it's getting worse at the sort of detailed, niche topics (electronics, automotive, and related fields) that one would really want a search engine for, while I suspect more popular and trendy information which is far easier to discover is going to be easier to find with it. The fact that it randomly ignores words in the search query is the most infuriating part (what the fuck did you think I put that word in the search query for?)
Less than a week ago I got hit with the CAPTCHA hellban for using inurl: and going more than 3 pages into the results, which must be a record time as I have triggered that in the past but only after many many intense searches. I switched to Bing and found what I was looking for on the first page.
I also have a high suspicion sometimes that it is actively trying to hide relevant results from me.
And everything else got “recipiefied”, where u get a life story before your answer. Both of these things are sites gaming their rankings. Sometimes i just want pure info, and google wont ever show pure info/data sites in their results unless its their own parsing of it..
That said, google still beats ddg. Ddg just doenst pull in the answers from fourms and stackoverflow like sites as well as google.
also i was surprised liking bing 'way of things' a lot the few times I used it. something felt more like home there.
Of course, this is not a way to search for things.
"Rust Vector Drain" really struggled today.
I'm a bit surprised that Google isn't prepared to remember context. "User has been looking at a lot of Rust Lang so let's promote those kinds of results"
It used to be very efficient, but now, if you don't type the exact word in full with the exact spelling, it will not find it.
The most annoying is sometimes when you only remember half of a name or first name that you are looking for. (Note: assuming that it is not in your contact list already)
I tried googling things like "kivy requires pyramid but pyramid is installed" and variations on that phrase including the exact error message and subsections of it and variations of the phrase - but all the search responses were about unrelated things, like just installing pyramid by itself. Incidentally, I solved the problem by just removing "pyramid" from the requirements.txt file and then it installed and worked just fine - but I was frustrated that Google wasn't really getting what my problem was. I feel like past-Google would have been capable of understanding the problem.
I realize I've gotten used to employ my memory as a sort of index, retaining only pieces of past reads, and typing that pieces on Google to find that document again whenever I needed. It used to work better, but I've been noticing that this method is getting less and less reliable.
As websites look for sources of revenue other than Google-backed ads, Google might indeed be favoring the ones providing the best return for them. But those are not necessarily the best ones in terms of quality for the user.
Paul Graham talks in at least one of his essays of how he tried to convince Yahoo folks about the importance of having a good search engine. Only to hear a "we are in Portals Business, not in the Search Engines one" as reply...
I always felt that it "tries to think for me" since then.
It's making my research for technical translation a lot harder recently.
Ask your local librarian, I’d be curious if you get similar feedback.
I still use Google for super-specific things that I know DDG might now have indexed
So now I try to save important stuff as markdown notes so I can search them with vscode later.
Google search isn't the same for everyone. It varies based on your location, language, profile, and recent search history (i.e. if you do 3 searches in a row about items in a video game, it will assume you are looking things up while playing and continue favoring results about that game for a while).
If things have really gone of the rails to the point you are dissatisfied, try clearing your entire search history here: https://myactivity.google.com/privacyadvisor/search
I wish there were some options to exclude certain domains.
I find myself using "" or inurl a lot.
I often find myself trying to ask a natural language question, and then trying again by putting most important search terms first, in "quotes", to see if I get better results.
I feel that Google is very good at search, but it's now a lot less predictable. In the past we all knew the tricks and tips, but today those don't seem to be as important as asking a question.
I use DDG or Bing when I can. I use Yandex for images.
In my search results today, they're doing a good job of putting wikipedia style facts onto my screen, while simultaneously pushing wikipedia results further away from the top. I'm usually shown lots of "news" related results - maybe some kind of optimization for temporal relevance?
It's hard to know how to respond to a request for something like "octopus hat". As myself, I know I would prefer to see results from Etsy over Amazon for this particular query today. As an outsider, I don't know how anyone would know that without being around me for some time, and knowing the exact mood/mindset I'm in at that moment. In comes all of the data collection to make this algorithmically/heuristically possible. It's a bit concerning that everything coming up at the top of the results for this query are trying to sell me something - making, thinking & doing are falling way further down the page.
It makes me curious what a naked search experience would be like these days, without the personalized bubble. I try it from time to time via DuckDuckGo, and when deeply curious I suspect I'll try to navigate Google through tor.
Though not the biggest microsoft fan, I've started using bing more often than google and the results seem marginally better.
So yeah, my impression is that Google is getting worse. And it's not just search. I'm planning to abandon gmail, and it's not just because of privacy.
Due to both privacy concerns and the general decline in quality of the Google versions. I just don’t use their products anymore. The only one I can’t get rid of is YouTube!
Back in the 90s and 2000s everyone would have just moved over to another search engine that provided better results. Google would already have been long forgotten if we had more options. It just means Google is primed to fail and another alternative can take its place. I’m surprised a new search engine hasn’t taken over. Google has been in a weak position for a few years now.
So initially, 2 or 3 years ago, I'd regularly use this feature and get better results. But over the years I came to realize that often then Google results were no better and even sometimes worse than the DDG results.
Still, for some things like longer quotes (error msgs) out of obscure forum pages or queries that are questions, Google does better, but almost everything else, DDG is at least just as good.
Search results for previous searches where I know the response corpus are significantly degraded.
Search quality has been falling pretty steadily over the last couple years.
For the last 1%, I use duckduckgo, which almost always ends up just proxying me to one of those other sites.
Search feels very "solved" to me, I don't see the point in using Google.
If it's a paper reference I search for the paper's ID/ title - Google won't do any better than DDG, this is a pinpoint search. If it's a term, like recently I was looking into Entity Resolution, I wikipedia it. I run into things I don't know constantly and my search engine has virtually nothing to do with how I discover new information.
for everything else, such as a faster search for wikipedia, or cliffnotes about an actor that don't go to any website, it works fine.
the majority of my searches further from that are just finding messages in fast moving chats on Telegram, so that doesn't use Google or any service that is a dedicated search engine.
the extent to which google wants to stop this is another matter
Example: product model -mercadolibre
It’s absolutely terrible. It will outright ignore most search query filters even regular search will handle.
Sometimes I have moments it only gives me Google books results for certain queries. Luckily I havent had that one in a while.
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
Given that, from a shareholder point of view they may be committing mismanagement if they don't monetize it even more -- at least until their market share at least reacts. Until they titrate enough ads into the solution for something to precipitate, they won't know if it's saturated yet.
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The original stories have also been repeated and mutated. Plus content farms are literally mixing it all up.
I have thought Google is getting overwhelmed with content and it feels like they are pulling back.
But without a metric who knows?
The information available is better than ever, but are we talking it must be in the top 30 returns? Long tail is failing? Worse for grandparents or the computer literate?
We just old people complaining about the past if we are talking the information Google is a portal too. It's amazing what Google returns now.