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Comment by wutwutwat | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, all the stuff you’re listing as things they suck at properly detecting, filtering, categorizing, they used to be extremely good at. The google search that exists today is markedly worse than the Google search of 5 years ago. Wtf happened to cause search to just rot away into a useless mess of results that used to be very high quality? It’s such a night and day regression that I’ve legit wondered if this is a sign of the Mandela effect.

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What you describe here in some order could be pointed at the fact they let someone who used to focus on Ads run all of organic search AND ads. This used to never happen, they had proper separation of church and state. The other part to blame imo is turning down the link graph, over reliance on NLP, and attempting to continue to prop up traffic to old media sites.

https://www.wired.com/story/prabhakar-raghavan-isnt-ceo-of-g...

Couldn't agree more.

And it's not just Google. Amazon is a mess. Social media is a mess. It all used to kind-of work but it's rapidly falling apart.

I wonder if they've misapplied the Youtube algorithm to searching. Other people who liked the pictures of red flowers also liked green flowers and purple flowers, so let's include that in the results, since that will probably generate more engagement and more engagement is obviously always good.

no, the rank Google ad buyers and sellers.

probably easy to confirm with a web crawler and generic searchs

they fundamentally changed their rankings to favored Google ad dollars

it's really not a deeper technical problem.

It always starts at the top. Sundar sure seems like Google's Balmer. He's good at keeping the lights on but from an outsider's perspective he doesn't seem to have any vision.

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