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But how do you attribute this to Google and not to the web exploding in size several magnitudes. Finding a needle in a 3ft haystack is one thing, finding it in

But how do you attribute this to Google and not to the web exploding in size several magnitudes. Finding a needle in a 3ft haystack is one thing, finding it in 3 miles of hay is another. I feel it's not Google getting worse for some queries but the internet is just so much larger now, and the evidence is that the other major search engines don't bring back that same simplicity and ease of finding high quality technical information from smaller sources that I also remember from the late 2000's

asark 8y ago
Eh, it happened pretty quickly and in the middle of a bunch of "we're making our search experience better!" stuff around the same time. I only gave a range because I'm fuzzy on the exact year it went to hell. Notably, the failure mode isn't that it finds a bunch of spam sites that happen to contain the keywords I want or have great SEO for those keywords, which is what one might expect if it were a wheat/chaff thing. In fact the more obscure and specific I get the more Google's results seem to try to wrestle me back to the middle, and the more it shows me page after page of blogging-as-income and similar lowish-value sites that are wildly far from what I was trying to get, and are in no way trying to masquerade as anything like the content I was looking for. I think the others don't go against this trend because they also don't want to spend more money fighting spam to try to salvage a use case / usage pattern that is at this point so old that a lot of Web users have never seen it work, and that many users even back then didn't use effectively. Those of us who relied on it heavily disagree strongly with the notion that Google only improves their search, though. For me it's much worse today—to the point of being entirely useless, in fact—for a significant percentage of queries I'd like to try against it, and noticeably worse though still usable for a bunch of others. It is definitely better at sending me to Wikipedia and at finding local restaurants or whatever, though, which is the kind of thing that probably constitutes 95+% of all queries against it (throw in people typing "example.com" into search rather than the address bar and it's more like 99%), so I'm sure their metrics look great.
apatters 8y ago
I use www.searx.me with Google, Bing and DDG results weighted, and in my opinion the results are flat out better than Google alone.

asark 8y ago

Eh, it happened pretty quickly and in the middle of a bunch of "we're making our search experience better!" stuff around the same time. I only gave a range because I'm fuzzy on the exact year it went to hell. Notably, the failure mode isn't that it finds a bunch of spam sites that happen to contain the keywords I want or have great SEO for those keywords, which is what one might expect if it were a wheat/chaff thing. In fact the more obscure and specific I get the more Google's results seem to try to wrestle me back to the middle, and the more it shows me page after page of blogging-as-income and similar lowish-value sites that are wildly far from what I was trying to get, and are in no way trying to masquerade as anything like the content I was looking for. I think the others don't go against this trend because they also don't want to spend more money fighting spam to try to salvage a use case / usage pattern that is at this point so old that a lot of Web users have never seen it work, and that many users even back then didn't use effectively. Those of us who relied on it heavily disagree strongly with the notion that Google only improves their search, though. For me it's much worse today—to the point of being entirely useless, in fact—for a significant percentage of queries I'd like to try against it, and noticeably worse though still usable for a bunch of others. It is definitely better at sending me to Wikipedia and at finding local restaurants or whatever, though, which is the kind of thing that probably constitutes 95+% of all queries against it (throw in people typing "example.com" into search rather than the address bar and it's more like 99%), so I'm sure their metrics look great.

apatters 8y ago

I use www.searx.me with Google, Bing and DDG results weighted, and in my opinion the results are flat out better than Google alone.