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Anecdotally and perhaps unrelated - has anyone else noticed a decrease in the accuracy and general quality of Google search over the past 2-4 months? They've ha

• wyck 8y ago
  Yes, i'm having to go several pages deep and even then not finding anything relevant, I've started to use other search engines and reddit to actually find useful info.
  • Liquix 8y ago
    Google poured billions into their search engine for two decades to make it better. Now that have a ridiculous amount of money and power, the search results get.... objectively worse. Which brings us to the elephant in the room: what are Google's motives behind this (clearly intentional) change? Could something as innocent as training a new neural net or testing a buggy version of the algorithm on subsets of users. But it could also be as sinister as driving traffic to those in bed with Google, silencing opposition, or effectively whitewashing the entire internet...
    • lnanek2 8y ago
      Maybe bad organic results lead to more ad clicks.
      • Liquix 8y ago
        Most definitely. But the folk at Google are very smart, very rich, and already run the most lucrative ad platform in the world. Wouldn't hamstringing their flagship product for the sake of a few extra $B/yr harm them in the long run as more and more users switch to other search engines? They had to have considered that and made the change anyway. What's the endgame? I don't feel it's more ad clicks.
        • behringer 8y ago
          What makes you think they wouldn't? Everything else google seems to do is in the interest of short term profits. Look at all the great products they've shut down simply because they weren't all that profitable. It's my opinion that a large portion of the websites on the front page of any search (quora and pinboard anyone) are completely bought and paid for.
        • rolph 8y ago
          I think the endgame ends up very close to same everytime this sort of thing happens. corp gets good people like it, then they get rich and take on investors. when stocks and investors get involved, then there is an expectation of an ever increasing >RATE< of profit. if that rate decrases then stocks are dropped, and if this goes on long enough, the corp is so interested in maximum profits over a shrinking timeslice that it basically takes all and gives nothing in return, that is the point when it is no longer a service, and exodus begins. [myspace]
    • lelf 8y ago
      > Which brings us to the elephant in the room: what are Google's motives behind this (clearly intentional) change? They are maximising ad revenue, not the search relevance/usefulness.
      • rolph 8y ago
        I was looking forward to seeing someone else share this opinion. So the google behavior is driving some users away, im wondering why others are sticking with it? I propose that in the course of professional contact we should strive to avoid use of google as a verb. Yes i know its not slick to say, "Perform a search - using the search engine." instead of, "Google it."; but it starves a mentality, i think it would disconnect the G-word from the perceived face of the internet, The whole point is a monopoly eventually gets out of hand and starts screwing its users, to its own benefit, due to largesse of the users. If google is to improve itself, We the users have to force it to by ignoring it and going elsewhere, This i think starts by RE-Realizing, as a herd, that there is choice other than the Alaughabet search engine [aka google].
        • JohnFen 8y ago
          > I propose that in the course of professional contact we should strive to avoid use of google as a verb. Stopped using "google" as a verb a long, long time ago, in favor of just saying "search". I don't think that's ever confused anyone.
    • elihu 8y ago
      One possibility is that Google hasn't gotten worse, but the spammers have come up with new techniques that Google hasn't adapted to.
  • mda 8y ago
    Maybe you had this problem before but your expectations grew faster than technology? Can you think of something from your search history and fins anything that other search engines found but Google failed?
• digikazi 8y ago
  Yep, I've noticed a lot more commercial results than before. To find something relevant I often have to dig deep, especially if what I'm looking for is a little bit obscure. I'm glad you mentioned it.
• identity-haver 8y ago
  About 2-3 months ago they basically nuked Youtube's search and recommendation. This was associated with some bad press about those features coming up with "harmful content" like unapproved radical politics & conspiracy theories. Now you basically see mostly curated front-page stuff plus some user stuff that had probably never come up in search before (e.g. a fairly common search term will come up with videos that are a decade old and only have 5k views). Maybe changes in Google search are related?
  • revvx 8y ago
    IMO, Youtube changed for the better. It used to focus on controversial and current, now it focus on curated and evergreen content. Exactly the kind of thing people in this thread are missing from Google Search. Maybe some similar change is coming to Search.
• sitkack 8y ago
  2-4 months? Try at least a year. Google search results are now that creamy scum that floats between an industrial wasteland and the tidal flats it was built upon during the changing of the tides.
  • a1369209993 8y ago
    Upwards of five years, actually. It was already declining when they decided to fuck the +WORD operator for their Facebook ripoff.
    • therein 8y ago
      So you're also saying ever since Hummingbird [0], Google search hasn't been the same. I agree. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird
      • sitkack 8y ago
        I asked Jeeve's about this, he picked up a Magic 8 Ball and it said, "not so good".
      • BRAlNlAC 8y ago
        Yup, that's when I started to switch to DDG. I remember Google saying that you needed to add '+' +before +words that must be included instead of "putting them in quotes"–how annoying. But even using their new operators, I couldn't get answers like I used to be able to. I already didn't like their data gathering practices by then, so gimping search for me made the transition a breeze. Interestingly even up to even 9-12 months ago I remember people consistently saying that DDG was so much worse than Google, which I always figured was a result of user error, or a result of not caring about tracking and leveraging the Google profile. I'd been off the Google grid for a while so I couldn't really argue, but I knew that I got significantly better information from DuckDuckGo, having grown accustomed to the level of detail needed. These days I probably only use Google a handful of times a month. The concept that they are purposefully soiling search results to add value to ads and sponsored results sounds about right, honestly. Advertisements used to be much less relevant than the results I'd get if I inputted a string of 5+ words, but anymore I have to be careful not to accidentally click on an ad, as the results tend to be terrible, and I'd rather enter a url into a browser than click on an ad I'm actually interested in. .
• ldng 8y ago
  Yes ! This morning I was not finding exactly what I was looking for in ddg and felt back to Google and result were quite noticibly worst. To me they started spiraling down when they started to give too much power to designers. Form over content is a terrible idea for a search engine ...
• JohnFen 8y ago
  > Anecdotally and perhaps unrelated - has anyone else noticed a decrease in the accuracy and general quality of Google search over the past 2-4 months Yes. Not just over the past 2-4 months, but over the past five years or so. It's become so bad that Google is no longer the most useful search engine for me.
  • arbol 8y ago
    What would you recommend instead?
    • jimnotgym 8y ago
      DuckDuckGo.com is my daily driver.
      • dx034 8y ago
        I love the concept of DDG and have it as my standard but still use Google (via !g) for about 30-50% of my queries. Simple queries work well in DDG (which is basically Bing) but more complicated queries only really work in Google.
        • bshacklett 8y ago
          Sadly I've been finding the same result. Exact searches on Google are often frustrating, but lately they've been all but impossible on DDG. It seems that all search engines (including those backing DDG) are getting on the ML train and assuming they know what I'm looking for better than I do. I understand this being default behavior, but there really needs to be a way to disable it.
    • JohnFen 8y ago
      DDG has become my first stop. It gets me what I need 90% of the time.
      • sodosopa 8y ago
• mda 8y ago
  Can you give an example from your search history? How can you quantify that results got worse?
• zepearl 8y ago
  Personally, my impression is that since at least ~1-4 years, the google searches return less exact matches especially when I search for an exact match of an error message, or multiple exact matches involving the same error message (when I start to become desperate I usually tend to split the error into 2 parts...). On the other hand the non-exact hits that it returns push me from time to time in the right direction. Having said this, I don't know of course if A) I'm too old (40) and the mindset of the younger search-people has now changed and/or B) Google just doesn't index tech forums as much as it used to and/or C) there are just fewer forum-posts and/or D) my problems became more complex (don't think so) and/or etc... . I tried (and still try from time to time) to use DDG and Bing but without success. Does anybody else have the same impression?
  • andyburke 8y ago
    Hello fellow 40 year old. I run DDG as my daily, but similarly have a hard time finding exact matches for error messages. I am suspicious, however, that I've learned how to use Google's search controls (", +, etc.) and I'm not sure they work the same on DDG. I also can't find a reference on DDG for how to control advanced searches. So ... although I feel like we might be having the same issue, I'm not sure I'm using DDG correctly enough to say it's a problem.
• Groxx 8y ago
  Their keyboard predictions have gone from "OK" to "Amazing, we live in the future", and over the past couple years to "of course I didn't mean 'aaAAaAAnd', wtf were you thinking". I frequently suspect they're starting to optimize more for $ than they were before, and ML just gives them more ways to make that number go up another % or so... but it often comes with impossible-to-predict and wildly inhuman edge cases. It's a pretty common trend when companies start focusing on small number increases - each A/B test shows improvement, but the product as a whole worsens and it drives people away in time.
• feedbeef 8y ago
  Google search worked much better over 10 years ago than it does for me today, i.e. before it abandoned the what-you-search-is-what-you-get model. My once-masterful Google-fu seems to be borderline useless today. I'm not sure what happened over the years, but Google search has morphed into a completely different, less useful product, at least for me. Any search term not wrapped in quotes can be randomly ignored today. It can inject keywords it thinks you want (but really don't). Google is great for searching modern sites like Stack Overflow, but it seems to have lost interest in servicing power users.
• AJ007 8y ago
  Google Images is a partial example, but this happened a while ago. It appears what they do is use ML to classify what is in the image, and then show images that fit those categories. It is useless now for checking things like, did this logo designer you hired off Upwork/Fiverr/etc just steal someone else's design. Aspiring science fiction authors, or Neal Stephenson, should write a novel about a world where ML tuned models optimize everything to be just good enough not to churn customers while maximizing margins. (Also applicable to non-profit items like politicians and universities)
  • icebraining 8y ago
    Google Images still checks for exact matches. The ML stuff is an extra.