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I have noticed in the past few years google results have become noticeable worse for similar reasons. Google used to _surprise_ me with how good it was able to

I have noticed in the past few years google results have become noticeable worse for similar reasons. Google used to _surprise_ me with how good it was able to understand what I was really looking for even when I put in vague terms. I remember being shocked on several occasions when putting in half remembered sentences, lyrics, expressions from something I had heard years ago and it being the first! result. I almost never have this experience anymore. Instead it seems to almost always return the "dumb" result, i.e. the things I was not looking for, even trying to avoid using clever search terms. It's almost like it is only doing basic word matching or something now. Also, usually the first page is all blogspam SEO garbage now.

fastball 7y ago
That was when people built websites to deliver content. Now people build websites to get highly ranked in Google. No matter how good google's algos are, they can't win when the underlying content is just SEO'd garbage.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  SEO'd garbage often contains ads, including Google ads. There's no incentive for Google to fix this problem. Google's job is not to give you great search results, it's to keep you clicking on ads. Ideally it would be the ads on the search results page directly, but if that doesn't work then a blogspam website with Google ads is the next best thing. If Google was a paid service this problem would be solved the next day. Oh, and Pinterest would completely disappear from Google too. :)
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    > If Google was a paid service this problem would be solved the next day. Nope. Cable television was introduced with the promise of no ads. That didn't last long.
    - TomJansen 7y ago
      Spotify & YouTube Premium run without ads just fine, so why wouldn't it work for search engines? Text is way more compressible then music and video. So at least on serving data it is way more cheaper than the aforementioned services
      - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
        Because an MBA will realize that they're "leaving money on the table" and not "maximizing shareholder value" by selling ad free subscription services. Subscription based services also require you to be authenticated and that enables fine grained invasive tracking. Something traditional media couldn't do. If delivery costs were a factor then I shouldn't be charged $15 for an ebook with near zero distribution costs when a paperback was $5 before ebooks came onto the scene and introduced a new incentive for price gouging.
        esoterica 7y ago
        Paperbacks were never $5 unless you were looking in the bargain bin.
        kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
        Pulp novels were. Even in this millennium.
    - Nextgrid 7y ago
      Cable television could get away with it because for a long time there was no alternative, so they could renege on the promise of no ads and still keep making money (though now people have alternatives in the form of streaming services and cable television is circling the drain). Search engines are a relatively competitive market. A paid Google with no extra perks will not fly when the majority of people will just flee to Bing. For a paid Google to be successful it has to provide additional value such as filtering out ads, blogspam, Pinterest and other wastes of time.
  - TomJansen 7y ago
    I would gladly pay 7.50 euros a month for a search engine which would serve me good results without the SEO blogspam. Sadly, I think that no new pages are written without SEO bullcrap. The next best thing I think is to use the search functionality of sites themselves (like Stackoverflow, Reddit, HackerNews etc.)
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
I suspect their job has gotten way harder. It's easy to forget that they aren't just passively indexing. The web is basically google's adversary, with every page trying to be top ranked regardless of whether it "should" be.
- Lammy 7y ago
  I think it's disingenuous to say "the web is basically google's adversary" when Google AdWords is the reason so many pages fight for top ranking.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
    Well sure, but I was hoping my narrow meaning would be clear: the search team operates in an adversarial environment.
    - Lammy 7y ago
      The Search team isn't some helpless independent group adrift on currents outside of their control.
  - ori_b 7y ago
    If it wasn't AdWords, it'd be something else. People build websites because they want their content to be seen. That means competing for search result ranking.
sonar_un 7y ago
I have also found that search results are getting frustratingly worse. Often even when I put in explicit search terms and quotes, and filter out words that I don't want, Google will return results that don't adhere to what I am looking for or just return no results at all. I remember when I would search for something and find much more relevant information. Now the first 5 or 6 search results are ad-sponsored and aren't relevant, but I have to go to the 3rd or 4th page to find something that matches. I also often have to search for things that were posted in the last year or less because the older postings are increasingly irrelevant.
- kaetemi 7y ago
  Page 1: About 189,000 results (0.35 seconds) Page 2: Page 2 of about 86 results (0.36 seconds) It seems they're really just trimming the web.
floatingatoll 7y ago
Google was good at launch because it was harvesting data from webrings and directories to provide it "high quality" link ranking data. However, they didn't thank or credit or share any of their revenue with the sites whose human curation helped their results become so impressive. Seeing that Google search was effective, most human curators stopped curating directories and webrings. The SEO industry picked up the slack and began curating "blogs" that are junk links to junk products. This pair of outcomes led to the gradual and ongoing decay of Google's result quality. Google has not yet discovered how to automate "is this a quality link?" evaluation or not, since they can't tell the difference between "an amateur who's put in 20 years and just writes haphazardly" and "an SEO professional who uses Markov-generated text to juice links". They have started to select "human-curated" sources of knowledge to promote above search results, which has resulted in various instances of e.g. a political party's search results showing a parody image. They simply cannot evaluate trust without the data they initially harvested to make their billions, and without curation their algorithm will continue to fail.
- hiram112 7y ago
  > Google has not yet discovered how to automate "is this a quality link?" Google has so much more data than just the keywords and searches people make, it seems like this should be a problem they could solve. Through tracking cookies (e.g. Google Analytics) they should be able to follow a single user's session from start to finish, and they also should be able to 'rank' users in some vague way where they'd learn which users very rarely fall for ads or spend time on the sites that they know are BS. Those sites that are showing up on page 5 or 6 of the search results, but still get far more attention than others on the first few pages, could get ranked higher. But I don't think many of Google's problems these days are technical in nature. They're caused by the MBAs now having more power at Google than the techies, and thus increasing revenue is more important than accuracy.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    Theoretically, they could do a lot of things, but plenty of those would get them in hot water from a regulatory standpoint. Also, don't underestimate the adversaries. Ranking well on Google means earning a lot of money. So much so, that I'd argue the SEO-people are making significantly more money than Google loses by having spammy SERPs. They will happily throw money at the problem and work around the filters. I don't think you can really select for quality by statistical measures. Google tried and massively threw "trust" at traditional media companies and "brands". The SEO-people responded by simply paying the media companies to host their content, and now they rank top 3, pay less than they did by buying links previously, and never get penalties.
nikanj 7y ago
Your search for "skiing Norway" mostly returns results for skiing in the French Alps, because those pages have much higher visit rates. Google is a dumbass nowadays, and regularly ignores half your search terms to present you with absolutely irrelevant results, that have gotten lots of visits in the past.
- holler 7y ago
  I've noticed this too, and frequently wonder why there aren't new and better search startups...
  - jedberg 7y ago
    There are, like DuckDuckGo. But the first complaint is usually "their results aren't as good as Google" and that's because Google in reality still gives better results because of their (lack of) privacy. People want better results but don't want to be tracked, and those things are in opposition to each other.
    - mkl 7y ago
      IME DuckDuckGo has all the same problems people are talking about here. I uses DDG as my primary search engine.
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      It took me something like 6 years, but I've gone over to DDG. Their results were poorer than Google's for me, so when I tried to switch I used to end up repeating and adding !g to every search. I don't think DDG got better, but Google results are bad enough that I think they're equal in quality now (for me). I don't login to Google, have tracking disabled, use uBlock and pihole; FF/Brave.
      - jedberg 7y ago
        > I don't login to Google, have tracking disabled, use uBlock and pihole; FF/Brave. I mean, that's probably why they are equivalent for you. You've chosen privacy over better results (which is a totally legit choice to make!).
XCSme 7y ago
I agree with search getting worse, now I always have to add quotes around my keywords: yes, I really wanted to search for this exact thing. I also end up adding "reddit" in my query just so I can reach some genuine useful questions/responses instead of top 10 blog posts written just for the Amazon affiliate links.
- karlicoss 7y ago
  Same! Or hackernews search when applicable, and sometimes even twitter is fruitful.
4gotunameagain 7y ago
Imagine if somehow it would be possible to pick any release and search with that.
ori_b 7y ago
Google has gotten worse for me BECAUSE of the stuff you're talking about: It used to search everything and find the words that I cared about. Today, it will silently guess at what I want, and rewrite the query. If they have indexed pages that contain the words I put in, but don't meet their freshness/recency/goodness criteria, they will return OTHER pages with content that contains vaguely related words. "Oh, he couldn't have meant that, it's from 6 months ago, and it's niche!" They'll even show this off by bolding the words I didn't want to search for. So, if I'm looking for something that isn't popular -- duckduckgo it is. It doesn't do this kind of rewriting, so my queries still work.
- Springtime 7y ago
  I'm not sure what has changed but I've experienced of late DDG participating in a similar style of result padding/query ignoring which has been publicly brought up in Reddit feedback (and I've certainly complained about using their own feedback form). Seemingly arbitrarily even double quoted strings I've observed being ignored which is not how it was even six months ago. I still continue to use it though since as some here have already mentioned Google's results because worse a few years ago and DDG was lean and good enough to switch. I do hope they'd consider more such feedback.

fastball 7y ago

That was when people built websites to deliver content. Now people build websites to get highly ranked in Google. No matter how good google's algos are, they can't win when the underlying content is just SEO'd garbage.

Nextgrid 7y ago
SEO'd garbage often contains ads, including Google ads. There's no incentive for Google to fix this problem. Google's job is not to give you great search results, it's to keep you clicking on ads. Ideally it would be the ads on the search results page directly, but if that doesn't work then a blogspam website with Google ads is the next best thing. If Google was a paid service this problem would be solved the next day. Oh, and Pinterest would completely disappear from Google too. :)
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  > If Google was a paid service this problem would be solved the next day. Nope. Cable television was introduced with the promise of no ads. That didn't last long.
  - TomJansen 7y ago
    Spotify & YouTube Premium run without ads just fine, so why wouldn't it work for search engines? Text is way more compressible then music and video. So at least on serving data it is way more cheaper than the aforementioned services
    - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
      Because an MBA will realize that they're "leaving money on the table" and not "maximizing shareholder value" by selling ad free subscription services. Subscription based services also require you to be authenticated and that enables fine grained invasive tracking. Something traditional media couldn't do. If delivery costs were a factor then I shouldn't be charged $15 for an ebook with near zero distribution costs when a paperback was $5 before ebooks came onto the scene and introduced a new incentive for price gouging.
      - esoterica 7y ago
        Paperbacks were never $5 unless you were looking in the bargain bin.
        kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
        Pulp novels were. Even in this millennium.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    Cable television could get away with it because for a long time there was no alternative, so they could renege on the promise of no ads and still keep making money (though now people have alternatives in the form of streaming services and cable television is circling the drain). Search engines are a relatively competitive market. A paid Google with no extra perks will not fly when the majority of people will just flee to Bing. For a paid Google to be successful it has to provide additional value such as filtering out ads, blogspam, Pinterest and other wastes of time.
- TomJansen 7y ago
  I would gladly pay 7.50 euros a month for a search engine which would serve me good results without the SEO blogspam. Sadly, I think that no new pages are written without SEO bullcrap. The next best thing I think is to use the search functionality of sites themselves (like Stackoverflow, Reddit, HackerNews etc.)

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

I suspect their job has gotten way harder. It's easy to forget that they aren't just passively indexing. The web is basically google's adversary, with every page trying to be top ranked regardless of whether it "should" be.

Lammy 7y ago
I think it's disingenuous to say "the web is basically google's adversary" when Google AdWords is the reason so many pages fight for top ranking.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  Well sure, but I was hoping my narrow meaning would be clear: the search team operates in an adversarial environment.
  - Lammy 7y ago
    The Search team isn't some helpless independent group adrift on currents outside of their control.
- ori_b 7y ago
  If it wasn't AdWords, it'd be something else. People build websites because they want their content to be seen. That means competing for search result ranking.

sonar_un 7y ago

I have also found that search results are getting frustratingly worse. Often even when I put in explicit search terms and quotes, and filter out words that I don't want, Google will return results that don't adhere to what I am looking for or just return no results at all. I remember when I would search for something and find much more relevant information. Now the first 5 or 6 search results are ad-sponsored and aren't relevant, but I have to go to the 3rd or 4th page to find something that matches. I also often have to search for things that were posted in the last year or less because the older postings are increasingly irrelevant.

kaetemi 7y ago
Page 1: About 189,000 results (0.35 seconds) Page 2: Page 2 of about 86 results (0.36 seconds) It seems they're really just trimming the web.

floatingatoll 7y ago

Google was good at launch because it was harvesting data from webrings and directories to provide it "high quality" link ranking data. However, they didn't thank or credit or share any of their revenue with the sites whose human curation helped their results become so impressive. Seeing that Google search was effective, most human curators stopped curating directories and webrings. The SEO industry picked up the slack and began curating "blogs" that are junk links to junk products. This pair of outcomes led to the gradual and ongoing decay of Google's result quality. Google has not yet discovered how to automate "is this a quality link?" evaluation or not, since they can't tell the difference between "an amateur who's put in 20 years and just writes haphazardly" and "an SEO professional who uses Markov-generated text to juice links". They have started to select "human-curated" sources of knowledge to promote above search results, which has resulted in various instances of e.g. a political party's search results showing a parody image. They simply cannot evaluate trust without the data they initially harvested to make their billions, and without curation their algorithm will continue to fail.

hiram112 7y ago
> Google has not yet discovered how to automate "is this a quality link?" Google has so much more data than just the keywords and searches people make, it seems like this should be a problem they could solve. Through tracking cookies (e.g. Google Analytics) they should be able to follow a single user's session from start to finish, and they also should be able to 'rank' users in some vague way where they'd learn which users very rarely fall for ads or spend time on the sites that they know are BS. Those sites that are showing up on page 5 or 6 of the search results, but still get far more attention than others on the first few pages, could get ranked higher. But I don't think many of Google's problems these days are technical in nature. They're caused by the MBAs now having more power at Google than the techies, and thus increasing revenue is more important than accuracy.
- luckylion 7y ago
  Theoretically, they could do a lot of things, but plenty of those would get them in hot water from a regulatory standpoint. Also, don't underestimate the adversaries. Ranking well on Google means earning a lot of money. So much so, that I'd argue the SEO-people are making significantly more money than Google loses by having spammy SERPs. They will happily throw money at the problem and work around the filters. I don't think you can really select for quality by statistical measures. Google tried and massively threw "trust" at traditional media companies and "brands". The SEO-people responded by simply paying the media companies to host their content, and now they rank top 3, pay less than they did by buying links previously, and never get penalties.

nikanj 7y ago

Your search for "skiing Norway" mostly returns results for skiing in the French Alps, because those pages have much higher visit rates. Google is a dumbass nowadays, and regularly ignores half your search terms to present you with absolutely irrelevant results, that have gotten lots of visits in the past.

holler 7y ago
I've noticed this too, and frequently wonder why there aren't new and better search startups...
- jedberg 7y ago
  There are, like DuckDuckGo. But the first complaint is usually "their results aren't as good as Google" and that's because Google in reality still gives better results because of their (lack of) privacy. People want better results but don't want to be tracked, and those things are in opposition to each other.
  - mkl 7y ago
    IME DuckDuckGo has all the same problems people are talking about here. I uses DDG as my primary search engine.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    It took me something like 6 years, but I've gone over to DDG. Their results were poorer than Google's for me, so when I tried to switch I used to end up repeating and adding !g to every search. I don't think DDG got better, but Google results are bad enough that I think they're equal in quality now (for me). I don't login to Google, have tracking disabled, use uBlock and pihole; FF/Brave.
    - jedberg 7y ago
      > I don't login to Google, have tracking disabled, use uBlock and pihole; FF/Brave. I mean, that's probably why they are equivalent for you. You've chosen privacy over better results (which is a totally legit choice to make!).

XCSme 7y ago

I agree with search getting worse, now I always have to add quotes around my keywords: yes, I really wanted to search for this exact thing. I also end up adding "reddit" in my query just so I can reach some genuine useful questions/responses instead of top 10 blog posts written just for the Amazon affiliate links.

karlicoss 7y ago
Same! Or hackernews search when applicable, and sometimes even twitter is fruitful.

4gotunameagain 7y ago

Imagine if somehow it would be possible to pick any release and search with that.

ori_b 7y ago

Google has gotten worse for me BECAUSE of the stuff you're talking about: It used to search everything and find the words that I cared about. Today, it will silently guess at what I want, and rewrite the query. If they have indexed pages that contain the words I put in, but don't meet their freshness/recency/goodness criteria, they will return OTHER pages with content that contains vaguely related words. "Oh, he couldn't have meant that, it's from 6 months ago, and it's niche!" They'll even show this off by bolding the words I didn't want to search for. So, if I'm looking for something that isn't popular -- duckduckgo it is. It doesn't do this kind of rewriting, so my queries still work.

Springtime 7y ago
I'm not sure what has changed but I've experienced of late DDG participating in a similar style of result padding/query ignoring which has been publicly brought up in Reddit feedback (and I've certainly complained about using their own feedback form). Seemingly arbitrarily even double quoted strings I've observed being ignored which is not how it was even six months ago. I still continue to use it though since as some here have already mentioned Google's results because worse a few years ago and DDG was lean and good enough to switch. I do hope they'd consider more such feedback.