5 ms·

Google Search has been going downhill _fast_ over the past 5 years or so. Since it's probably incompetence rather than malice, what the heck is going on at Goog

Google Search has been going downhill _fast_ over the past 5 years or so. Since it's probably incompetence rather than malice, what the heck is going on at Google Search? It seems to me the "let's use AI for everything" camp has taken over the entire place even though it's making Search worse than it ever was. And please spare me the excuse that now Google can answer questions. It can't, it just answers with snippets extracted from websites it deems relevant, and often the answer is flat out wrong or irrelevant. I just hope the ML/AI mania that has taken over these big tech companies proves to be a fad that just goes nowhere like it did in the 70s and we return to plain old algorithms and good software engineering.

tekstar 5y ago
Maybe some PM realized: Worse search results -> more Google searches -> more ad views
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- handrous 5y ago
  And if the spammy, garbage pages now appearing on results page #1 also use Google ads....
- rafale 5y ago
  Good point. Users only know about Google at this point. And won't even consider another search engine.
- ahepp 5y ago
  That backfired then (well, for me). I use DDG now because if my results are going to suck either way, I’d rather have privacy.
  - stavros 5y ago
    I've been using DDG for years, and its quality has recently gone down too. I was accustomed to using !g to search Google, but now I'm very surprised to find that the Google results are worse! Google has completely lost the plot if DDG is the engine with the better results.
    - ahepp 5y ago
      Yeah, it’s at the point where search engines are now closer to shortcut bars for me. It’s rare that I don’t have to append “wiki” or “Reddit” to my search in order to find a decent result (which I assumed existed before I even searched it). I wonder what the consequences are for discoverability on the web. It can’t be good. Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic, but it seemed like there was a time I discovered new and cool web sites. Now all I discover is ad spam clogging up the tubes.
      - stavros 5y ago
        > I wonder what the consequences are for discoverability on the web. It can’t be good. Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic, but it seemed like there was a time I discovered new and cool web sites. Now all I discover is ad spam clogging up the tubes. I feel the exact same way too. I can't even discover blogs with solutions any more (even ones I know exist because I've seen them before), it's all just spam.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  I don't think it is a PM. Googlers are generally nice. I think it is a second level machine learning system that has gone haywire and nobody knows how to fix it, or they lost the keys, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397797 for a real life (or not : ) story.
shuntress 5y ago
Just like pretty much every other thing online Google (search) is constantly in danger of being run over by people acting in bad-faith to game the system. Of course their actions have not been perfect but it is a mistake to say that their search would be better as a "plain old algorithm" no matter how well-engineered it is. I'm certain that search results would be worse than they are now if the algorithm was just "grep but for the whole internet". Or that, in that case, the careful complexity necessary in each search to exclude all the SEO garbage would be unbearable.
- sph 5y ago
  Eh, I don't know. There was spam but search was useful. Now there's still spam, and search is useless. Also, I don't think people remember how much interesting stuff is on the internet. There used to be tons of results from small sites of blogs which are still there, but not listed on Google anymore. Modern Google has made the internet incredibly smaller. Everything is still out there, hidden from our searches. It's like their algo has been tuned to favour silos, spam or content silos that is, to the detriment of the long tail of small, hobbyist websites with high signal-noise ratio.
alex_c 5y ago
>It can't, it just answers with snippets extracted from websites it deems relevant, and often the answer is flat out wrong or irrelevant. I recently searched the name of a YouTuber I was watching, the top "People also ask" suggestion was "Is [name of youtuber] married?" I didn't particularly care but clicked out of curiosity. It expanded to show a snippet from an old (1980s) NY Times article about a completely different person getting married long before this particular person was even born. Google AI using other companies' content to provide wrong answers to questions I didn't even ask... That says it all.
Clubber 5y ago
>I just hope the ML/AI mania that has taken over these big tech companies proves to be a fad that just goes nowhere like it did in the 70s and we return to plain old algorithms and good software engineering. It's now being used by law enforcement. Sponsored by an errant swat raid near you. Don't worry, they'll prosecute you anyway to cover their ass. Can't risk losing their pensions, ya know. /scared https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/product-feature-artificial-intelligence-breaking-into-law-enforcement/ https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/product-feature-artifici...
handrous 5y ago
The plummet began around '08 or '09, to my recollection. It was as if, over a period of a few months, they just completely gave up trying to fight webspam shit. Simply surrendered.
dorkwood 5y ago
If I search "who gave away Anne Frank's hiding place?", Google confidently gives me the answer "Miep Gies". I don't know why Google would even suggest this -- Miep was one of Anne's helpers. Imagine all the other people out there having their names unfairly smeared by Google's algorithm.
- keewee7 5y ago
  Interesting. Using that query on Google Denmark (google.com/?gl=dk) gives a more plausible answer, Van Maaren, but Google US (google.com/?gl=us) gives the wrong answer, Miep Gies.
  - dorkwood 5y ago
    That is interesting! Unfortunately if I try Google Netherlands (google.com/?gl=nl) I also get Miep, so it's not just a US thing.
- randomNumber7 5y ago
  You have to ask the really hard questions. Like the ones every 5 yo could answer without thinking. E.g. try: "What can you do with a car/book/gun?" Be suprised the answer isn't drive/read/shoot^^.
- freediver 5y ago
  Happy to report that Kagi Search (a newcomer and one of the three search engines that can answer questions like this) gave the right answer. Both Google and Bing got it wrong.
  - tmikaeld 5y ago
    No way I'm going to pay 10$/mo for search cleaning (they're just a search proxy), if it was reasonably priced at something like 1$/mo I'd consider it.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
yeuxardents 5y ago
It reminds me of the scene from the original willy wonka from that era, where they are trying to use a computer to predict where the next winning ticket will be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMZ2j9yK_NY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMZ2j9yK_NY

tekstar 5y ago

Maybe some PM realized: Worse search results -> more Google searches -> more ad views

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
handrous 5y ago
And if the spammy, garbage pages now appearing on results page #1 also use Google ads....
rafale 5y ago
Good point. Users only know about Google at this point. And won't even consider another search engine.
ahepp 5y ago
That backfired then (well, for me). I use DDG now because if my results are going to suck either way, I’d rather have privacy.
- stavros 5y ago
  I've been using DDG for years, and its quality has recently gone down too. I was accustomed to using !g to search Google, but now I'm very surprised to find that the Google results are worse! Google has completely lost the plot if DDG is the engine with the better results.
  - ahepp 5y ago
    Yeah, it’s at the point where search engines are now closer to shortcut bars for me. It’s rare that I don’t have to append “wiki” or “Reddit” to my search in order to find a decent result (which I assumed existed before I even searched it). I wonder what the consequences are for discoverability on the web. It can’t be good. Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic, but it seemed like there was a time I discovered new and cool web sites. Now all I discover is ad spam clogging up the tubes.
    - stavros 5y ago
      > I wonder what the consequences are for discoverability on the web. It can’t be good. Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic, but it seemed like there was a time I discovered new and cool web sites. Now all I discover is ad spam clogging up the tubes. I feel the exact same way too. I can't even discover blogs with solutions any more (even ones I know exist because I've seen them before), it's all just spam.
skinkestek 5y ago
I don't think it is a PM. Googlers are generally nice. I think it is a second level machine learning system that has gone haywire and nobody knows how to fix it, or they lost the keys, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397797 for a real life (or not : ) story.

shuntress 5y ago

Just like pretty much every other thing online Google (search) is constantly in danger of being run over by people acting in bad-faith to game the system. Of course their actions have not been perfect but it is a mistake to say that their search would be better as a "plain old algorithm" no matter how well-engineered it is. I'm certain that search results would be worse than they are now if the algorithm was just "grep but for the whole internet". Or that, in that case, the careful complexity necessary in each search to exclude all the SEO garbage would be unbearable.

sph 5y ago
Eh, I don't know. There was spam but search was useful. Now there's still spam, and search is useless. Also, I don't think people remember how much interesting stuff is on the internet. There used to be tons of results from small sites of blogs which are still there, but not listed on Google anymore. Modern Google has made the internet incredibly smaller. Everything is still out there, hidden from our searches. It's like their algo has been tuned to favour silos, spam or content silos that is, to the detriment of the long tail of small, hobbyist websites with high signal-noise ratio.

alex_c 5y ago

>It can't, it just answers with snippets extracted from websites it deems relevant, and often the answer is flat out wrong or irrelevant. I recently searched the name of a YouTuber I was watching, the top "People also ask" suggestion was "Is [name of youtuber] married?" I didn't particularly care but clicked out of curiosity. It expanded to show a snippet from an old (1980s) NY Times article about a completely different person getting married long before this particular person was even born. Google AI using other companies' content to provide wrong answers to questions I didn't even ask... That says it all.

Clubber 5y ago

>I just hope the ML/AI mania that has taken over these big tech companies proves to be a fad that just goes nowhere like it did in the 70s and we return to plain old algorithms and good software engineering. It's now being used by law enforcement. Sponsored by an errant swat raid near you. Don't worry, they'll prosecute you anyway to cover their ass. Can't risk losing their pensions, ya know. /scared https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/product-feature-artificial-intelligence-breaking-into-law-enforcement/ https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/product-feature-artifici...

handrous 5y ago

The plummet began around '08 or '09, to my recollection. It was as if, over a period of a few months, they just completely gave up trying to fight webspam shit. Simply surrendered.

dorkwood 5y ago

If I search "who gave away Anne Frank's hiding place?", Google confidently gives me the answer "Miep Gies". I don't know why Google would even suggest this -- Miep was one of Anne's helpers. Imagine all the other people out there having their names unfairly smeared by Google's algorithm.

keewee7 5y ago
Interesting. Using that query on Google Denmark (google.com/?gl=dk) gives a more plausible answer, Van Maaren, but Google US (google.com/?gl=us) gives the wrong answer, Miep Gies.
- dorkwood 5y ago
  That is interesting! Unfortunately if I try Google Netherlands (google.com/?gl=nl) I also get Miep, so it's not just a US thing.
randomNumber7 5y ago
You have to ask the really hard questions. Like the ones every 5 yo could answer without thinking. E.g. try: "What can you do with a car/book/gun?" Be suprised the answer isn't drive/read/shoot^^.
freediver 5y ago
Happy to report that Kagi Search (a newcomer and one of the three search engines that can answer questions like this) gave the right answer. Both Google and Bing got it wrong.
- tmikaeld 5y ago
  No way I'm going to pay 10$/mo for search cleaning (they're just a search proxy), if it was reasonably priced at something like 1$/mo I'd consider it.
  - skinkestek 5y ago

yeuxardents 5y ago

It reminds me of the scene from the original willy wonka from that era, where they are trying to use a computer to predict where the next winning ticket will be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMZ2j9yK_NY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMZ2j9yK_NY