5 ms·

Anyone else feel that Google as a search engine has gotten really bad these past few years? Finding information outside of looking up restaurants, songs or prod

Anyone else feel that Google as a search engine has gotten really bad these past few years? Finding information outside of looking up restaurants, songs or products the results are often times completely irrelevant and limited now.

RankingMember 3y ago
There was a post yesterday about the literal operator (double-quotes around a word) no longer working. I had noticed weirdness like that but hadn't thought much about it. I've noticed a lower quality experience in general searching for things on Google, though, yes.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  That seems like a weird thing for Google to intentionally break. I’m guessing there’s a more technical reason. For example Google probably directly indexes by keyword. So “foo bar” probably searches the union of all “foo” and all “bar” pages for “foo bar”. But if the page changes since indexing, they will serve matches that aren’t actually matches. Or websites might game the indexer so that “foo bar” isn’t actually visible but it shows up on the Google search page.
ToDougie 3y ago
In my 24 years of use, my google-fu has improved significantly. However, I can no longer keep up with how drastically google search results have deteriorated.
justrealist 3y ago
It's an adversarial environment.
drawkward 3y ago
Today, I was googling for some methodology discussions on how to execute a type of market analysis I'd never previously undertaken. Instead of finding what I was looking for, I got a bunch of SEO-optimized corporate garbage trying to get me to hire Nielsen or IRI to do it for me. Corporate "blogs" suck a$$.
scottyah 3y ago
I don't see it as a Google thing, it's just that the internet as a whole sucks more, as do the people on it. It doesn't really matter how they change their search engine because people will find ways to game it, and are heavily incentivized to do so.
mstipetic 3y ago
I’ve been talking about it for a while - try searching for any industry metrics, research into topics, trends reports etc, it’s impossible. Unless I know the exact title of an article, even though I remember concrete things about an article I read and try to use them in a search it returns nothing useful.
chankstein38 3y ago
One thing I think affects this, aside from Google just being trash now, is the age of content available. I can't tell you how many times I google for a solution while writing some code and find irrelevant crap from 2013 or something. Don't get me wrong, it's good those things are available to be searched still but I don't routinely need 10 year old data. It would be nice if they'd archive things older than a certain date and give you an alternate way to search those things. Maybe I'm searching for something where the tech is 10 years old so I need that answer and Google's results say "No current results. (number) archived results available. Click here" and let you click to load the archived results the same way they do with omitted results. I don't know this is just something I've been thinking about for a long time. Maybe it's stupid but I get so tired of scrolling through stackoverflow posts from the 2010s when I'm looking for an answer on a new version of a language I'm using.
- UltimateEdge 3y ago
  For these things you can often just append something like "after:2020" to see current results. (I am not sure if you were aware.)
  - chankstein38 3y ago
    I wasn't, I appreciate that!
000ooo000 3y ago
Yep it's pretty awful now. Being tech support and then a programmer, I've been googling very frequently for a long while and only in the last few years have I started to feel frustrated in trying to find what seems like basic info. Seems the variety in results has vanished, e.g. once I could search for csharp xyz and get a stack overflow result with a few solid 'sub results', followed by an msdn article, then a GitHub issue page, then a blog or three. Now, it seems like I get an entire page of msdn results, maybe a stack overflow result, a couple of those dogshit content aggregation sites regurgitating stack overflow content, and that's about it. What should worry Google (ha) is that I'm starting to break the muscle memory of going straight to google and instead asking chatgpt first. I set my custom instructions to include a link to docs for anything it mentions and even if ChatGPT is wrong, I'm usually at the info I want faster than with Google.

RankingMember 3y ago

There was a post yesterday about the literal operator (double-quotes around a word) no longer working. I had noticed weirdness like that but hadn't thought much about it. I've noticed a lower quality experience in general searching for things on Google, though, yes.

janalsncm 3y ago
That seems like a weird thing for Google to intentionally break. I’m guessing there’s a more technical reason. For example Google probably directly indexes by keyword. So “foo bar” probably searches the union of all “foo” and all “bar” pages for “foo bar”. But if the page changes since indexing, they will serve matches that aren’t actually matches. Or websites might game the indexer so that “foo bar” isn’t actually visible but it shows up on the Google search page.

ToDougie 3y ago

In my 24 years of use, my google-fu has improved significantly. However, I can no longer keep up with how drastically google search results have deteriorated.

justrealist 3y ago

It's an adversarial environment.

drawkward 3y ago

Today, I was googling for some methodology discussions on how to execute a type of market analysis I'd never previously undertaken. Instead of finding what I was looking for, I got a bunch of SEO-optimized corporate garbage trying to get me to hire Nielsen or IRI to do it for me. Corporate "blogs" suck a$$.

scottyah 3y ago

I don't see it as a Google thing, it's just that the internet as a whole sucks more, as do the people on it. It doesn't really matter how they change their search engine because people will find ways to game it, and are heavily incentivized to do so.

mstipetic 3y ago

I’ve been talking about it for a while - try searching for any industry metrics, research into topics, trends reports etc, it’s impossible. Unless I know the exact title of an article, even though I remember concrete things about an article I read and try to use them in a search it returns nothing useful.

chankstein38 3y ago

One thing I think affects this, aside from Google just being trash now, is the age of content available. I can't tell you how many times I google for a solution while writing some code and find irrelevant crap from 2013 or something. Don't get me wrong, it's good those things are available to be searched still but I don't routinely need 10 year old data. It would be nice if they'd archive things older than a certain date and give you an alternate way to search those things. Maybe I'm searching for something where the tech is 10 years old so I need that answer and Google's results say "No current results. (number) archived results available. Click here" and let you click to load the archived results the same way they do with omitted results. I don't know this is just something I've been thinking about for a long time. Maybe it's stupid but I get so tired of scrolling through stackoverflow posts from the 2010s when I'm looking for an answer on a new version of a language I'm using.

UltimateEdge 3y ago
For these things you can often just append something like "after:2020" to see current results. (I am not sure if you were aware.)
- chankstein38 3y ago
  I wasn't, I appreciate that!

000ooo000 3y ago

Yep it's pretty awful now. Being tech support and then a programmer, I've been googling very frequently for a long while and only in the last few years have I started to feel frustrated in trying to find what seems like basic info. Seems the variety in results has vanished, e.g. once I could search for csharp xyz and get a stack overflow result with a few solid 'sub results', followed by an msdn article, then a GitHub issue page, then a blog or three. Now, it seems like I get an entire page of msdn results, maybe a stack overflow result, a couple of those dogshit content aggregation sites regurgitating stack overflow content, and that's about it. What should worry Google (ha) is that I'm starting to break the muscle memory of going straight to google and instead asking chatgpt first. I set my custom instructions to include a link to docs for anything it mentions and even if ChatGPT is wrong, I'm usually at the info I want faster than with Google.