My own thoughts based on a recent series of queries below.<p>TLDR I think it is most definitely.<p>Recently I was fortunate enough to be able to afford buying a home.<p>An empty home needs a lot of furniture to fill it. I've graduated from Ikea furniture I suppose, or more correctly I don't think I'd be able to make a successful pitch to the wife that this is the correct place to shop for furniture.<p>So, off I go to Google to try and see what the landscape is for furniture. The usual suspects all show up. Cranes and Bottles, Possibly Barn, Mercys, Blossomdales. And that was it. I scroll down, different variants of pages for these, ads... again more duplicate pages of brands I already know, more ads, so on and so forth. The "next page" is replaced by a "see more", and when I tap it just more of the same.<p>I literally couldn't find anything organic other than major brands, who not coincidentally were likely paying for adwords as well.<p>This isn't what I want to see in a search engine, I doubt it is for anyone else. I could have just typed in those domains, I know them all already.<p>I feel like at this point, it's time for a back to square one search results engine. Monopolies eventually kill off all brand goodwill and it looks like we've hit the tipping point.
I generally do a google search now and tag 'reddit' at the end, to find useful conversations around the topic I'm interested in. It's been working great so far.
That's the whole point inevitably, if it was good we won't stay on a page/multiple result pages for long. Also the rationale behind removing direct image links, so as to keep you on a JS executing page.<p>“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky
<a href="https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/" rel="nofollow">https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/</a>
I wrote about this before:<p><a href="https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/" rel="nofollow">https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/</a><p>Basically, Google doesn't have an incentivize to ever provide some unique results to you. They solve for the "general" use case, and the more you click through the better for them (higher likelihood you'll click an ad).<p>I'm actually working on my own kind of search, it's the basis for a few of my websites.
local furniture stores near me<p>turns up a good number of stores that are, in fact, near me. Brick and mortar, local, boutique places. Places I've never heard of. Yeah, the ads are for the usual suspects. But not only were there a lot of places that seem at least somewhat interesting on their own, there were a lot of articles from local news sources about furniture shopping in Dallas, TX. Which is also really convenient because that's where I live. Articles about the benefits of going local over big brands (internet driven or otherwise), where, when, and how to find good bargains locally, which shops are better for what categories of furniture. Etc.<p>I mean, Google certainly has some problems, but I don't think this is one of them.
Home furnishings are a bit special. The market is flooded with cheap Chinese goods. There’s no way to tell what’s good, and there are way too many choices/knockoffs. Plus it’s too heavy to return if you don’t like it. You really have to see it in person to have the confidence that it’s right.<p>This is also true for cabinets, flooring, lighting, etc.
When I want to discover new stuff, I just keep excluding things I don't want. For furniture, just add "chair -ikea -x -y -z" until you no longer see results from them.
You can't expect a tool to work when you don't know how to use it.<p>You're blaming google because you're using the tool wrong. If you're searching for furniture, type in 'furniture'. If you're searching for different furniture brands type in 'different furniture brands'. If you want to discover furniture brands type in "discover furniture brands".
I suspect the difference in experience relates to the idea that a recent homebuyer is valuable marketing product. OP is probably getting flooded because of financial circumstances.<p>I agree that discovery is broken. I too cannot find a brand or organic non-toxic children’s furniture except by very roundabout searching through similarities on Amazon, etc.
Google has changed it's search to favor corporate interests. It doesn't reflect the real internet anymore.<p>Search for movies, you get a list of newspaper reviews instead of the forums or independent reviews. Everything, even recipes, gets links to newspapers. It's so useless now.<p>What I do is "-news" or add "forum, reddit, etc" in my searches. Or I just simply jump to page 5 of the search result. Or I started to use duckduckgo more.<p>The same thing with youtube. If an event happens, I used to just search for the event and I'd get the most revelant/most viewed links. Now, it's pages of CNN, MSNBC, WashingtonPost, NYTimes, etc links.<p>It seems like google just wants to be a glorified newstand. I can't believe how horrible it has gotten. It takes effort to get what you want now.
Google's major problem is that it's in an adversarial relationship with the SEO industry. For any given keyword there is a lot of money to be made by being in the top 3 results, which means the top results tend to be dominated by businesses with the resources to mount a focused and persistent SEO campaign. This leads the results to become saturated with content marketing rather than "organic" content.
Recently I went to Berlin for a startup bootcamp and met the CEO of Mablo[0]. Their aim is to solve this problem, so that people can find products that fit their exact needs. The point is the problem that you described above is real, everyone else also faced it and there is a company that is trying to solve it.<p>I agree with the other comment. It is not that search engines are broken. But having ads does not incentivize any search engine to make products discoverable.<p>[0] <a href="https://mablo.net" rel="nofollow">https://mablo.net</a>
33 out of the 36 results on the first page of a google shopping search for "furniture" are all from Living Spaces for me, with a pretty homogeneous aesthetic
Google has a problem that they are not content generator, and their every attempt to create community around content generation failed, knol, google+, google answer, blogspot etc. Their reliance on other people to create relevant content could not solve the problem no matter how efficient their algorithm is. I wish they give one more go at content creation with much more distributed control and privacy awareness.
When I search for furniture I get a huge variety of different stores and brands, many of which I've never heard of before. Have you tried searching from a private browser window?
Search is not about discovery. It’s about already knowing what you want. (Or it should be, Google’s steps away from this are what irritates everyone.) Try Pinterest.
I do seem to get many bad links, but I think it may be Search Engine Optimization? Or possibly it seems Google takes me to more social media links than in the past.