I bet non technical people, the ones not even knowing what an ad blocker is, will tell you its getting better and better. Google search got really good at I dont know what Im doing let me describe it like Im speaking to a dog queries.<p>For example last week I was trying to find a 10 year old French song. All I remembered was some bits and pieces from the music video, so I just dropped this gem into search tab<p><pre><code> music video french song windstorm tornado
</code></pre>
and bam 4th result is 'Dernière danse' wikipedia page, despite no 'windstorm' nor 'tornado' in the wiki text. 5th results under Videos tab.<p>Want to find a particular meme?<p><pre><code> two sad girls smiling man meme
</code></pre>
and just like magic 3rd result on main page, second under Images. Leads to reddit post explaining the source (Survivor show).<p>Google realized Semantic Web is not going to happen and moved on to AI solutions. Every picture and video indexed is OCRed and goes thru ML classifiers, every query gets "what would a stupid person ask to get real answer" treatment.
sick of these posts all the time that are so anecdotal. Google performs great for so many searches, for normal people without stupid additions like site:reddit (insane, I've never had to do that, if anything is relevant from there it will come up naturally, and/or reddit should not be a source you want to use). Average people that don't use/know about or care about using ad blockers. Average people that aren't paranoid or don't surf sites they don't like unlike HNers here who are paranoid or have a weird aversion to ads (who notices them anymore? why are you on sites that have them? Spend less time on youtube or wait 5 seconds). We're so in our tech bubble sometimes.<p>Yes there has long been a problem with paid ads floating to top etc but that's a long time battle of business and the general internet landscape and doesn't mean google is 'no longer good'.
We're (well a good deal of us here) trained enough to know how to search best for results, just those little tweaks in language etc, to get results, and Google works for millions of searches without fail. I think about side things that are tied into Google search now like the AI helpers, Mini etc, that all understand natural language and return results and perform actions based on very casual sentences. G is doing just fine.
How do we turn these anecdata/tweets to bona fide dataset? Some sorta crowdsourcing?<p>Eg I have been extensively comparing (personal) experience across Google, DDG, You.com, kagi etc. Thus far, I keep coming back to good old google.