Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022

One thing I find annoying is that they still return results that are those sites that seem to register a load of terms that all point to the same page. You see this with telephone numbers, song lyrics etc. where the result looks like &quot;Lyrics for Stairway to Heaven&quot; but you click through and there is no content, just a page that says &quot;Upload some lyrics to this song&quot;.. etc.<p>These sites should be heavily penalised for click-baiting and they have been doing it for years.

Ironically, my work on my own search engine has led me to be a bit more patient with Google&#x27;s problems. At least I think I understand them better. Search engines fail in weird ways.<p>I think in part that Google just has gotten a spectacularly confusing failure mode. If it can&#x27;t find good matching contents, it starts second-guessing your query and producing other results, which makes you think it&#x27;s not even considering what you entered. It may even be &quot;better&quot; in the sense that it&#x27;s more likely to return at least something relevant, but in practice it&#x27;s bad UX because it&#x27;s so unintuitive what&#x27;s happening. It&#x27;s probably one of those unfortunate optimizations that are invisible when they work and frustrating when they don&#x27;t.<p>There is so much stuff on the Internet it&#x27;s easy to start thinking there is guaranteed to <i>be</i> good results for any search, and that just doesn&#x27;t seem to be the case. Especially with highly specified searches with 6-8 terms, you quickly enter the domain where you&#x27;re reasonably unlikely to find an exact match.

When I search for &quot;databricks series b valuation&quot; in Google (from Argentina, using Google.com in English) result #6 is:<p>&quot;Python get value from database - Büro Jorge Schmidt&quot;, which judging by title and preview seems to be a Python + MySQL tutorial. It returns a 403 error and might be a hacked site, since the home page is for a graphic design studio in Munich.<p>Result #8 is something similar:<p>&quot;Intellij flatten packages - Músicos de Viaje&quot;. This is definitely a hacked site (from Spain, apparently) that redirects me somewhere else.<p>Result #10:<p>&quot;How to calculate tax percentage in sql query&quot;. Another hacked site, this time for an evangelical church from Brazil.<p>Now... how can Google think that any of these sites are relevant? Even if it doesn&#x27;t realize the pages are hacked... even its crawler has been fed content that included the keywords... :<p>A - The sites themselves don&#x27;t match the query at all.<p>B - No legit site about the subject would link to these sites.<p>C - The results themselves (title, url, preview), as Google shows them, have nothing to do with the search!

The article mostly talks about IA (instant answers) which are notoriously hard. The recent advances in machine learning have made the technology more approachable, so startups like Kagi Search (disclaimer: founder) can also leverage latest advances in NLP and compete on this ground.<p>To give just a few examples:<p>Query 1: how many stars in the usa flag<p>Google: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cln.sh&#x2F;63sVzh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cln.sh&#x2F;63sVzh</a><p>Kagi: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cln.sh&#x2F;bFEHsD" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cln.sh&#x2F;bFEHsD</a><p>Pretty surprising that Google would get something like this wrong.<p>Query 2: when did moon explode<p>Google <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cln.sh&#x2F;fUhdJS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cln.sh&#x2F;fUhdJS</a><p>Kagi <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cln.sh&#x2F;5wDvXG" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cln.sh&#x2F;5wDvXG</a><p>Both engines feature the same article but for some reason Google decides this is not fiction, and gives a (wrong) answer.<p>Query 3: do most rabbits have short or long ears<p>Google: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cln.sh&#x2F;JuOeqq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cln.sh&#x2F;JuOeqq</a><p>Kagi: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cln.sh&#x2F;BkZi6O" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cln.sh&#x2F;BkZi6O</a><p>Both engines use the same article for source, but Google completely misses the context.<p>These examples show that a search startup has a chance to go neck-to-neck with Google and compete even in technology as sophisticated as instant answers. We invested considerable resources in the Kagi Search AI capabilities, discussed in some detail here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.ai&#x2F;last-mile-for-web-search.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.ai&#x2F;last-mile-for-web-search.html</a><p>What is mind boggling though from a product management perspective is that Google had nearly a decade head start and a cash purse of hundreds of billions of dollars to get this right.<p>To be fair, it is likely that the vast majority of queries are answered correctly, but only the outliers get the public attention. Also Kagi is not without its own share of silly mistakes too, but just being able to be considered in the same basket as Google is already a huge thing for us.

I think that Google is optimizing for the &quot;average user&quot; to the detriment of power users such as the HN crowd. Most people treat Google as an internet oracle and send queries like &quot;how do I do X&quot; while power users will search for keywords. One example of this optimization is the automatic answer boxes that show up for certain questions, which are wrong disturbingly often or don&#x27;t include important details.

The web itself is deteriorating.<p>Instant answers (IA) caused a shift in the way contents are written. Content optimized for IA tend to be repetitive and shallow. Viewing content written for IA is a frustrating experience and these tend to dominant the result page now.

It&#x27;s definitely deteriorating, and the worst part is that it completely ignores quotes if it thinks you meant something else, and shows the results for what it thinks you want. Completely useless in a lot of cases

If you search for anything political on Google, you&#x27;ll notice that the results are clearly slanted in one direction, towards the opinion of a handful of pre-approved news outlets. This leads me to seek alternatives whenever I need neutral sources, for instance Yahoo search.

The most frustrating part of using Google these days (for me anyhow) is Google returning results that <i>don&#x27;t</i> match terms that I specifically wrap in quotes. If I search for:<p>&quot;gamakatsu octopus hooks&quot;<p>I expect to only receive results for that. Instead I get bombarded by results that match a portion, or when Google thinks I tangentially might have meant something else. There was a time when it respected the quote characters, but those days have long since passed.

What&#x27;s galling is that they&#x27;ve actively gone out of their way to make it worse, instead of just letting it regress through neglect.<p>For example, a few weeks ago, I image searched for a meme that I created years ago on 4chan. A dozen or so results were returned, none of them relevant. But if you tack on the name of a 4chan archive, for example &quot;4plebs&quot; (not even &quot;site:4plebs...&quot;), all of the sudden it turns up.<p>Google in general seems to penalize 4chan and its archives, which is ironic since it&#x27;s one of the few places where actual humans post OC. Meanwhile Pinterest spam, AI-generated blog posts, and reddit threads full of bots and shills abound in its results.

When I search “tim lee food blogger age” Google actually shows results with “age” striked out (so it shows top results as if age wasn’t part of the queried string).<p>Trying to think why&#x2F;how it’d conclude that age wasn’t necessary for good results.

Googles search&#x27;s results are often wrong because of corporate choices. In Greece there is a completely independent news web site which for some reason just isn&#x27;t registered as a news web site with google. As a result not only is this web site less shown than others (in google feed or in search results) but in the past there have been cases where this web site was the first to publish a story but google search only returned other news sites which reproduced this story even using the original material!<p>In my opinion, google has become too big and has lost focus on actual quality&#x2F;engineering.

I believe the theory that Google is optimizing for ad revenue. Sites without ads get ranked lower. The biggest example I can think of is Wikipedia. When I search a proper noun with a Wikipedia article, I almost want to go look at that article. Recently, I feel like I really have to dig for it.

I share the view that Google SERPS have dropped in quality the last 5-7 years. Of great annoyance to me is the amateurish way that a search results page will find relevant Twitter results but then clicking on the results takes you to the root page of the Twitter user and not the result. Since many Twitterers are prolific posters, it can be very time-consuming or even impossible to find the result listed. Thankfully Inoreader takes me to the exact Twitter result.

One of the worst things I&#x27;ve noticed recently about Google Search is how it is very anti-startup because of the concept of the Google Sandbox, an essentially arbitrary length of time they put a huge negative penalty on your site to try to entice you to buy paid ads instead before your funding runs out waiting for organic traffic.<p>Perhaps that&#x27;s my biased opinion on their motivations as I&#x27;ve recently launched <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grizzlybulls.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grizzlybulls.com</a> and yet even though Bing has tiny market share, I&#x27;m getting 10x more organic traffic from Bing rather than Google...

One reason it might deteriorated is that goog is constantly battling ppl &#x27;optimizing&#x27; their content for Google while competitors likely see less than 1&#x2F;1000 of this.

I don&#x27;t know if search is deteriorating as a whole, but certain searches seems to be manipulated for political reasons. The famous example is an Image search of &quot;white couple&quot; - really, try it, it is like only 50% correct. But I don&#x27;t believe the image search itself would be that bad, rather certain queries are given manipulated results.

One theory is that Google has made a substantial change to a neural network based search, and they are still working out the kinks in getting it to work. How could it not be A&#x2F;B tested such that we wouldn&#x27;t notice the bad searches? The answer to that I am not sure. I read their research publications, and the NLP research coming out of Google is far beyond any other company. I can only imagine what they aren&#x27;t publishing.

The methodology in this article is terrible. It makes me doubt that the people at Surge HQ understand even the most basic scientific concepts.<p>This is like doing a taste test between two sodas where one is clearly labeled &quot;Coke&quot; and the other labeled &quot;Pepsi&quot;. It will end up measuring branding and public perception instead of anything empirical or even objective.<p>This isn&#x27;t a measurement of search quality, it&#x27;s a public opinion poll with a sample size of 250. In fact the whole thing is a poorly disguised advertisement, and I don&#x27;t think it serves them well.

I&#x27;ve been gone from G for 4 1&#x2F;2 years now. When I was there, the weekly meetings often featured &quot;search quality&quot; measurements that were <i>rigorous</i> in their objectivity (I thought). They bent over backwards to be non-self-deluding.<p>I distinctly remember Udi Manber saying &quot;if the web is slow, it&#x27;s our fault&quot; (actually, the speech was that <i>everything</i> is &quot;our fault&quot;), meaning, really, &quot;take responsibility for problems and don&#x27;t throw up your hands.&quot;<p>However, the natural tendency of any organization is to reward the suckups and promote mediocre people who just get along with everyone. It wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if that&#x27;s what&#x27;s happened with Google, too.

I tried the query &quot;databricks series b valuation&quot; on Kagi (just a beta user there) and the results were:<p><pre><code> 1. Databricks Funding Rounds, Valuation and Investors (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;craft.co&#x2F;databricks&#x2F;funding-rounds) - not directly to the point but does include information about all rounds. 2. Databricks Raises $1B at $28B Valuation, Plans Massive - not answering the question at all. 3. *Databricks Closes $33M Series B Funding - FinSMEs* (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.finsmes.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;databricks-closes-33m-series-b-funding.html) - Direct hit! didn&#x27;t even have to click into the page. </code></pre> In my mind this is yet another proof of Google&#x27;s search quality decline. I remember being so excited when I saw the first structured search result but now I tend to use other engines first.

Article forgot to mention censorship. All kinds of results are censored&#x2F;banned from Google. This detoriation is just as bad, maybe worse, than the one caused by paid for results or simply inaccurate results.

What if someone wanted to get a large number of results, more than 300, for a common term found on the web. Is Google suitable for such a task.<p>How could this be proven. Search for the term &quot;example&quot; and see how many results can be accessed. Is it greater than 300.<p>By limiting the number of results that can be accessed, Google is &quot;hiding&quot; a portion of the web from the user. How do we explain this practice. Perhaps that portion is not deemed useful for user data collection or advertising purposes hence it is excluded. Perhaps Google wishes to prevent users from accessing large chunks of its index. Who knows.<p>We need a search engine that exposes the full web and does not try to guess what someone is searching for. If the user requests all pages with the term example, then that is what the search engine returns. Google is far too limited.<p>If one goes to a library and searches an academic database, she is never precluded from viewing all results. Even though she may only access the first few pages, she is always allowed to see all the results. She can view results that were low on the relevance scale to understand why they scored low. She can then subsequenty narrow her search. I have seen this implemented in non-academic databases as well. First a broad search is performed. It returns all results, not just a portion. These results are stored. Every single result is accessible by the user. (Not possible with Google. User only sees 200-300 max.) Then the user can narrow her search and search within those results. The user repeats using different searches until she has what she wants. The user controls the number of database items she wishes to search, based on the initial broad search. With Google, the user has no such access to all results from a broad search, nor the ability to search exclusively within that set. Google is extremely limited. Everything is geared toward user data collection and online advertising. It truly detracts from any search functionality they may have to offer. The user is the product, not the database.

Incidentally, I noticed very recently (in the last month or so) that searches in google maps (at least on mobile) are also starting to return completely irrelevant results. Something is seriously wrong at google.

Yesterday I was googling for “rub fingers genie magic”. I was looking whether it was a cup, kettle or a vase you “rub fingers” to invoke the magic genie.<p>But google would automatically change to “jenie” and bring up Amazon crap. I tried adding “alladin” and it changed query to bring up alibaba crap.<p>Google had no idea about the famous alladin and genie story.<p>Google not only misunderstood me, they thought I was an idiot for asking a non e-commerce query.<p>The top 5 results above the fold were all ads. It was truly frustrating. I called a friend to ask them that question and get an answer.

Lately Google has been giving me results that ignore my operators like quotation marks and - signs. I knew it was all downhill from here when Image Search became 50% video results.

Google search is OK for me in English. In my native language (central Europe), it&#x27;s almost impossible to find content that is not eshop or someone selling something. I&#x27;m looking for HTML4 articles, phpbb forum discussion, etc. where people actually share knowledge, but I only get super-SEO optimized crap. The best I get is a blog spam from an eshop.

For tech stuff Google is usually pretty good, sometimes I have to change a little my query, but it works. For non tech stuff is a disaster. I recently looked for a specific brand and model car tyre datasheet, I know it may be a nich, but still I got ONLY ads. Not a single result was about data, let alone datasheet, all were ads.

It was always pointed downhill because its not user-aligned. It&#x27;s only a matter of time.

This article from HN a while back was great: How SEO is Gentrifying the internet. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.currentaffairs.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;how-seo-is-gentrifying-the-internet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.currentaffairs.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;how-seo-is-gentrifyin...</a><p>I just tried to find this article on google by searching &quot;Can cats eat blueberries bad search results&quot; (Can Cats eat blueberries is very relevant to the article) and it showed up on the first page of results, albeit at the end.<p>On Bing I wasn&#x27;t able to find it

I hate when I search for tech issues and I get doc pages but the deprecated docs get top billing. Ironically this often happens when looking up google documentation of their own products. Also sometimes I am looking up a term out of curiousity &#x2F; intellectual interest but the results are dominated by people selling products for that term. I agree that search could use an overhaul, maybe even niche search designed around certain domains could be a target for producing something better.

On a slightly different tangent, has anyone noticed that predictive text while typing on a phone (iPhone for me) seems to be getting progressively worse? Like it predicts the most random words that have little connection to what I typed on the screen.<p>I don&#x27;t know if all my mistakes over the years are being remembered and so the prediction algorithm is accumulating more errors and performing worse, or if something else is at play (clumsy fingers as I get older?).

The first 1&#x2F;2 to 2&#x2F;3 of the page is ads. For slightly obscure things find myself having to tweak wording, use controls like omitting words.

I never understood why they didn&#x27;t expand the &quot;did you maybe mean&quot; section when they pushed into ML based query interpretation.<p>Let me search what I want to search the way pagerank trained me to. Keywords over sentences.<p>But if you want to start pushing in that direction why not just add a &quot;you may find better results when phrased as&quot; section which these models appear to be preferential towards.<p>From the examples, ngrok for example, search didn&#x27;t even care to include the keyword in all searches, even if the page is more &quot;popular&quot; the fact you&#x27;d (and I have repeatedly had to) quote the term to insist it be included is nuts for a search engine.<p>Finding obscure bug solutions was already barely possible, but has become impossible when even explicit error messages are &quot;interpreted&quot; to &#x27;why won&#x27;t &lt;unrelated program&gt; do &lt;unrelated keywords&gt;&#x27; on StackOverflow because it noticed that the program uses the same library and has had some searches with the same process name in the error line.

Is it Google that&#x27;s deteriorating, or is it the quality of the web in general that&#x27;s gone downhill and Google just reflects that?

I think it&#x27;s complete BS that when I search for something like Basecamp, they show the paid advertisement before the organic result, even though they&#x27;re the same.<p>Feels so slimy. The organic result would have sufficed.<p>Nothing but a glorified 1997 Yahoo Index at this point.<p>I never click the advert. I know I&#x27;m probably in the minority, but I won&#x27;t give them the infinitesimal revenue.

While Google results may well be deteriorating, this example strikes me as a poor one. Unless you&#x27;re trying to demonstrate poor results, why wouldn&#x27;t you put quotation marks around &quot;series b&quot;? There&#x27;s no point in making the algorithm guess what you mean when you can be explicit.

Personally I&#x27;m at full scale war with ads on the internet and I make sure I see almost none (nowadays this can be achieved in a lot of ways - Pi-hole, NextDNS, uBlock etc.)<p>So when recently my wife and I were searching for a holiday destination online on her laptop (with no blocking as she gets very annoyed if blocking makes even one page unusable - she&#x27;d rather drown in ads all day) I was pretty shocked that for almost all search queries, on a 13&quot; laptop with 1280x800 resolution and the browser running full screen at 100% zoom, the &gt;&gt;entire visible Google results page is all ads!&lt;&lt; There is literally no organic search result visible &quot;above the fold&quot;!<p>So, Google could improve their search engine dramatically and the typical searcher would not even see the results of it...

I’m shocked that the original author didn’t think to put “series b” in quotes instead of as separate words. Doing that returns a table format of every databricks round as the second result.<p>In general, “term” is like the old +term format which we all used to use back when we thought search was good until google killed the +.<p>In reality the Web has gotten worse with far more bad spam actors and our search habits have changed partially because google steered us towards more natural language style queries away from the old style queries many people used to use in this community.<p>In other words, we got used the convenient of free form text without special operators, and when the webspam increased we feel that having to go back and futz with the query using these operators means search has degraded.

If we could only give feedback on search results, things would improve. I am tired of finding the same articles over and over again that just update the year every year and gives you a top list of product &quot;reviews&quot; with a link to amazon.

If you are looking for an alternative, try Neeva. Being ad free means we aren’t beholden to advertisers, and unlike the other alternatives such as DDG, Neeva isn’t just a wrapper around Bing results. Hope you enjoy it.

disclaimer: I started you.com, a private search engine with summarization.<p>I&#x27;ve seen many users complain about Google&#x27;s quality and wanting to have some control over their sources. That&#x27;s why we added source preferences as a feature (you have to log in). You can also change the order for a query and similar queries directly within the search results page so that you eg see StackOverflow or Code Completion higher than web results.

Why only 2022 really? Put all other subtle things aside, myself feel it&#x27;s getting harder and harder to distinguish Ads and genuine results without reading the contents carefully.

Google&#x27;s primary differentiation used to be that they were by far the best search engine. Since then, they have moved upstream:<p>1. Android<p>2. Chrome<p>3. A deal with Apple<p>Even if a much better search engine were to emerge, without an extremely large delta in search quality, they may struggle to compete against Google because Google controls the entry points.<p>Apple &amp; Microsoft still control the platforms (OSes) upon which Google reaches the majority of consumers, though. Seems likely that Apple will try to displace Google eventually.

I cannot rate any of the results anymore as being good.<p>I want my search engine to search for the keywords i typed in, not what the search engine thinks I want to search for.<p>If Google shows me a different person then the one I&#x27;m looking for, I am at fault, not the search engine. I should be more specific.<p>So yes, Google&#x27;s search quality sucks big time, but not in the way the author thinks. He think Google should know what you are searching for. Which is for me, a really bad factor.

I&#x27;ve been saying this since 2016! So what can be done about it? There are certainly better search engine alternatives out there. But the market doesn&#x27;t seem to want it? The average Joe and Jane still go right to Google for search and Chrome for browser. And the truth is that as soon as a solid alternative comes out, the entrenched incumbents will squash it like a bug through acquisition or other means.

Ssh.com in search results is my latest pet hate. Give me official documentation or actual helpful data, or their thinly veiled advertising.

Google is focused on cloud race thinking search is done. Please try to remember any new successful product of them for the last 4 years.

I recently changed over to ddg as my primary search engine (for the nth time...) and this time it seems like it sticks. The quality of google search results have been dwindling, that and a lot of ads just pushed me into switching over again. I have to say that ddg have improved their service as well, so hats off to them.

Yesterday on HN someone claimed that they were more or less happy with code that they wrote 10 years ago. My question, is this a brilliant senior dev that I could learn something from or a grad student that doesn&#x27;t know what they don&#x27;t know? My impression is that 2015 could answer this question but 2022 google can not.

Definitly, I just cannot anything.<p>Worse, when one is polyglot and it will just automatically translate search results or nicely return local results (after automatic translation) when I want the original stuff I am looking for.<p>Then all the shitty url redirects for any kind of document returned by it for analytics.

Google search works exactly as Google wants it to work: highly optimized for whatever makes money for them.<p>Sure it is worse for us but it is so much better for them. And it will get even worse since revenue growth has to go from somewhere.<p>And it will take decades for some other company to displace Google.

There&#x27;s been a lot of HN discussion [1][2][3] about Google Search recently, and whether it’s gone downhill.<p>I used to work on Search and Search Measurement at YouTube, Twitter, and Microsoft, so I thought it would be fun to move beyond anecdotes, grab some data, and do a quantitative analysis.<p>tl;dr I didn&#x27;t have historical data, to see how Google Search has trended over time. But compared to Bing, Google still generally outperforms -- although some of its failures are pretty surprising!<p>If there are particular areas of Google Search that people are interested in digging into, give a shout -- I love running these kinds of search &#x2F; human eval analyses.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29772136" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29772136</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29417061" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29417061</a> [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29392702" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29392702</a>

Please comment with your recent failed searches in this thread.<p>Any new search engine is going to need a niche with lots of users.<p>I haven&#x27;t seen a comprehensive list of actual failed queries that new search engines could focus on solving.

Youtube gives me a better search results. Esp. for non-IT related searches.

&gt;&gt; Is Google Search Deteriorating?<p>To answer this, Google&#x27;s search results need to be compared as before and after. The OP is talking only about the current search quality and a comparison to Bing.

Google isn’t a search engine. It’s an ad engine. The top results drive ad revenue for their ad network.<p>You’re not getting good search results because the information you want doesn’t make money for Google.

Even on Google Maps many of the bad reviews are getting automatically filtered. My guess is to protect businesses. Many of the google services just keep getting worse and worse.

One thing that&#x27;s recently been driving me crazy with Google: how the heck do Github aggregating websites get better SEO than regular Github when I search for a repo?

search for clam antivirus:<p>Google first link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alternativeto.net&#x2F;software&#x2F;clam-antivirus&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alternativeto.net&#x2F;software&#x2F;clam-antivirus&#x2F;</a><p>DuckDuckGo first link: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clamav.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clamav.net&#x2F;</a><p>i don&#x27;t understand why the search result, first link is alternativeto instead of clamav home page

I hate when I receive n sites (where n&gt;5) that point to the same GitHub issue or stackoverflow content with different ui

This is a very common cycle. People make a good tool, good tool becomes popular, people destroy tool to harvest profit.

Why does this company have AI in their name if they are just selling access to regular old humans?

The question should rather be: can vanilla Google Search deteriorate any further?

Remember &quot;Let me google that for you?&quot; Nowadays it&#x27;s not a joke.

It&#x27;s so so bad. I used to be a google master. Now I&#x27;m a consumer.

Google is the best search engine for searching ads.

With sincere respect to the author, I stopped reading the article. Even though I found the topic interesting and am definitely inclined to believe that Google&#x27;s search results are declining in quality, I felt that the search terms and criticisms were distractingly unfair.<p>If someone were evaluating <i>hammers</i> and handed a bunch of hammers to beginners and judged the hammers by those results, I&#x27;d tune out there, too, for the same reason.<p>A suggestion for improvement would be to have the users RTFM (read the fine manual) first, and <i>then</i> take a reading a week later on their everyday search results. Google is a tool, like an other. Know your tools.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;websearch&#x2F;answer&#x2F;134479?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;websearch&#x2F;answer&#x2F;134479?hl=en</a><p>And: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;websearch&#x2F;answer&#x2F;2466433" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;websearch&#x2F;answer&#x2F;2466433</a><p>Always put a quote around &quot;exact search&quot; terms that must be grouped together, especially if the term includes something common like the letter <i>b</i>.<p>Indeed `databricks &quot;series b&quot; valuation` does a lot better: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?hl=en&amp;q=databricks%20%22series%20b%22%20valuation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?hl=en&amp;q=databricks%20%22series...</a><p>The 4th result is exactly about Databrick&#x27;s series B valuation. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;funding_round&#x2F;databricks-series-b--f0c822da" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;funding_round&#x2F;databricks-series-b...</a><p>Always search for a multi-word proper name, especially a common name like <i>tim lee</i>, with quotes. Put &quot;tim lee&quot; into quotes, and wikipedia shows up on the first page:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?hl=en&amp;q=%22tim%20lee%22%20vlogger%20age" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?hl=en&amp;q=%22tim%20lee%22%20vlog...</a><p>Is <i>vlogger</i> really a common search term? Personally, I&#x27;m okay with Google suggesting <i>blogger</i> because I don&#x27;t think <i>vlogger</i> is all that common. But maybe? Perhaps a better search term would yield better results?<p>In fact, &quot;tim lee blogger age&quot; gives better results than with <i>vlogger</i>! Google was correct to suggest that change. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?hl=en&amp;q=tim%20lee%20blogger%20age" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?hl=en&amp;q=tim%20lee%20blogger%20...</a><p>Anyway, this kind of criticism works best for me when the critic gives the subject the most reasonably charitable chance and <i>then</i> talks about the bad. Expecting great results out of bad search terms isn&#x27;t reasonable, in my opinion.

yes, 100%<p>especially in the images and news sections

The article totally misses the point. Yes, for the digital morons (their turks) google may work perfectly fine. However, for people who actually look for real content google gets worse and worse. All the good material gets far lower ranking than the repetitive low quality medium posts with identical and non-existing content.

This reply is based on my own biased experience, but I run a small website to share public trail data and I&#x27;ve found that Google (in my opinion) artificially suppresses my site&#x27;s results on really basic searches. Within Google&#x27;s search console you can easily check if a page has been indexed. For example, I&#x27;ve published new trails&#x2F;hikes in the past where Google&#x27;s index claims it includes the page.. but when I search &quot;myhikes &lt;name of trail&gt;&quot;, it sometimes doesn&#x27;t show up - even after clicking through multiple pages! If I change my search to &quot;site:myhikes.org &lt;name of trail&gt;&quot; it&#x27;ll show up... weird? I think so.<p>I understand how keywords can be confused by search engines and &quot;myhikes&quot; is fairly generic as many people might post a blog with the string &quot;my hikes&quot;, etc. Now if I search a popular trail that Google likes to serve up regularly (i.e. &quot;myhikes &lt;name of popular-indexed-trail&gt;&quot;) it comes up as 1st in the list.<p>Additionally, what pisses me off even more, is that I&#x27;ve searched for &quot;myhikes &lt;name of trail&gt;&quot; and have been served Google&#x27;s own map &#x2F; shitty trail tiles ranked as #1, then my site is ranked #2. Doesn&#x27;t that last bit feel a bit anti-competitive? It does to me, but maybe I&#x27;m biased.