I read comments and articles all the time about the quality of Google's search dropping. I haven't noticed it much in practice, but I'm persistent, use copious ad blocking, and my Google-fu is strong, so I usually find what I'm looking for.
Image search is another story. I've been less and less satisfied with Google Image search results, and visual search has been totally neutered. It only returns low res results that rarely match the original as well as it used to. I used to be able to plug in a 400x400 image and find a dozen copies of it at a usable size. No more. Too many copyright complaints, I assume. I've started using Bing for image and visual search now. It's not as good as old Google Images, but marginally better in some cases than the current iteration.
I've stopped being able to reliably find an animated gif and copy and paste it.
One used to be able to just right click on an image and copy it. Now, I only get a still. I try clicking into the website that hosts the image and it's click, click, click just to get anywhere close to the size I want and often times its not even an animated gif anyway because they do some sort of media query and serve me up an uncopyable movie instead.
The web sucks now. People work around it with bots and the like on Reddit, but I feel like the economics have been figured out and it's not fun anymore.
Instead, we use /giphy in our Slack and hope the algorithm finds something that kinda-sorta was what we were thinking.
With /giphy I think half the fun is when it falls flat on its face. The original command is always visible and most people just read that for the sentiment and then enjoy when the gif it found misses the mark by a mile.
The problem is not just google's algorithm but also the fact that people are not sharing useful information the same way they used to. These days when I'm trying to hack smarthome stuff or looking for advice on 3D printing something or software limitation workarounds the best I can hope for is a subreddit, otherwise the knowledge is hidden on a discord server after I "join the community" for the 98343789th time. I can't just read a 10 year old forum thread where people talked each other through solving it, I have to join the discord and figure out which channel to ask my question in and do some dance with frog memes and people react to my question with an emoji of a toothless man laughing before we can talk shop.
I'm sympathetic but this is turning to a get off my lawn rant. Things weren't easy too depending on what it was. Forums and irc were just like discords in that you had to deal with insular culture and often serious verbal abuse for being stupid enough to ask for help in a forum meant to get help in.
That said, I do see the sentiment. It would be nice to have the old convience of being able to look up old forum posts (especially with summaries in the OP via edit). Stackoverflow often fits that role now although I dread the answers even worse than old forum posts. I guess what I want is my cake and the ability to eat it too, I dont know why we can't just have the ability to search forums and have the general kinder attitude that modern media tend to have, they shouldn't be mutually exclusive.
> serious verbal abuse for being stupid enough to ask for help in a forum meant to get help in.
in all honesty, isnt this a bit of "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", "sticks and stones" etc?
yes, you might be called various words, told to RTFM. but seriously here, is it really so bad? do you really want to drag down actual verbal abuse to something so absolutely trivial?
This really depends on the forum. Yes, most had some eccentric people, but this was a small price to pay. More strictly moderated platforms or "modern media" tend to show you more ads and questionable content that is overall more harmful than someone being a bit too blunt. Also, there were extremely helpful forums too that had a much, much better atmosphere than your standard discord channel or other large social media platforms without it even being a competition.
I don't want the internet to be kind everywhere, some artificial culture. If I don't like the tone of the place, I can go elsewhere. Strong moderation comes with too high a price in my opinion.
Even popular things such as finding out what are the more popular Path of Exile league starter builds is harder to find now than in the past. At this point, I'm often just searching the PoE forums or subreddit to get an idea for a build.
The thing is, this doesn't matter anymore. You have very little control as Google tries to be smart. It's very hard if not impossible to find something older, obscure, things from other regions, languages, etc...
I think "Google-fu" just refers to being able to bend the search engine to your will. In the early days it was with operators and special keywords (inurl, etc) but today most of those are not as useful or actively harmful and so "Google-fu" has progressed. It's knowing which terms to drop from the error you are searching for, it's knowing how to phrase things correctly, it's knowing how to skim the results and separate the wheat from the chaff. Or at least that's what it means to me and how I use it.
I don't think they misunderstood and I think their point still stands. The irrelevance of Google's search results are becoming ever more unyielding to the user's intent. The portion of results that are SEO spam for every query is increasing. The amount of your query being dropped and ignored in your search is increasing. Google results are becoming increasingly irrelevant and is on a trajectory to a point of completely ignoring your query where the results are strictly a combination of spam and a random pick of websites.
"Google-fu" is not progressing. It's struggling to hang on by the decreasing number of threads before it's utterly ineffective.
Where we used to say “rome fall why”, you’d now write “why did the roman empire fall”. Because the AI likes that phrasing and produces better results.
Soon you’ll write a 300 word description of what exactly you’re looking for, like you would when asking a trusted expert, and Google will figure something out. The days of keyword searching are long gone.
Not to pick on your quick example, but actually testing it, these two terms [1] [2] have nearly identical results. Top result in both cases is history.com, followed by wikipedia, and the next 4-6 results are the same but in slightly different order.
I think this is actually an example of the benefit of their AI. Despite the big difference in the "style" of phrasing (simple english vs more formally naming the subject noun), both seem to map to a very similar representation in their embedding space. I've run into frustrations with this myself, but for basic questions like this it seems like the search works Pretty Good.
Consider that "Why did the Roman Empire fall?" consists of 1 word that describes the type of question being asked ("why"), 2 useless junk words ("did the"), and 3 "key words" ("Roman Empire Fall"), of which 2 should really be treated as a single word referring to a single concept/entity ("Roman Empire", for which "Rome" is a synonym in some cases).
Humans instinctively know this, so we are able to construct queries like "why rome fall".
But that "why rome fall" query, which we think of as a purely mechanical keyword search, already requires quite a bit of sophisticated processing in the search engine. The system has to recognize that "fall" is synonymous for "collapse" or "wane in power" and not synonymous for "autumn". It also has to recognize that "rome" means "the (Western) Roman Empire" and not the modern city of Rome in Italy or "the Holy Roman Empire" or the city of Rome, NY, USA. It furthermore needs to interpret "why" in such a way that it emphasizes results with "reasons" or "explanations", rather than something like a "timeline" or "summary".
Personally I find it really weird that Google is interested in pushing users more to interact with its digital librarian / AI assistant, instead of continuing to improve keyword search.
I have a few guesses as to why they are going this way:
1. It makes the user interface simpler from an engineering perspective (fewer user-facing buttons and options to implement and test).
2. There is strategic benefit to making search more of a black box. Maybe they are specifically trying to "educate" users to expect and be comfortable with such black boxes. Maybe the plan is to get people so accustomed to "AI assistant" search that they see keyword search as outdated, and thereby secure a competitive advantage for the next several years over other search engines, by having the biggest and best AI models.
3. They are trying to increase the amount of rich "natural language" user search inputs in their data. Making keyword search worse will encourage people to use queries that more closely resemble natural language. I assume that this has strategic benefit related to Guess 2 above.
My own google-fu tells me that both of those searches are likely to be pretty poor - using the word "fall" instead of "collapse" is likely to snap up quite a few weird results about autumn tourism in italy and including "empire" in the second query feels likely to get you a batch of other poor results (like, for instance, the collapse of Russia commonly known as the third roman empire).
Personally I'd suggest "collapse of rome" which does deliver you a rich embedded result specific to the fall of rome.
I agree that Google's search parsing peaked a while back though, it seems to be getting weaker and weaker and now partially relies on the fact that search term autocompletion on mobile devices will supplement it by helping present an array of options near what you might want.
That may work for common topics, but it does not appear to work for niche ones, at least in my experience.
If I want to find a particular user-run forum on some obscure bit of some hobby, "<hobby name> <forum topic>" brings it up. But if I type out "Forum for <hobbyists> discussing <topic>" I get... a random selection popular of fora where someone has mentioned <topic>, often in passing or with minimal information.
Except that this isn't objectively an improvement, even in a perfect world where AI is substantially better than it currently is.
> you’d now write “why did the roman empire fall”. Because the AI likes that phrasing and produces better results.
"the AI likes that phrasing" is exactly the problem here. How is anyone supposed to know what the AI "likes", other than painstaking trial-and-error in the unbounded and arbitrarily high-dimensional search space of human language?
Even the people who built the model probably don't know. Language models (and deep NNs in general) are extraordinarily complicated things, and there are problems with pretty much every technique that purports to provide visibility into their inner workings. There are just too many parameters and too many "information paths" in such a thing for regular people to wrap their heads around it. The ability to incorporate a high amount of complexity is a big part of why those models are so effective to begin with, but it also makes them really hard to reason about.
"AI" is currently in a weird spot where it's starting to kinda-sorta behave like an intelligent human in some limited settings, but in general is nowhere near as smart as a human. Most models still have a very shallow conceptual understanding of anything, even if they're becoming uncanny in their ability to match sophisticated patterns. It might not even be possible to teach some concepts to language models as they currently exist today, if only because there is only limited conceptual understanding available to be learned from corpora of text and images, even huge ones. Humans are still tremendously more effective than our best language models at understanding meaning and intent. Can an AI ever learn about love, regret, fear, or bliss, by reading millions of news articles and books and looking at millions of images?
Thus AI right now is in a kind of "worst of both worlds" situation, where it is complicated enough to be hard to reason about precisely, but still mostly unsophisticated and therefore highly sensitive to how inputs are crafted. Therefore it's hard to formulate inputs that provide useful outputs. It's still alpha-level technology at best, and there might be one or several conceptual innovations remaining between what we have today and something resembling general intelligence.
Consider also that "AI assistance" is complementary to keyword search, not a replacement for it. Google search AI is becoming something like a "digital librarian", a creature that can understand your queries and guide you to a starting place in the relevant literature. But much like in a real library, the digital librarian is going to be most useful as a starting point. At some point, if you already know what you're looking for, you still are going to want to search on "structured" criteria, as well as, yes, keywords embedded in text.
And finally, do you really want to type a 300-word description in order to get good search results? I was already getting good results with 3 keywords. I have already done the sophisticated pattern-matching and concept-graphing in my own brain, and now I know exactly what terms I want to look for. Why should I be forced to coach an AI on how to redo all that work for itself, instead of just letting me do a damn keyword search? Not to mention wasting my time and giving me carpal tunnel typing it all out.
You touched on the fact that the AI right now is primitive and unable to parse regular english well - I agree that it still has a ways to go in this regard but, while all of us complaining here might prefer the old google, we are the "in" crowd that actually put in the time to learn the old arbitrary rules. It isn't great to keep around arbitrary rules purely for the sake of consistency if those rules are bad. I think the fact that the search results are often unable to clearly distinguish different questions (and may return some autumn related results for "fall of rome") is a clearly bad thing - but the old format we're used to required a lot of learning and adaptation (the aforementioned "Google-fu") that shouldn't be a necessary skill for future generations.
I had a good laugh yesterday. I was setting up a password vault for my mother and had to get the login pages for various services and a few did like Etsy does - search for "Etsy Login" and you'll notice their SEO has managed to put /search?q=login above /signin in google's results. It amuses me whenever SEO is taken to such an extreme that it actually makes the results from your company less useful for people actually looking for your company.
It's the opposite now - you increasingly have to use "Google-fu" to make sure that your query is not creatively reinterpreted in ways that are virtually guaranteed to yield irrelevant results (but more of them) - e.g. substituting words with "synonyms" (which aren't), or removing the most important keyword from the query altogether.
I made my career using google search and it has changed pretty significantly from the early 2010s. There was a point where it would seemingly scour the entire web for whatever string of text I entered, but now it tries so hard to give me what it thinks I'm looking for that I very often get results that are completely irrelevant. I'm still usually able to find what I'm looking for eventually, but it takes a lot more work on my part.
> I read comments and articles all the time about the quality of Google's search dropping. I haven't noticed it much in practice, but I'm persistent, use copious ad blocking, and my Google-fu is strong, so I usually find what I'm looking for.
The results quality has gone down and it's noticeable only after you switch to another independent search engine, like Brave Search.
For example, search for the term: "javascript undefined vs null" on Google and Brave Search. Brave Search gives way more information in the sidebar and Google doesn't at all.
The discussions feature on Brave Search is great, you don't even need to append queries like 'stackoverflow' or 'reddit' for searching discussions.
On top of that, let's say you're trying to search for an npm library like 'react-select', if you search that term on Brave Search, it gives you a button to copy `npm install react-select` right below the npmjs.com link.
It's crazy how good Brave Search is compared to Google sometimes, haven't used Google Search in a long time because of it.
There's also something to be said about how Google should be returning information, not answers. Skip to the 1:00 mark in this Technology Connections video where he demonstrates how if you ask Google when the touch lamp was invented it'll pop up with a giant, confident answer of 1984, despite the fact that if you do the research yourself you can find the first patent for it was filed in 1954.
As far as the thought experiment goes for making up rules, you could probably have a threshold where advertising ability gets cut off and it would do enough.
It's certainly controversial so all I can give you is a subjective viewpoint but yes, objectively these things make search engines more convenient but cut the traffic to the original websites by a small margin.
So far, I've noticed Brave Search only shows sidebar results for Stackoverflow and a few other popular forums that do not advertise on their pages directly, nothing else. So they're not really taking any revenue away. As for npmjs thing, I'm not sure if their revenue is hurt in any way because to view the package documentation you still need to open the link. Brave Search just provides you a copy command button extra for convenience.
As for discussions, they do not give full context so you always need to click the link so that's great for website owners as they get more exposure and traffic too.
At this point, Brave Search features are more on the UX side of things than anti-competitive so I personally will hold off the tinfoil hat for now.
Brave Search is pretty good for basic queries but it doesn't support most operators, even basic ones like quotes, making it less suitable for people who use their google-fu a lot. When I use Brave as my default, I have to fall back on DDG or Google much more frequently than I was falling back on Google with DDG as my default, and it's usually because I need to use an operator.
More on topic, they still use Bing's near-useless image search, so even if it's getting worse Google Images is seemingly the only decent option in that category.
I just noticed more and more copy and pasted content from stackoverflow intruding on my searches. Word for word the same content. There are so many people out there just creating blogs and stealing content and SEOing their way into traffic, it's not even funny anymore.
On some of them I’ve noticed the text will overall have the same idea but a lot of the words will be different. I think some of these sites will translate it to Chinese and then translate it back to English to give it a lower similarity score. It is truly amazing the amount of effort some people will expend to avoid adding anything useful to the world.
And they probably don’t even make any meaningful amount of money off it. But given enough scammers trying this sort of thing at least for a while and the web is polluted even if a given individual has already moved onto their next scam.
And because something might be answered either on stackoverflow or one of the many stackexchange spinoffs, restricting your search to either will remove results from the other.
I hadn't realized that Bing image search still lets you link directly to the Image URL, not just the page it's hosted on. Something Google stopped doing a few years ago in response to content platform complaints.
OK, I'm definitely switching to Bing Image Search for images.
Per OP... they do seem to have a public domain/CC search limit feature too. I don't know how well it works. (I'm not sure how either it or Google identify CC/public domain content. Is there an opengraph tag?)
I used Tineye.com's reverse image search extensively before google added the feature and baked it into chrome. Google's results have consistently worsened to the point that I've switched back to tineye and installed the chrome extension.
Try Yandex. I've found it to work better when trying to find a different, higher res version of certain image and Google to work better when trying to find a related image.
I've definitely noticed worse results from Google search.
I just get page after page after page of "content" that appears to be either GPT written or written by somebody who has no idea about the topic.
They all seem to follow a pattern, they have a table of contents, and they take sentences from real sites regurgitate them and put them together into semi-random paragraphs.
If you know nothing about the topic it appears on the surface to be legitimate. And I bet to any quality engineers it all seems totally legitimate, because they're not experts in these fields.
Its actually crazy good and does borderline questionable things, like it does facial recognition. you can upload a social media picture of someone and Yandex will find that person elsewhere on the Internet.
Just a couple days ago I was searching for a funny video I had seen. I tried searching on YouTube and Google - typing in descriptions, what I remembered of the title, the excerpts of dialog I could recall, what was going on in the video - couldn't find anything even close to it. Searched on TikTok and got it in the first result.
Google search quality is in severe decline in my opinion. I have many experiences where I am searching for stuff that I know exists and that I know Google of yesteryear would have found, and Google comes back with garbage results and spam. Personally, I am hopeful that this means a Google-killer will be coming along soon.
I was feeling this as well, but didn't pay attention _how_ bad it is.
I mean it really is... Is there ANY search engine left that returns more than 500 results for any search?
Are there any community driven search engines?
I mean at this point it can't be hard to build a better alternative...
Tried it, but returning lots of results doesn't seem to be their focus.
Now I installed OpenSearchServer and see how far a local index gets me.
The simple query "a" gets me at most 394 results at google, after letting OpenSearchServer crawl/index for just 2h I already get over 900 results for "a".
Well.. I guess it really is not hard to beat that meager 394 results.
Initially read this as, well, "FU Google", and thought "yep, FU to them too". I guess I will acknowledge I have a bias. Then curious about this term, I googled-on-bing "FU Google". Top result was Google-fu, not the expletive.
Image search is another story. I've been less and less satisfied with Google Image search results, and visual search has been totally neutered. It only returns low res results that rarely match the original as well as it used to. I used to be able to plug in a 400x400 image and find a dozen copies of it at a usable size. No more. Too many copyright complaints, I assume. I've started using Bing for image and visual search now. It's not as good as old Google Images, but marginally better in some cases than the current iteration.