[..]There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was.[..]
This is always a strange claim for me, because it does not even remotely match my experience. And now we have the rise of Chat-AIs, and people who claim it's so much better than google, which also does not even remotely match my experience. And now I ask myself: am I just too stupid to see it? Or are the people too stupid to not see it? Do I search just too different things from what others search that I can't see it?
And then I also remember the claim that the youth is insanely uneducated about technology and the modern world, even worse than old people, and I wonder whether this is the reason for those claims. Do those claims all come from young people, who live in a very different world and are just very clueless about those things?
So at the end, does Google end, because it's not cool with the youth anymore? Not hipster enough and getting lost in the difference between the culture of the generations?
I myself have found a very clear, objectively measurable, falloff for Google search results when it comes to non-NLP searches.
The quotes operator is designed to search for pages containing exactly the phrase given, however I have found that Google has many times where it yields no results, and then does a “did you mean <no quotes>”, while other search engines can easily find the piece of information that was given.
No matter the reason for why this is happening, it has dampened my usage of Google considerably because Google doesn’t seem to be able to handle the most basic of queries anymore.
I remember a Google search with quotes for which Google implicitly removed the quotes, returning irrelevant results, but suggested that I add some extra pair of quotes… which resulted in the same page but suggesting yet another pair of quotes… and so on.
I was literally unable to perform the search that I wanted, and all Google suggested repeatedly was adding a dozen quotes on each side. Most frustrating search experience I've ever had.
Are you maybe able to provide an example search that does this? I'm pretty sure quotes still always work as intended for me (although I still miss the loss of + a little, which was used for the same purpose).
I just tried to search for "falloff for Google search results", as an example of random quoted string from your comment. Google Search returned one result - your comment.
Then I replaced 'Google' with 'Bing', and Google returned results without the quote which were irrelevant - but that makes total sense to me.
Same observation here. Sometimes I check the "News" tab for a search query, just to find there are 0 (Zero) results, when the regular search returns Millions of pages for the same query. In these situations, I feel like some algorithm has decided to hide these news, from me, for some unknown reason.
There is a way to have Verbatim the default, at least by changing the default search engine settings in the browser. Ctrl-k in my Chrome uses a verbatim search (can't remember exactly how I set it up).
I've certainly found that google results for me are worse than they used to be, and that DuckDuckGo is a lot more competitive and the !g bang gets used less and provides less improvement to results than it formerly did. I've been online since the time when people were moving from Yahoo to Google, so I'm not a gen Zer with different search patterns to Google's historical audiences.
I'm not quite sure of the reason. There's a couple of possibilities:
1. DDG is relying on Bing for a lot of their search data, maybe bing's just got better, or DDG have configured their integration better. I don't feel that DDG's had a significant improvement, it definitely feels like they've caught google on the way down more so.
2. Google losing the SEO war. As it gets easier to run and monetise blogspam sites, more of them exist, and as time goes on, a longer tail of topics get "served" by these sites. Unlike the spam of years past which tried to convince Google that their viagra selling site was really about top ten movie downloads, these sites are nominally about the topic the user searched for, so maybe Google is having a harder time trying to evaluate "quality". LLMs are being given a lot of the blame for this, but this is an older phenomenon than that, there were plenty of sites doing e.g. templated articles fed product spec sheet, or pay a minimum wage intern to rephrase the wikipedia page before that.
3. I've cut down my usage of Google services to basically just YouTube and YouTube Music. I also run ublock origin pretty much universally. Maybe my de-Googling has just been successful to the point that Google doesn't have a accurate profile for me anymore, and this has more of an impact on search than I expected.
What are they losing, though? Isn't this more like a snake eating its own tail? Or the human-centipede of online advertising?
I'm not convinced serving quality results is really in line with Google's incentives. If they trick me into clicking some garbage and have to go back and try again, isn't that another shot at showing me ads?
I don’t know if Google has degraded. I mean I haven’t noticed it. Maybe I just search mostly common stuff. For niche stuff that Google doesn’t know much about, search engines like DDG seem to know even less.
Depends on what you Google. If you search for mundane stuff like recipes, how-to guides, or product suggestions then you just get SEO spam. Google is still fairly good for very technical stuff, but anything of monetary value has been captured by professional advertisers and their affiliate link filled content farms.
Basically, the more popular a topic is, the more its search results are infested with SEO spam.
Even in technical realms this holds true. One of the huge disappointments of learning JavaScript/typescript recently is how terrible and spammy searching for anything on it is. Coming from the golang world where I'm used to search results being highly relevant with few advertising spam blogs among them.
> If you search for mundane stuff like recipes, how-to guides, or product suggestions then you just get SEO spam.
I look for recipes a lot. While what I find matches the "SEO-shaped recipe blog page" template mentioned in TFA, nevertheless the results still have the recipe(s) I'm looking for.
When I need to fix/build/repair stuff, searching just youtube almost always gets me what I need or want.
I've honestly found GPT4 to be fantastic for every recipe I've tried. I list what I own, say generally what I want, and say either use what I have, or minimize the number of new things I need to buy, and tell me how to make the thing. The instructions are far more legible than SEO spam recipe sites.
> And now I ask myself: am I just too stupid to see it? Or are the people too stupid to not see it?
My hypothesis is that it depends on how you search. For me, Google has become unambiguously poor, and I've stopped using it because I get bad results.
But I think that the reason for that is Google's use of AI (not the LLM stuff, but the stuff they started using a number of years ago). Google is clearly trying to interpret "what I really mean" from my queries instead of just taking them at face value, and it's awful at doing that. For me. It's obviously good at it for other people. It may have to do with me actively doing my best to prevent Google from tracking me.
The other thing I don't understand is the idea that Search is somehow becoming less accurate over time.
Google tracks analytics on the quality of its search results, simply by observing which results users click on, how long it takes them, or whether they don't click on anything at all.
The idea that Search is somehow worsening doesn't make any sense.
What has maybe happened is that Search has improved for the population as whole, but gotten worse for certain subsets of users -- but still a net gain overall. Or alternatively, that the web itself has changed -- that Search is doing better than ever, but some users just don't like what the web offers in response. (E.g. nobody writes straight-up recipes without tons of intro anymore -- but that's also so they have tons of space to insert ads, it's not about SEO. It's nothing to do with Google.)
I'll echo this: search, in a purist sense, has definitely improved (just looking back to the mid 90's through to now).
The "search experience" however, has degraded since the mid 2010s, for me at least. I'm in a constant battle to filter through advertising and bad content that is "optimized" for the algorithm to find the information I need. The constant need to monetize the technology more and more has certainly reduced it's usefulness en-masse.
But I don't think chatbots or alternatives (beyond curated indexes) will solve this problem - as you say the web itself has morphed around ways to optimize one search engine's ranking algorithm.
> The idea that Search is somehow worsening doesn't make any sense.
Search is worsening. We've all seen it with our own eyes. I don't care how much analytics Google is gathering, that's irrelevant.
Just take on example: try googling for the release date of an upcoming video game or movie which you know for a fact hasn't had an announced date. Then view the top 5-10 results and let me know if you consider them to be of a high quality.
I just searched for "Elder Scrolls 6 release date" and "GTA VI release date", and the results seem decent. Web pages including words like "prediction" in the title, and the summaries in the search results mention that the predictions are based on things like earnings reports and legal filings.
I did the same search and if you consider these to be decent quality results we should just agree to disagree because we value information differently.
I would expect results from reputable publications and not gpt filled click farms. I expect content that is information dense instead of padded and packed with keywords. I expect results that don't have a pointlessly huge number of redundant headers and subheaders that only exist for SEO purposes. I expect a huge bias towards original sources or sites that directly link original sources. And if I'm searching for information that doesn't exist I expect it to be clear right on the results page that this is the case.
Who exactly is it you're expecting to produce a high quality information dense web page to say Elder Scrolls hasn't been released so that google can rank it higher?
Are you arguing every information void should be filled? If things are not there, there should be no results. Not spam or other inaccurate stuff that doesn't help anyone.
Is it your belief that in the case of asking a question without a clear answer that the quality of the result isn't relevant? Or that all results are of equally high quality? Do you think that the results on the Google SERP are of the highest quality when you ask these questions?
If straight up keyword matching was enough then Google would never have overtaken Alta Vista. Ranking useful high quality information higher is the entire point.
No it isn't. Literally Google's entire initial innovation was a ranking algorithm based on inbound links, weighted by the authority of the linking party. At this point I'm bowing out because you don't even know the basics of the thing you're arguing about.
> that Search is doing better than ever, but some users just don't like what the web offers in response.
The reason that I don't think it's this is because often there are sites that offer exactly what I'm looking for. Google doesn't surface them in my results, but other engines do.
> The idea that Search is somehow worsening doesn't make any sense.
What analytics are you thinking of that would show search is somehow MORE accurate? Because if it's just searches and click throughs and traffic and revenue...
More people with internet = more people searching for stuff.
More mobile phones = more people searching for stuff out in the world.
Worse results = user goes back to google and does ANOTHER search and search revenue just doubled again. Huzzah bonuses and vacations to Disneyland all around this year!
I think by any measure, growth and clicks and revenue are going to go up no matter what they do so I'm not sure exactly what metric you'd be tracking to see whether Google search results are actually qualitatively better? Short of the site going down entirely, there's probably nothing they can do to slow growth. But nowhere in that compounding money farm is the quality of results relevant.
> The other thing I don't understand is the idea that Search is somehow becoming less accurate over time.
The search is probably fine, but it's relegated to the bottom half of the page. It could also get worse if Google isn't able to keep up with the SEO and scammers. Personally I feel like Google has lost interest in providing a good search experience, they still have, what, 90% of the market. There's zero incentive to ensure it's a good experience and they can keep milking the advertisers.
Meanwhile the competitors have been forced to do better and especially Bing has. Any search engine that rely on Bing has become really good in the past five years. That might also be part of it, those of us who went to Bing, DuckDuckGo or other search engines for other reasons have learned to use those and when we then go back to Google it's worse, because we haven't used it for ten years.
But you're probably right, the search bit is fine, it finds the same results as Bing, so it's down to presentation and Google used to be the best and now they are the worst.
This echoes my experience as well. I switched to DDG some years back, in part because I could always compare with Google easily by appending !g. I still use !g (perhaps 1 in 50 searches), usually when I'm willing to trade worse presentation and degraded privacy for better long-tail results.
Try Kagi Search if you're willing to pay for a better search experience!
I've been using it for over a year, 100% of the time, and love it. Great results and awesome functionality like weighting certain sites, AI summarization, etc.
Yes, and Amazon has improved the shopping experience as they have gained these insights as well. As someone who went away from the world for 5 years so wasn't in the pot as it slowly started to boil, Google and Amazon are both significantly worse and less user friendly than they used to be.
Just look at Google Assistant. It has gotten significantly worse the last two years. Strangely, the only time it asks me for feedback is when it happens to work. Shouldn't be hard for it to detect when it craps out I talk frustrated at it, but they don't seem interested in getting feedback at that point. Ah, but it happens to turn one light on once (versus the 20 something went wrong times), prompt for feedback on that specific one time it worked.
You’re hiding huge swaths of unforeseen consequences.
Do you honestly think that when Google is presented with an improvement in search results that would reduce its revenue that they choose the improvement?
The majority of users may not understand the are looking at a low quality result. Clicking through to canned SEO websites that fill the front page for many queries is enough for them to get what they want.
Enough of course until someone shows them better results and then they will switch search engines just as we switched from altavista to google all those years back.
…then search is no longer fit for the valuable segments of the population, unless you measure "value" strictly by numbers of eyeballs without ad blockers.
The proliferation of LLM spam websites has made it completely impossible to search for any video game related information. Every search returns hundreds of sites with the same garbage chat GPT articles derived from Reddit or game wikis. Ironically, this makes the source material impossible to find. It’s really dire.
I’ve been playing Divinity2 Original Sin and have googled maybe 30 terms. And get good results. Even on ddg. Almost always in the top five results always first page.
Try that for baldurs gate 3. The trash results that are returned might have what you're looking for, after scrolling past the SEO highschool essay style intro and after closing the mid page JavaScript embedded nag window.
It's not that Google search has necessarily gotten worse, but it's lagging behind the shitiffication of the web caused by SEO and the new features (People Also Ask QA synopses) have absolutely horrible accuracy.
ChatGPT and other LLMs are also absolutely horrible on accuracy, don't get me wrong.
But, here's an example of what's wrong with Google.
I search something like "Can mangoes grow in Washington state?" and at the top of my results is the condensed "People Also Ask" question answer result. These attempt to read and condense a webpage (of questionable accuracy) into an answer for my query, but they are often full of shit.
For example expanding "Where are mangoes grown in WA" shows an answer about Western Australia rather than Washington. Another answer tells me "yes" but when I read the actual article it clearly says "no, they won't survive".
Google has been fighting against SEO basically from the beginning. For many years, you could see the difference with other search engines that had worse tech. In general, google used to do very well against SEO bots, for well over a decade.
Today, I think they are losing. Quality primary sources are often crushed by unusable websites, which understand google's analytics very well. If I make it hard to find the information, but I make it seem that it's the next paragraph down, my search results will improve!
Google itself is causing the enshitification of third party websites, many of which have paragraphs and paragraphs that are obvious spam. I'd take any videogame guide website from 2005 over the first page of google today
Google understood a long time ago that they could not beat SEO, and have been fighting a losing battle ever since. I remember a research presentation from them (might have been late 00s or early 10s) in which they wanted to know: we have an adversary with unlimited resources who can create as many webpages and servers as they want. How do we detect pages in "their" internet as opposed to pages in the "real" internet. The basic answer at the end of the seminar was - you can't. There is no information-theoretic way to do it on the structure of the graph. Instead you need to follow chains of trust, which means that you need roots of trust, which means .... look at the web today, dominated by a handful of known platforms.
I find it interesting that people write Google queries in correct, often polite English as if there is something intelligent on the other side. When I try this query: "where mango grow washington" I seem to get decent results, but the human-sounding query does return garbage.
Perhaps the problem with Google is that it's trying too hard to convince people that it's smarter than it really is. I treat it as a stupid, mindless computer and it works fine most of the time.
Yupe, keywords is still how I search most of the time unless I’m literally looking for a question (or something close to it) hoping to hit a Stack Overflow and clones / Reddit post asking that question.
You can tell who all the old people are that were using search engines since back in the day. LOL
All I ever expect from a search engine is it find pages with the words in my query (and maybe exclude certain words as specified), anything else is just gravy.
I think people much prefer thinking they know something with a superficial overview (see things like the popularity of TED talks). Responses from LLMs are great for this: they look like a cohesive summary but they often end up being total bullshit.
Digging through search results to find what you need is work. Having something confident make you believe an alternate truth is not.
People who actually try to use code output from chatbots quickly realize it just only _looks_ like code of the right shape and quality. There have been many blog posts and comments here touting how great the code ChatGPT generated is while the given example response is complete nonsense once you look a little deeper.
In my recent experience, Google search is totally broken for anything that is hard to find or uncommon.
I recently search for "raspberry pi uart hat" and Google responds with the following:
Not many results include the word "uart" so we eliminated it from your search terms. Here are thousands of irrelevant results about random raspberry pi hats you aren't interested in.
Google is good when you know what you're looking for like a specific local business but it's awful when you're trying to find a recipe all you get are wordy life stories. ChatGPT can give me a concise recipe in my preferred units (metric) everything by weight, substitute x for y and tell me the calories. Phind.com is great for programming queries.
I run a fairly popular web game (Redactle https://redactle.net). Thousands of people play it and there are thousands of links on social media which Google doesn't seem to care about. When you search 'redactle' you should be getting my site or a clone of the original setup by a fan; This is how it works on Bing and DDG. But on Google the top results are ad-infested link-farm game sites, a domain squatter page at redactle .com and crap like that. They simply don't recognize the social proof that is out there. A thousand https://spammygames{1..N}.com sites linking to each other beats out all those people linking from reddit,fb,x etc.
Yeah quite the opposite for me - I have to use Google to search YouTube because YouTube's search is completely unusable now. If I want to search for a video I go to Google and click the Videos tab instead of going to YouTube. YouTube's search
gives you like three possible matches but then pollutes the page with "you might like" and "people also watched" videos, all of which are simply invalid results.
I was discussing this recently on a hike and I joked, "SEO broke the Gen Z brain".
In my own personal experience, I think the younger generations care less about search. They just don't use it much, nor do they value the information & cultural pipeline in which search is valuable.
It has either gotten worse or there is just more crap websites out there to clog things up. They also have made it harder to search for "exact" terms (you now have to use quotes and check a box).
I still find Google to be fine but I recently I was searching for an exact phrase that I knew was on a website and got nothing. I tried DuckDuckGo and got the one exact page that I was looking for.
There have been recent discussions about Google pruning their indexes and I think that might be part of it - I've noticed in Google Webmaster Tools for some of personal sites that previously indexed pages have become unindexed with no given reason.
> And then I also remember the claim that the youth is insanely uneducated about technology and the modern world, even worse than old people
Yeah that claim doesn’t get made in any sort of widespread way. There are variants of it that do (“kids only know how to use their phones not keyboards”) but your specific wording here makes me think this claim came from some hyper specific bubble or from your own subconscious.
Those claims mainly come from people in schools, universities, youth orgs and companies. So the ones who should know it best I would think, as they work with young people all the time. This does not seem to be a particular hyper specific bubble. Of course, complaints about youth are not new, the young people are by nature lacking experience and knowledge, that's a given, and so are complaints about those lacks. But lately, there is a new type of complaints, which is about technology and specifically computers. This is atypically, as for the last decades, young people usually had the benefit of being more competent with new technologies, as they grew up with them. This was a defining difference between the generations for a long time. And now this seems to disappear, or at least change.
And after thinking about, it makes sense. Technology today has reached a plateau of quality and comfort, has removed the struggles of the past, and is now cheap and widely used in society. That's very different from the previous decades, where tech was an uphill-battle, where computers were expensive and only used by those who had demand for it. Tech today has saturated society, and this also changed perception.
Now more people can evaluate the actual ability of people. And old people today have legit reasons to learn and use technology. And the most notable change is: the old people today, are the middle-aged and young people from decades ago, meaning they are the ones who had already in the past reasons to learn technologies. So comparing old with young today in those aspects, is very different from 20, 30 years ago. And it seems, the young people today have finally lost their benefit of early access to technology, and now they compete again with experience and knowledge.
So regarding Googles search this means, maybe the youth is just lacking good google-fu, which older users with more experience have. Or they generally have a difference stance on how the search should work, because they have no deeper understanding on what the Search is, what it should deliver and can deliver, and what not. Some of the comments here go very strong in that direction, that people have a very different approach on what they expect from Google. So again, it's a difference in perception.
This is always a strange claim for me, because it does not even remotely match my experience. And now we have the rise of Chat-AIs, and people who claim it's so much better than google, which also does not even remotely match my experience. And now I ask myself: am I just too stupid to see it? Or are the people too stupid to not see it? Do I search just too different things from what others search that I can't see it?
And then I also remember the claim that the youth is insanely uneducated about technology and the modern world, even worse than old people, and I wonder whether this is the reason for those claims. Do those claims all come from young people, who live in a very different world and are just very clueless about those things?
So at the end, does Google end, because it's not cool with the youth anymore? Not hipster enough and getting lost in the difference between the culture of the generations?