I don't know about overall quality of search, but did stack overflow do something to fall out of Google's good graces? I swear unless I specifically include stack overflow in my search query it's either near the bottom or not include at all. Instead it's a whole bunch of articles from independent websites. This is for questions I know fit the bill for stack overflow too. It's almost like Google is artificial lowering their ranking to decentralize the source of knowledge. That or stack overflow lost 70% of readership in 4 months
I think Google might have tweaked their search to not always go to stack overflow. That might be start of their downfall. Recent times it is rarely stack overflow as top result and it happened suddenly, not gradually.
Google has an unusual situation where search now only needs to be good enough. They are much more focused on the knowledge engine of providing direct answers and the advertising business.
With such a dominant market share, search has certainly lowered in quality
Google search used to be one of the wonders of the modern digital world, but (and I admit this is subjective) it feels like the quality of results has decreased drastically over the years. I just can't find stuff as easily as I used to. It still comes out on top for e.g. querying for technical information but for other things (image search) I don't even bother with it anymore. It also feels like certain kinds of queries are subject to malicious SEO practices where it becomes impossible to find results that aren't from the same group of tabloids/media outlets.
What happened? Did they let their golden goose starve to death? Or is this all in my head and Google is actually fine for everyone else?
It's because Google has never been focussed on search quality imo. No search engine produces high quality results anymore.
Especially since you get the clear spam sites that somehow reference your query in the page content (where they've just spammed loads of keywords, but also pretty sure some spam sites are doing something dynamic with it).
Google has gotten notably worse in the last few months. I keep getting the feeling it is serving results for a query similar to what I entered, but more popular. It drowns out any results that actually might answer my questions.
I feel like Google is increasingly becoming useless as a general purpose search engine.
When I try to find information on a generic topic where I can't exactly tailor the query, the results are usually filled with low quality, SEO optimized promotional sites, clickbait articles/YT videos or aggregators. With some luck there is a good blog post with quality links on page 2 or 3.
Good results are now mostly restricted to areas where Google can utilize structured data sources (Maps/Business data, Wikipedia, ....).
This is extremely ironic, since Google originally rose to popularity because it was much better at "real" search than the competitors.
The interesting question is why!
Is Google just not able to compete with SEO tactics? Are they overly fixated on ML/"AI" techniques that don't work well in practice?
Or are regular search results allowed to become worse on purpose, in order to maximize ad revenue? It is something a near-monopoly could afford to do.
You know, I don't think any of this matters so much at all now, because I recently realized that SEO has totally destroyed some 90% of the technical utility that Google once had.
There was a time when one could ask meaningful questions and see links to useful websites like hyperphysics, engineering toolbox, and others. Now, even if you're lucky enough that Google recognizes the technical nature of your question, you still end up with a page full of ads, commercial websites, blogs, and unrelated garbage on the first page[1]. Remember when if it wasn't on the first page it probably didn't exist?
I only lament that I have no way to compare modern and legacy Google search functionality to prove the decline I've noticed for years. Even the way we search has changed, as Google seems to have normalized asking full questions instead of just searching for keywords.
The internet seems to be regressing. This is just one of many fronts. Of course Google is only partly to blame. Users and their obliviousness to harmful commercialization are also a part of the problem.
1. Unless you're asking a coding related question, in which case Google is still great for directing you to the correct stack overflow question.
What I've noticed is that Google is trying to be too smart. Their search result quality went down big time about a month ago and I noticed that for many queries they were dropping some of the query words I had entered so that they could give me "more results", but the results they gave me ended up being terrible.
There are multiple subjective reports of Google search quality going down the toilet in recent months/years, probably due to multiple reasons (SEO, AI), but I haven't seen this kind of report.
I'm just gonna throw this out there as I'm noticing it more and more at this point since switching languages.
What the actual F has happened to google search results for programming issues?
I used to be able to google a question and get, more or less, a right answer from a forum or stack overflow.
Recently, many coding tutorial websites have clearly figured out how to hack googles pageranks and now instead of one 'right enough answer', its 5 clone 'tutorial' websites, with all the same crappy answer that isn't actually what I was asking. Like I can't use google for coding questions any more. Not like I was able to previously. Also, Stackoverflow with bangs from ddg are broken and it thinks I'm a robot. No answer except to go to SO directly and search.
Over the last year I have noticed that Google search results are not as relevant as they used to be a few years ago. I often have to browse to page 2,3,4 of the search results page. But I remember often I could find what I needed in the top 3 search results on page 1.
Is it just me, or are you guys having similarly poor experience with Google search?
I don’t know why, but I’ve noticed a decline in relevancy from google search results. Particularly annoying when google returns results that are basically the opposite of what I searched for. I’ve started using other search engines simply because google doesn’t return what I’m looking for. I haven’t kept a log, but I’m fairly sure this includes searches related to technology.
As an aside I guess, I have noticed recently how much worse the search actually is. I'm not even referring to the adds, simple things around library documentation for example, where I would always find the best results up top to close to, now I get quite unrelated results, not even containing the phrase/function name I'm searching.
This is not because the info is not indexed or is behind a walled garden though, I now have to find the source website and go directly to their docuemtation myself, or their github. It's not an 'issue' but defeats the purpose of google search itself.
In a strange change for me particularly, for news/general info I actually will search through sites like reddit or twitter to get some actual targeted results.
I would put forth that Google isn't a search company anymore. They spend more resources filtering out all the junk on the web. Search is a secondary function for them. The end-user doesn't see the filtering; publishers and merchants trying to jockey for position do.
Somewhat tangential but I believe Google Search is going downhill, they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight. Recently, I've had to append wiki/reddit/hn to queries I search for because everything near the top is shallow copied content marketing.
I don't know why but google results became mediocre/bad recently. There were a time when I could pick [good] google results in a blind test (for programming topics) between several search engines (Bing, Yandex). Now, DuckDuckGo can return noticeably better results for some queries than Google.
Google has had terrible search quality as of late. I'm finding myself using DuckDuckGo more and more just to find very basic things that used to be easy with Google. This is just in the last couple months or so.
Not sure if that's the case here, but if it is I wouldn't be surprised.
I effectively stopped searching Google as is. It's become completely useless. Recently I got FIVE sponsored results before even getting to the SEO-gamed results.
I have to:
* Add "reddit" to get any sort of non-promoted human-driven knowledge
* Select "Past Year" from Tools
Recently I started getting really old search results. Not sure if I just never noticed, or they finally totally screwed up their algorithm.
Google seems to have taken their eye off the ball when it comes to providing accurate search results.
Someone at the top of Google seems to have cranked the results prioritising slider all the way towards recency of information instead of accuracy, growing a million spammy fly by night sites instead of defaulting to trusted sources of information. As a programmer its so hard to get information from a technical query in Google these days.
Does Google search have a QA dept? Are they able to compare how accurate search is today compared to a year / decade ago? Does anyone at Google listen to them?
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