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.
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
Not sure if this is a google problem or an internet problem. But it’s not only over past few months. Their search results have been in decline for years.
That's my guess too; I'm sure Google drives the overwhelming majority of SO traffic.
A few years ago, my programming-related queries would hit Stack Overflow as the first or second result. Now it's very frequently spammy garbage in the top 2-3 slots.
It's also as if google decided to suicide themselves a bit earlier. Their results have really become crap lately. It keeps ignoring anything than 1-2 keywords. What's going on?
Because it's not just Google. Every web search engine has been getting worse; it's why Google remains "the best" in every head-to-head comparison. The whole web has been getting harder to 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?
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 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 been more obvious that they are losing against SEO in the past few years. When searching for programming results it is rare for an authoritative source to be be above w3schools or geeksomethinggeeks. Even with a specific query for something that is not a beginner tutorial you have to wade through that shit to even get to stackoverflow answers.
Either google engineers have really started to dig w3schools or they don't eat their own dogfood any more.
They're doing this sort of thing a lot more often, it seems like, whether through manual actions targeting specific sites or algorithm changes that suddenly take a high quality top ranked page and disappear it from results entirely. It's happened to me where I had the most relevant result for a search term (in fact, it's the website that popularized that term) and now it's gone from all Google results. It's still the top result on every other search engine, but I've been unable to get it back at all on Google.
This heavily aligns with my experiences over the past few years.
Where Google once used to return exact or close results for very specific or niche searches, I feel like it struggles to even land in the same ballpark of results. I've been asking myself whether the results have always been this bad more and more over the last year and a half thinking I've been taking crazy pills. Unfortunately, the current competitors still perform even worse for the same queries so it's not like there's enough of a reason to default elsewhere (yet, I hope).
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
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.
It happens all the time, especially online. See lots of posts on social media sites about how Google Search is terrible now and how they can't find anything useful there. Heck, it's even gotta notable enough that even some of the folks most directly responsible for the issue (the SEO industry) are questioning Google's results quality now.
Unfortunately since this time results have gotten worse ( anecdotal I know, but I know many who agree). I think this is down to a mixture of issues - the SEO industry has made search optimisation much harder, googles probably been a bit complacent with no competition too. Also introducing big changes like search personalisation and localisation which (IMO) has taken away more than it adds.
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