Keyword indexing and PageRank worked for a while because the underlying data wasn't written trying to game them. Then came spam linking and keyword stuffing and more. I'm surprised search engines are still useful in spite of that.

- For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in. This is not dependent on SEO spammers at all, only on Googles unwillingness to accept that not every user is equal and some of us mean exactly what we write, especially when we take the time to enclose our queries in double quotes and set the "verbatim" option.

- Ad targeting has been so bad it has been ridiculous. Yes, on average it works but around the edges it is somewhere between tragic and hilarious. For ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads Google could think of was dating sites. Not toys, not family holidays, not tech conferences, not magazine subscriptions, not offers from local shops, but scammy dating sites that was so ridiculous that I cannot imagine how most people would fall for them. (For a while I wondered if this was all a fluke but now I have confirmed it happens to others in my situation as well.)

- Also in other areas it is becoming ridiculous. For example: what is the idea behind aggressively showing me captcas while I'm logged in with two different google controlled accounts, one gmail and one gsuite, both paid?

But anyway, what I'm referring to is the amount of spammy content that comes up when you do a Google search, while truly useful content doesn't do so well. Honestly, have you ever read a good article on About.com? Yet they rank very well on Google.

Search could still be much better. While Google is great, they don't understand people well enough to make the necessary improvements.

There have been a ton of articles about how Google sucks lately. Well, maybe Google has gotten worse, but maybe the internet has just gotten worse.

If I search for “best gaming laptop” or “taco recipe” the results are pretty much uniformly spammy across Google, Bing, and Neeva, the latter being a paid search engine. All of them are just farms for ads, popups, and paid links sandwiched between AI generated copy.

Is that the search engine’s fault? Is there some oasis of quality results I don’t know about? I would like to know.

Google has gotten better at discerning between crap and quality content, but they still have a long way to go, and I'm unsure if it can be fully fixed the way search engines currently work.

1. Search engines are getting less good at ranking bad content below good content

2. The good content is getting worse. So bad, in fact, that it looks like bad content.

It may be a little of both. I lean towards 2, though. It’s kind of a race to the bottom in terms of jamming your page with ads, buzz words, and popups these days.

Generally speaking, the web doesn’t have great results for e.g. product recommendations. Part of it is because of how centralized the internet has become.

The best you can do a lot of the time is to just serve mostly Reddit results. But even that can be gamed.

Google makes money regardless of the quality or 'originality' of the content your search comes up with so they currently have no motive to change things.

Obviously Google doesn't think their search is good enough, and I would agree -- piling more "inputs" and arbitrary branches into a ranking algorithm, however, is no solution. This will only devolve into an endless game of cat and mouse until a new search engine comes along and does to Google what Google did to Yahoo.

I don't agree with Google being blamed for this. They're trying desperately to fix the problem. Maybe they're not as effective as you'd hope, but why would a "multipolar" search world be better? Wouldn't all search engines be plagued with people trying to game the system?

Like, a lot more seo spam though.

As I understand it, the history of SEO/Google is as such (simplistic view):

1. Google creates a search algorithm (that is not 100% known to externals) that tries to match your search term with valid, true content.

2. SEO strategists -- whether by legitimate or deceptive means -- tailor content, HTML, etc to match this algorithm.

3. Google has constantly improved and tailored this algorithm to prevent spammy type sites.

4. There is a growing consensus that spam is taking over Google search.

This all leads me to believe that either Google is losing it's touch on it's search algorithm or it's simply matured to a point that it can no longer out-game the gamers (SEOs).

I don't think Google ever had a great algorithm and switched to something worse. It's just the SEO actors putting crap out there now, and clickbait. The thing it became worse at was recommending small sites/blogs over big publications/sites.

Back in the day, all they had to face was people trying to spread viruses but those results were super obvious. And they weren't even flagged back then, just users were smart enough to instantly spot it from the result.

I’d say that if there’s a general trend over the past decade, it’s that search results haven’t necessarily lead to a better user experience, but Google did a lot of fighting with spam sites, in addition to more ads / integrations with their wider ecosystem.

All this makes for a lot of quality hits in the whole experience, and I totally understand the frustration of people who depend upon their rankings. I don’t think there’s a solution, though, as Google needs to keep evolving, especially to fight SEO spam that tries to game their algorithms.