It all started going downhill since Google's "Hummingbird" switch to be honest. Interviewing for Google, I actually brought this up with an engineer in the search team during the lunch.

He said they haven't noticed any regressions. I said I figured that would be the case but I can definitely feel the difference as a daily user.

This is indicative of a larger issue - testing is probably as difficult as solving the halting problem i.e. code could be generated from proper tests, yet teams tend to trust their tests completely. I see high profile websites having severe usability issues or being outright broken in ways that would be immediately caught by "interns randomly click here and there" usability tests. But these version got deployed probably because testing did not show any regressions.

I tend to believe that if user complaints about new problems or regressions increase over statistical noise - there is a problem.

> yet teams tend to trust their tests completely.

Well said. This is a big problem. We see a similar problem with the use of telemetry data as well.

I noticed the same. I've wondered for years why it happened and sometimes when I'm frustrated I try to think about it. But I am not entirely sure that the degradation in search results for me happened only in the past 5 years. Maybe, but I'm not sure.

I had no idea about Hummingbird though.

In 2009 Google was amazing for diagnosing Linux issues. I would just copy the error from the console and I'd have links to the issue tracker, a work around and the version in which the bug was fixed. Today I get a link to some github project that has nothing to do with what I'm working on and was closed as being an upstream issue.

I don't have the time, money or energy to build a specific crawler, but a Linux search engine that indexed all the major distros, packages, mailing lists, forums and issue trackers would be amazing.

> Google's "Hummingbird"

I had assumed that Google search had gone downhill because it started trying to "personalize" my search results. That wasn't a great explanation though, as I don't use a Google account.

Hummingbird seems a much more likely explanation.

Oh, they still "personalize" your search results.

I do a full clear on my web browser (cookies / offline storage / history, everything) and then open YouTube in a private browsing window and it asks me which of my two Gmail accounts I want to log in with. I'd guess it's just a combo of external IP and browser fingerprint, but it's creepy.

I know they do, and I consider this a real problem. I was just saying that personalization isn't a completely satisfactory explanation for the decline in Google search result quality. It is likely to be a factor in that, though.

I noticed the same but only on an absolute level. Compared to Bing, DDG & Co, Google is still by far the best search engine.

What would you recommend instead?

DuckDuckGo.com is my daily driver.

I love the concept of DDG and have it as my standard but still use Google (via !g) for about 30-50% of my queries. Simple queries work well in DDG (which is basically Bing) but more complicated queries only really work in Google.

Sadly I've been finding the same result. Exact searches on Google are often frustrating, but lately they've been all but impossible on DDG. It seems that all search engines (including those backing DDG) are getting on the ML train and assuming they know what I'm looking for better than I do.

I understand this being default behavior, but there really needs to be a way to disable it.

DDG has become my first stop. It gets me what I need 90% of the time.

I found the opposite. I started using DDG when I moved to Brave but after a month, I found I would go to DDG, search page after page and get frustrated and open google and have my result on page one or two.

I've heard others say similar things. That's simply not my experience. I wonder if it depends on the sorts of searches that we each tend to perform?

For me English has been working decently on DDG but last time I tried I had a really hard time getting decent results in other languages.

Qwant might be a good option, as it's European it should be better for searching in (some) other languages.

https://lite.qwant.com/