has anyone else noticed a marked decline in the quality of Google search results over the last 12 months? I swear, around about 2011 I thought Google was going to become self aware but it's declined from that high-point to a point where duckduckgo has become a viable alternative for more than just reasons of privacy. Which is a great thing!

Turns out "Don't be Evil" was more than just a feel-good marketing slogan. It may have actually been good for business as well.

Bye bye Google. It really has been great!

The one that I've noticed getting much worse over the last couple of years is Google (and to a smaller extent DuckDuckGo) removing the least common search term if there aren't thousands of hits. Precise search terms are very valuable for hitting the right results in a pile of unrelated slop and Google is even doing things like returning all Windows results when I search for linux and some CLI app that isn't available for Windows and never was. I can put in full paths out of /sys and Google will happily remove linux and the entry name because I'm only getting 5000 hits. The only thing I can think of is that they're trying to increase the number of ad impressions by having you need to do more searches to find what you're looking for.

I think that summarises what I have been seeing quite nicely. Its like it has lost all sense!

> over the last 12 months

More like since 2014.

I use google search for one thing only these days: product search, when I'm trying to find a local dealer for a product.

For everything else, duckduckgo, which, to be completely honest, is a lot more like the old google from the early 2000s, than the current google.

> More like since 2014

I do remember remarking to somebody around this time that google search had become something of a glorified grep.

You could still get things though. What I meant in this comment is that it has gotten even worse to the point that its almost unusable. It really does remind me of Microsoft of the 00’s.

I think 2014 was the big change into "AI first" for Google. I remember Translate working fine in 2014 in China with the offline pack, and the offline pack was ~220MB. In 2016, the offline pack was ~30MB and nobody understood the translations over there.

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

No repro here.

Google knows I land on StackOverflow results so often that SO results appear near the top, if not the #1 result, for terms that often have nothing to do with programming or computers. I was recently looking for an online thesaurus service and Google showed me an SO post about building linguistic/semantic search algorithms. Hmmm.

This is my experience too, and also in other areas. I have to include "stack overflow" or "forum" keywords to actually find something useful on the first or second page. Example: drone racing discussions.

I've noticed that for far longer than 12 months. Google search results are frequently crap. DuckDuckGo is often better.

But sometimes I dream about building my own search engine. It would avoid the big ad-driven sites as much as possible, and give preferential treatment to obscure blog posts about topics nobody else has written about. I want a search result to show the many different ways it could be interpreted, rather than assume one of them based on whatever heuristic, and show me tons of identical results that aren't what I want.

That’s Google c. 2011

Yes. When I started using DuckDuckGo it was despite Google's search results often being better and every few weeks I used Google for some queries because I simply couldn't find what I was looking for.

Now my last visit to Google is more than a year ago because DDG got better while Google got worse.

> has anyone else noticed a marked decline in the quality of Google search results over the last 12 months?

I noticed this since around 3-4 years ago.

It seems to be based on region.

Quotes get ignored. Even very specific queries about X prioritize clickbait junk like "TOP 10 X!!"

I THINK they might be anti-competitive too; searching for particular Apple APIs is sometimes more miss than hit, though that might be because of Apple's own poor documentation.

However, most Apple-related searches used to show me Samsung crap, and that's definitely not benign. Like searching for "iPhone" literally presented an ad for the Samsung Galaxy at the top, for a while.

> Like searching for "iPhone" literally presented an ad for the Samsung Galaxy at the top, for a while.

That's how ads work. If Samsung pays more money than Apple to show ads to people searching for "iPhone", then people will see Samsung ads.

I'm curious then; would Google list Firefox and other competing services before their own?

Theyd kind of have to if they were being paid to ... whether what they charge FF etc is reasonable would be the question

Would this be considered acceptable if it was a large company doing it to a much smaller company?

i.e. if Samsung was shoving itself into the searches for all non-Apple phones?

well like I say, that depends ... but big players squashing little players is fairly normal in my experience ...

I think this is a combination of SEO exploiting the methods Google used to use to provide good results and personal data based result optimization only being good at certain types of queries...

> they get an IE6-sized kick in the teeth.

as in: people will continue to suffer for about a decade while good alternatives readily spring up but suffer slow adoption?

Yeah, let’s hope that it’s IE6-sized, but not IE6-speed. Although I’m not ruling out a lost decade of web tech happening again.

Why does an alternative have to be widely adopted to be seen as good? Tech has an obsession with "popular or bust" and that's the ultimate cause of the lack of choices IMO.

Firefox is already here.

Since Firefox is already dependent on Google for a great deal of their funding, I’d say the next phase in Google’s strategy will be scaling that back.

They still need to keep Firefox alive, because it allows them to control market concentration and avoid the antitrust issues that MS had to fight.

Betting protection from antitrust issues on getting cozy with a political party is a risky strategy; political landscape shifts on quite regular basis. It's safer to keep a competitor alive so that if and when the power goes to people who don't like you, it won't be easy for them to go after you.

That would be why they're (allegedly -- I haven't checked) buying up those lovely Republicans.

I think it's likely to be a while before any political party other than the Democrats and the Republicans holds a lot of power in the US.

It’s been ongoing since Trump’s win. I can’t find the link right now, but they’ve also been bankrolling and having speakers at those weird, right wing DC conferences. And they’ve been supporting ALEC for years.

https://fortune.com/2016/12/14/google-conservative-outreach-...

The US isn't the only country in the world, and I'm surprised the EU wasn't your first thought here given what they did to Microsoft and IE.

And other projects will apear, all the people that visit sites like this one here, will switch, and slowly transition their families. Majority will conitniue "suffering" since they already don't have adblocks installed.

That doesn't make any sense. Firefox already is open source and forked already. New features can easily be cherrypicked even.

Firefox is a great alternative for many. But it is not great for everybody.

Many many people use adblockers now. The amount of users they will alienate would be very high.

Nope, mostly tech-savvy people use adblockers, it's astonishing how many people still see ads on a daily basis.

It is true and I wonder if the tech people aren't becoming the privileged class who knows ways of not feeding the big corporations.

For example, it takes a lot of effort and energy for me to explain to non-technical people that comparing Apple and Google in terms of their mobile devices is non-sense. Just look at their regular financial reports, I usually say, and understand that one is an online advertisement business, while the other is a purely software + device business. One wants you to use their devices at all costs, while the other wants you to buy them. Those are very different core business models, different mentality and approaches. Etc etc. And so the choice between them comes down not even to taste or quality or price; it comes down to which business model you sell your soul to.

And then there's ad blockers and understanding how modern internet works etc. It worries me that the disconnect between those who understand the inner workings of tech and those who don't becomes bigger and bigger by the day. As the tech business itself becomes more and more sophisticated (and monopolist/authoritarian).

According to stats I’ve seen, around 30% of people use ad blockers. And that’s growing. Nobody stops using an ad blocker.

It’s not just tech savvy people. I imagine plenty of people here have set one up for their family members.

I operate a website visited primarily by both unsophisticated users and non-expert but savvy users (the former group being the demographic that exchange emoji-laden meme images on Facebook, and the latter group as the type of people comfortable getting around a phpBB board in the mid-2000s). I've seen a steady decline in AdSense/AdWords ad-revenue from visitors based on ad-impressions despite increasing visitor counts from those two main demographics - the evidence suggests they're using some form of ad-blocker.

Makes sense for them to kill it now before the majority gets a taste of what it could be like.

But there will still be adblockers. Safari still has them, manifest v3 Chrome will too. They work great and the user doesn't need to hand over all of their browsing information to the adblocker for it to work.

And we definitely have to help speed up this process

> IE6-sized kick in the teeth Sorry to distract, but I'd like this on a T-shirt.

They still are the fastest and the most secure, and Manifest v3 is faster than uBlock Origin since no javascript code needs to run.

I won't be using Chrome anymore once they implement this since I like my element-hiding rules which I wrote myself, but for the common rabble, Manifest v3 will be an improvement.

The speed difference is only noticeable in benchmarks. It's completely meaningless for humans. Manifest v3 will not be an improvement for anyone previously using uBlock Origin.

Disagree. Chrome feels snappier. Firefox stalls sometimes when rendering and can't achieve 60 fps on some websites I use. (Not Google properties)

That difference is very unlikely to be due to the nature of support provided for ad-blockers, though.

They could support declarative rulesets without disabling request blocking. And the request inspection API is still live, it seems; I wonder if this means SimilarWeb and other spyware peddlers can stay in business for now.