Someone at Google will probably disagree emphatically, but it seems to me like this represents a bit of an existential threat to web search. There's so much money in being #1 for popular queries that countless actors will throw enormous resources into getting there.

It makes sense for this target audience to give broad results. They seem to be relying more on neural language models to accomplish this.

Google also surfaces more authoritative results than Bing, Google thus favors bigger commercial sites.

Google is suprisingly good on vague searches (for instance, describing a singer's appearance and song themes will return the name), but getting worse on "conspiracy"-type searches (you will not find many amateur sites discussing the high-class escort past of the First Lady, because these lack authority, all results focus instead on the massive fine for posting allegations).

Google can also allow users to self-select. The way to do this would be to have a survey with multiple sliders that allow the user to demonstrate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much they care about a certain parameter. There would be default profiles that automatically set the sliders for you, like “academic.”

Even if Google doesn’t take this route for global search, they can add more features to advanced search. Google Advanced Search is underpowered, given Google’s technological capabilities.

Finally, with regards to the Advanced Search approach, Google can allow the user to create several search buttons that always appear on the Google front page. For example, an Arab American researcher may have a default search button, an Academic search button, and an Arabic search button, all of which can be tweaked along multiple parameters, as described above.

https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-unde...

Google can no longer be an independent observer, as the act of observation changes the results!

Richard Grenell has been in the news: https://www.google.com/search?q=richard+grenell&safe=off&rlz...

if you search "Javascript issues Rshiny" (this is just an example not the actual query) - you only get javascript results for 4 to 5 pages of results.. when you reverse it to "Rshiny Javascript issues" - the results are better

i.e. "how do I change a ford taurus headlight" vs "taurus service manual headlight"

"us" "ambassador" "germany"

My guess is that, by now, resource intensive 'power users' are not worth the effort for google.

For technical queries I moved on to ddg, it's not perfect but a hell of a lot less time waisted.

Google search has been getting increasingly worse for me over the last five years or so. In terms of the quality of search results, it has no edge over DDG.

From memory I do recall the +/- and "" operator being overriden if there was a "popular" search query that contained broader results than my specific query.

Specifically for the "" operator was that the query would drop "" so instead of showing x results which must include that expression it would show broader results as if the expression was not contained in "".

With the amount of stuff that gets shoved into Google search bars worldwide, it's easy to believe that kind of strategy is broadly beneficial, but it does lead to frustration when you're being precise with a query and you're overridden.

Here are some results for Taylor Swift instead:

Google has "overfitted" because their A/B test told them messing up more queries gets them higher "engagement". They are masquerading engagement as satisfaction, clouded by their incentive to have people dwell on ads longer.

Memes:

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/608/639/8ef...

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/608/619/bec...

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/608/641/517...

The bing memes go back ten years when it was giving unexpected worse results

The same memes are being repurposed because the same experience is giving better results than google’s differently worse results

Searching for a topic that's recently become, er, topical, but I'm interested in earlier discussion.

DDG's very limited date-ranged search is especially frustrating here. Book search is often more useful.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hk&ia=web

Them training you to have low expectations isn't the right way I don't think.

https://www.google.com/?q=US+Ambassador+Germany

And when you search DDG in their news section, most of the results are about the impeachment hearing, just like Google.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hk&iar=new...

I've been noticing it for the past 3 or 4 weeks. I've been thinking my google-fu has been weakening. Glad to know I'm not the only one.

The engine should generally pick up relatively quickly that when you specifically search for "Forth," you usually mean the programming language and not a typo. Catching these differences in use case is why customized search is a feature.

FWIW I will use "Forth language" or "Forth programming language" instead of "Forth" to delineate more precisely what I'm seeking.

"US ambassador Germany" makes it hard to comprehend what you intend. Do you get better results for "who is the US ambassador to Germany" or "news about us ambassador to Germany?"

Google properties have been skewing to less relevant news and corporate results ( search, news, maps and even youtube ).

It's a shell of it's former useful self. Hopefully ddg and other search providers step up their game to put pressure on google.

Google is just another example of a monopoly gone bad.

I belief this is an effect of Google News emphasising recency in its ranking algorithm.

Interestingly, your complaint is almost the opposite of the one often made on HN, namely that people would prefer a somewhat dumber but very literal search interface. It also shows why that wish's fulfilment might end up disappointing people: In the snippets I get, "Germany" gets included in these articles in all sorts of irrelevant ways, including navigational links that really aren't part of the story ec.

Google just doesn't seem to care about search anymore. Maybe they don't need to?

Did the user visit a page and cease searching for a given query? Great, the page answered the users question.

Did they visit a page, bounce, and keep on searching?

Well that page didn't answer the users query.

Maybe there has been an uptick in people googling "US ambassador Germany" and looking for news articles about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings.

Very weird.

[0] - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hx&iar=new...

For a few years, I've been blaming the reduction in the quality of search results on this attempt to "know how to serve me best". I still think that's a huge part of the cause, but I'm not so sure it explains everything.

Given what we know about the political leanings of Google it is very hard to see that as anything other than an attempt to direct the narrative.

Even if it isn’t, it’s still unclear how an algorithm would make that jump from those keywords. A completely different country, for example.