Except when it isn't. I don't know if I'm uniquely bad at web search these days, but Google seems to do the exact opposite of what I want. I.e. when I need some solid information about a piece of technology or knowledge, it'll spam me with content marketing bullshit published last week. But when I need something recent - like a current opinion on some software alternatives, or installation instructions, all I get are results from 5+ years ago.

I don’t know if we’re both in that case and Google has simply moved away from how we learned to coerce it (and other search engines) over the years, our habits now yielding negative returns unbeknownst to us, but I find myself in a similar situation.

Month after month, year after year, search results get worse, and harder to sift through. At this point, google is mostly a way to find wiki articles despite typos (because Wikipedia’s search is bad and can’t handle typos).

Google has definitely changed in the past few years. I've noticed that it ignores quotes when it feels like it, and is very aggressive at "synonymous" substitutions (which in many cases aren't - e.g. I've seen it replace "FreeBSD" with "Linux"). It's making it harder and harder to make queries for something specific.

I thought I am the only one! Last week, I was trying to find something with the quotes and it completely ignore it. It took me a few queries to find what I am looking for.

Use verbatim, as per my comment up thread.

<outlandish conspiracy theory>

Google does this to make every tech worker not working for Google, and thus Google's competition, less productive.

</outlandish conspiracy theory>

Or maybe the google AI has a funny side. Right now it's probably laughing its ass off reading teMPOral's comment.

I use duckduckgo and it always finds me PostgreSQL documentation for version 9.3 or 8.x or something obsolete like that during general search.

Google gave me Python 2 results for every doc query for a looooooonnnnnngggg time, I just clicked to the newest version when I got there.

That was mostly PSF's fault since they had the default documentation URLs setup to point at the Python 2 documentation for way longer than they should have...

Oh really? Interesting. I always thought it was because Google never switched to Python 3.

Ha, me too, but then I've also been caught out on 'latest' (which I typically reflexively click on after opening) having some crucial difference from what we're using (12 vs. 13) too, so hard to win there.

I don't know off-hand if it's possible with the search (e.g. it might use a last-selected version cookie) but we should probably be using version-specific 'bangs'. `!pg12` or whatever, in my case.

So does Google, and it’s even worse there. In Google, the first page for "postgres window functions" is version 9.1, version 9.3, and 8 random tutorials. DDG has 9.1, 9.3, tutorial (the same as Google…), but then you at least get 12, 11, and then some more tutorials.

Or it could also be that people are more often clicking on recent links or searching for "something something 2021". I know I usually give higher preference to links with more recent date attached as that just-contains-what-you-want site from 2010 will potentially be outdated by now. Of course it depends on subject of your search, but id imagine it's true more often than not in big scale.

This is the thing - for some things (e.g. searching for tech to use), you care about recency. But for something you absolutely don't. But the search engines magic seems to throw this all into one bucket and notice that people are more clicking the '2021' links. And the consequence of this is SEO optimization done by automatically updating all links to current year - I searched for something on 1st Jan and already got a bunch of '2021 comparisons'

It's a common content marketing tactic to update post titles to include "for 2021" a few weeks ahead of the new year. It's a tweak to get it ranking, as every other content marketer is doing the same.

Google often delists articles over around 15 to 20 years after they are put on the internet.