> This is a problem with the web, not with Google. The web has become littered with trash content

Isn't it the search engine's job to wade through the trash and return the results that are useful?

Not to mention, most of the trash was created because of Google search. Half the internet is optimized for the google bot, not humans.

The problem gets harder and harder as the trash gets more SEO

The problem gets harder and harder because trash generates profit, not because Google is fighting a holy war with the SEO hackers in an attempt to clear the web for us end users...

Trash content alway existed. Always.

AltaVista was all spam results when Google came on the scene. From where I sit, Google just doesn't care to work on search any more.

For example:

- pre 2005?, Google search terms were never aliased.

A search for Bob, never returned Robert or Bobby. To make things "easier", alias searching was added. Now, there is all sorts of algorithmic aliasing happening, and it poisons the results further.

- Couple this with the desire for verbal google searching to work, without complex queries, and even more aliasing/approximation of search results happen.

I've seen homonyms aliased as of... 2016? Why? Google voice searching.

- Quotes are only suggestions, only verbatim search forces precise terms (+ used to mean a word must appear as written, but was removed because it was interfereing with Google plus username searches..)

- These days, Google spends more time trying to take content from web pages, and insert the answers at to of page. They want to be wikipedia, with you never leaving their page.

All of the above, and more, show a steady decline in the desire for precise results, and instead, a desire to sacrifice search quality for profit, and pet projects.

As others in this thread have said, Google isn't Google any more.

Internet search algorithms are bit of an adversarial competition against bad content, no? Given the amount of money at stake for beating the search algorithm, shouldn't we expect any search engine to decline in usefulness over time?

> Given the amount of money at stake for beating the search algorithm, shouldn't we expect any search engine to decline in usefulness over time?

Internet search algorithms should be worth significantly more (and I imagine that this is the case; e.g., I doubt that the combined value of all spam sites together matches Alphabet's market cap).

Given that internet search companies should also have an edge acquiring talent, you would expect that internet search algorithms would win this fight.

The problem with aliasing is that it undermines the ability of users to refine their searches, especially in the case of Google with its unclear semantics for terms within quote marks.

I've switched to using DDG as my first search engine of choice because, while its ranking of sites initially is generally weaker than Google's, it gives me much more power to subsequently refine searches.

The web was always full of trash.

The problem is that the new trash is much more hostile: it's actively trying to subvert/cover the good stuff.

The web itself has transformed from a new frontier where people generally have good intentions, to a digital society undergoing active fraud, sabotage, and influence by commercial entities, governments, and wider society.

In the 90's when I first started using the WWW, it was mainly used by academics, techies and geeks - and it was glorious. People used to create web pages just for the hell of it, not for financial benefits.

Projects like IPFS might regain that thing we lost.

There's a reason our legal systems are composed of millions of pages of laws. It's because everyone tries to use/abuse everyone else, to a degree.