I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking. But in the last years I feel that is more common that I leave Google search without useful information. The worse part is that all the competing search engines are using the same algorithms that are only useful for mainstream results.
Or is there some thing that causes Bing to show different results? Perhaps the scammers build a network that targets google because it's bigger?
Google increasingly thinks it knows better than me what I'm looking for.
Memory Hole
"The alteration or outright disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a web site or other archive. Its origin comes from George Orwell's "1984", in which the memory hole was a small incinerator chute used for censoring, (through destroying), things Big Brother deemed necessary to censor."
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Memory%20Hol...
Tools are not to blame here, it's like blaming the compiler for the behaviour of an application. Starting with the training data and ending with how the model is used in deployment it's the blame of people who made it, not of the neural architecture. The architecture itself can learn anything you throw at it, good or bad.
Basically, like searching diving suit thickness, and google ignoring "suit" and "thickness" (until i specifically put those two words in quotemarks), and only showing me results for diving.
Google search 'reservoir cats' and it will completely ignore what you actually search for in favor of the mainstream result. The effect is basically that you can't sesrch for 'reservoir cats'!
Even putting something opposite or unrelated to the highly mainstream result will have no effect.
Its completely entirely ridiculous and makes the search engine seem like a facade.
Side note: both duckduckgo and google gave me correct results for that specific search. Turns out "reservoir cats" is a movie and a simpsons episode.
If I search for Palp fiction it shows me pulp fiction results but asks if I really meant Palp fiction, if I say yeah I really meant that it shows me Palp fiction with a message did you really mean pulp fiction.
on edit: some of the palp fiction is headline palp friction.
I don't know of a good general internet search engine, so I tend to stick to the sites I know will provide answers that'll work for me, which is a shame for discovering new content.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=diving+suit+thickness&rlz=1C...
Every reddit page while not logged in is full of hidden content from other unrelated pages. When you search, you'll get hits in these unrelated pages-- but when you follow the link it's not there (because it's on the unrelated pages).
Worse, the pages with the correct content aren't necessarily in the results at all because it was low enough in the thread that it was collapsed and wasn't visible to the search indexer.
It's not a total loss, but I'd say about 80% of my own comments are now difficult-to-impossible to find via search when they were easy previously.
Even today here are bloggers outside who do not have a commercial affiliation with the goods/items/things they are blogging about. Such content is practically impossible to find in comparison to all the Amazon-affiliated pseudo-information conveying spoof-sites.
The Amazon affiliate program is definitely contributing to this problem.
Additionally as polyglot it is very irritanting that Google tries to helpfully translate queries for me, thus I have to go to other search engines to actually find the article on the language I want.
It is spam pure and simple.
I'm not sure what the beginning of the end was for Google Search, but I think the day where they changed the ad background to white is a good candidate.
Google Search used to be like Chrome or Gmail - we know its wrong in the long term, but it's hard to stop using it because it just works so well.
But these days, not anymore. Search is a lot less sticky, and it is their golden goose they are messing with here.