Whether or not google search right now is as good as it could be should not be the main point of discussion.
We have to remember to acknowledge that the web google is indexing now differs drastically from the web it was indexing 20 years ago. Web pages are now less likely than ever to be freely accessible plain text put forth in good faith for public consumption. Google (in addition to dealing with big walled gardens designed explicitly to hide content from google) is trying to sift through basic spam, industrial scale SEO exploitation, and nation-state cyber warfare.
Bitching about google search being bad almost feels like yelling at the canary in the coal mine when it passes out.
The issue (at least for me) is that google is no longer actually searching for the thing I ask for, and it's being blatantly disrespectful of users who cared enough to learn how to actually use the search features.
Quick example from today? I did a literal two word search - gulp admzip - and while the result are okish, an increasing amount of space is taken up by results with this handy little blob at the bottom:
"Missing: gulp | Must include: gulp"
"Missing: admzip | Must include: admzip"
WTF are they smoking? I asked for two fucking words, and the top result doesn't include one of them. Then the second result doesn't include the other.
So then I add quotes around the phrase I want "gulp admzip" because I'd really only like to actually see results that include that EXACT phrase, and... drumroll... IT DOES IT FUCKING AGAIN: "Missing: gulp | Must include: gulp"
And that literally has nothing to do with the quality of the items it's searching, and everything to do with Google deciding what I meant - Clearly I meant the npmjs.com package adm-zip, because that item gets vastly more views than any of the real search results.
I couldn't have possibly meant to restrict the search to the actual fucking phrase I told it to search for, because there aren't that many results, and they don't get many views.
Decreasing the feedback loop time is essential to modifying my query quickly so that I can eventually find what I am looking for.
The "Missing", "Must include" pages have always, always, ALWAYS, in every case, never given me what I am looking for. If it did, then I would have just taken out my search term.
Most sites that include the exact phrase "gulp admzip" are empty spam of regurgitated word lists of every build tool or dev package designed to attract errant clicks that help boost ad metrics. That is why Google can't "just grep the entire internet".
Incidentally, I agree with Google here that whatever problem you're trying to solve is more likely to be an issue with either gulp or admzip and you will be better served by content specifically about one or the other.
You know what - I'd much rather just see the spam sites.
The spam sites are useful feedback that my search is either too generic, or there aren't many good hits.
Further, some of them aren't actually spam sites - I'm not afraid to click through 5 or even 6 pages of results, and I can usually visually distinguish obvious spam from content very quickly.
I can't do that if Google has removed my ability to actually filter the results to the relevant search terms, and just keeps showing me the freaking link to npm over and over again.
That's meaningful feedback that my search needs to be improved.
Getting all spam back is actually ALSO GOOD! I can visually distinguish spam pretty quickly, and it's also meaningful feedback that my search needs to be improved.
Removing my ability to search for exact phrases is fucking BAD! I'd much rather get spam or nothing when I search for a directly quoted phrase, rather than google just start returning bullshit.
The problem is that the bullshit google returns is actually very hard to visually parse out - they're real sites that get lots of views, those views are just ENTIRELY unrelated to what I'm actually searching for. That's really hard to filter out quickly.
I don't think this is true. A quick look at https://github.com/cthackers/adm-zip
> var zip = new AdmZip("./my_file.zip");
It's entirely possible that a person could be querying the exact variable name "admzip" for a variety results that should only be code snippets of the by-convention "AdmZip" variable name with no concern for the package name "adm-zip", which, by the way, Google will interpret hyphens as just whitespace, so it's the equivalent of searching "adm zip".
I know this could be a case because I do this kind of programmatic search all the time, and in fact I remember specifically searching the web for "AdmZip" and not "adm-zip" a few years ago.
And if there are no good results for "AdmZip", that's fine! At least I can, at a glance, quickly know that there are not many code snippets across the web lying around with that conventional variable name.
You are aware that it has always been like this? That's why the "+" operator even exists. Even 10 years ago or more (before Google+ stole the "+" operator), you could get back results that don't actually include your search terms and you'd have to do +gulp +admzip to force their inclusion>
https://searchengineland.com/google-sunsets-search-operator-...
Try it yourself, it does JACK SHIT - they still show me what they'd prefer I have searched for.
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Edit - ok, I'm guessing you are, since on the second read I see you're joking about the google plus timing. I don't understand how that makes this better? Tooling is being stripped away in favor of showing me "popular search content" that google would prefer I see, and ads...
I'm just saying, in the same theme of my original 'young whippersnappers' post, that a lot of things people are saying is new behavior is in fact, old behavior with a different UX.
Yes, that's double quotes at the end. Weird.
The problem as I see it is Google has created a bunch of perverse incentives to make your page rank higher. One big problem is Google gives higher rank to "comprehensive" articles. On the one hand that would seem like a good thing right? But what you end up getting is endless affiliate articles that don't seem to be written for humans. And they are really easy to spot if you know what to look for.
A great example is webhosting reviews. Search "best web hosting" and click any of the 1st page results and you will almost always get an article that just rambles on and on and on with headings like: best web hosting for email, best web hosting for blogs, best web hosting for email marketing. To a human, it's an incredibly disorganized mess, but to Google's bots, its "highly comprehensive and authoritative".
Webspam will seek to game whichever search company has dominant market share and they will structure their spam to overcome the filter and ranking specifics of that engine.
Considering tools like GPT-3, one could easily imagine in the limit, a spammer running a large number of searches through a search engine, finding out what ranks high, and the training a generative model on that dataset to produce similar articles. Auxiliary signals like inbound links and DNS records they can also usually work around by purchasing domains or buying inbound links.
It will always be a war and there is never going to be a victory over webspam. Even with something like web3 where posting content costs money I can imagine ways spam.
Imagine you're searching for vaccine information. GPT-3 generated spam provides pages that highly look like authentic NIH medical reports and expert opinion, only every piece of factual data was replaced with the spammer's product (let's say a competing Pharma vaccine that is less effective)
Search engines are not arbiters of truth, they can only approximate it via consensus knowledge, and if consensus is distorted by vast amount of spam, well, there's a problem.
Think of it like a blockchain ledger. If someone steals more than 50% of the hashing power, than all bets are off. Well if someone steals a non-trivial amount of a subject area with spam, than consensus algorithms break down, and the 'ledger' for that subject looks to be weighed towards the spammer.
Well, some things are (reverse image search, ease of accessing 'Cached' pages -- now I have to go to archive.org Wayback, etc), but forum search has always been bad.
Long before Reddit was big, USENET/DejaNews and forum software like PHPbb/UBB ruled supreme (and before Markdown there was UBB Code). Google, despite owning DejaNews, did not often surface links into USENET content, and a lot of forums, for whatever reason, were not indexed by Google. For example, I used to spend a lot of time reading the latest on PC/3D Hardware stuff on Beyond3D, Overclockers, Rage3D, etc and I almost always had either use site specific search (dejanews.com or say, PHP BB's built in local search), or I had to add site:beyond3d.com for example.
And is a large amount of confirmation bias going on in these Google threads that appear. Some people make assumptions that their search patterns are representative of the billions of searchers ("argh, I searched for pytorch k-means and a GitHub wrapper site appeared!") and that their experience is a representative sample, while others focus only on what has gotten worse, and not what has gotten better.
What's clearly gotten worse is webspam. But while it has degraded the Googlee experience, it's not clear any of the other search engines are any better at filtering it out, except by luck because perhaps they don't crawl as many sites as often.