They haven't given up; the OP has a point. The "sites" you are hoping for Google to return _don't exist_. Any website online right now that doesn't exist to drive ad revenue is exceedingly rare. In 2001, there were way more websites that existed just for fun; any tom, dick and harry could open up note pad and get a website online. That doesn't exist anymore.
It's my opinion that those who complain about Google search results are frustrated that Google can no longer find a web that no longer exists
However, 90% of everything is crap, so the good stuff is not buried under thousands, or millions, or mere billions of pages of crap, but trillions.
> any tom, dick and harry could open up note pad and get a website online.
This part hasn't changed one iota - you can still do _exactly_ that, even following a tutorial from 1996 to the letter, if you want. All that stuff still works fine - and I have websites that old, built that way, that are still up and work fine.
You ever try to search for a niche piece of software for your computer? Google surfaces the "Top 7 Best software" content farm articles before you ever get to the official sites. That's what some of us are frustrated about.
I'm sure someone at Google has. They could fix it if they wanted to, and boost well-known sites that get straight to the recipe (allrecipes.com, foodnetwork.com) instead of making you scroll through the SEO spam first. They haven't.
Also if you are specifically doing it for recipes, just select manually websites that have precise ingredient amounts, very detailed and explicit recipes, that explain the reasoning behind each step, provide photos of how things should and shouldn't look like, why the proposed technique is optimal and/or the tradeoff of alternative techniques, the chemistry involved, comparison with other recipes, etc. (although in my experience most or all recipe sites are horrible and aren't even vaguely close to something like this)
Example. If you searched the word "flight" in 2002, the first two results would be NASA links and the third would be the Museum of Flight. These pages still exist. But now the entire first page of Google search results are cost comparison websites. This is Google's badness, not the web's.
The problem is that there is no way I can tell current Google to give me stuff that's interesting, novel and information dense anymore. It's all well and good if I knew that the Museum of Flight existed before my search, but the point of Google is to tell me about its existence. I can't tell Google "flight ... but no cost comparison or airliner website stuff"; such a query is currently not possible.
Demand is real as evidenced by everyone in this thread wanting such a search engine. We are not representative of genpop, but we aren't insignificant either.
Google had this in 2002 (i.e. a default to novel and info dense results unless otherwise specified), so it can't be that hard or expensive.
> No one will pay for that.
So we have ads.
I was beginning to wonder if this explanation was true but after starting to use Marginalia (mostly for fun) I now know the old web still exists - Google just doesn't let me see it.
What is Reddit if not the largest forum in the world? You have the same gripe; you are looking for a web where people share things for free (like in forum); and when Google first existed most of the web is like that.
And if google were to prioritize forums; then SEO blackhats would do everything in their power to make every website look like a forum; and then you are back to square one. The problem is the profit motive, not Google's algorithms.
If there's an algorithm being gamed that causes that, that algorithm was designed explicitly to be gamed.
The reliance on synonyms and semantically related topics has made iterative refining impossible as well, it's essentially non-converging.
My solution has been to search in multiple foreign languages, which looks less conducive to these "affordances".
When the "No Search results" page was deleted, the internet died.
It is easier than ever to open your websites, and there are tons of free providers today. Look at any manual aggregator -- like hacker news or hackaday.com -- to see them. This is a variety I have not had in 2001!
Also, the amount of good content today is vastly larger than it was in 2001. Though you are right about the ratio changing.
So it's both "less signal" (fewer high-quality websites) and "more noise" (more spammy SEO-to-oblivion sites).
[0] A similar thing happened to video advertising, which is why even really good YouTube videos are filled to the brim with ad integrations, merch tie-ins, and calls to like and subscribe.
<Topic> sucks
RIP "sucks".
That, and the Google search results are bad for the parts that do exist.
Still lots of great content still out there, often times the target of my original Google query.
Before the rise of smartphones a competitor could have emerged and take users from Google. Yahoo wasn't completely dead yet. Platforms were mostly open, a sea change could have happened (though highly unlikely).
Into the smartphone area, other engines became anecdotal (bing just exists in the background), there is enough lock-in to not have to fear against direct competition, and the main focus becomes having users spend more time on the web, search more, instead of staying in native apps. That's were, if my memory is correct, they ditch language based landing pages and start fazing out modifier support and all the "power user" part of their interface.
Fighting SEO scams becomes a waste of time when it has no real impact on wether user will continue to use the product or not.
When people stopped "surfing" and starting "searching", the whole mechanism broke down. Plus Google started using other metrics for ranking sites these days.
But at the end of the day it's the search engine's job to separate the wheat from the chaff and google has been doing a very poor job of it lately. Like the article right said, the best is to prioritise websites that are about sharing knowledge not affiliate marketing, paid ads, marketing, etc.
> But I think all can agree that Google results reduced when people started to game the algorithm and create search engine optimized garbage websites.
Well not quite.
There were piles of SEO crap sites being produced in 2001. Google used to manage to react to any new exploit and improve their results. They actively fought that battle for at least a decade or so. They used to win.
It is only more recently that they seem to have given up.