Search is objectively worse today than it used to be, it's not just that "it's harder to use for old people", it's just worse.

>Search is objectively worse today than it used to be

How would you demonstrate that search is objectively worse? And how would you then show that it's a result of Google's algorithms, and not a consequence of the content of the Internet changing significantly?

>How would you demonstrate that search is objectively worse?

There's a few ways to do that. The easiest is to point out that almost any lucrative search query has -0- organic results above the page fold on a typical monitor today. It's all ads unless you scroll down.

Then, it's not proof, but how much time do you think Google spends on things that sit below the fold and aren't clicked on much? What would the financial incentive be?

> how much time do you think Google spends on things that sit below the fold and aren't clicked on much? What would the financial incentive be?

Quality organic search results is the reason they can have ads above the fold. There's tremendous financial incentive for them to care about that.

It's a result of people generating content solely to cater to Google's algorithms and accumulate ad and referral revenue. The internet changed significantly because of how Google indexes and ranks content. The proof is in the pudding... results for product searches are dominated by SEO referral link blogspam. Entire careers and businesses that didn't exist in 2006 have been built around this.

> How would you demonstrate that search is objectively worse?

How would you demonstrate that being 50 years old is worse than being 25 years old?

You ask people that are 50 years old or older because they have been on both sides.

> it's a result of Google's algorithms

Well, it's simply in front of your eyes: this [1] was not possible in 2006.

Anyway, the fact that you cannot easily find on Google why Google search results are worse, proves that Google search results are worse today than in the past.

https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/1/23/21078343/google-ad-d...

I was trying to be clever with my metaphor, but since a lot of people seemed to miss my point, I'll spell it out.

An old person's glasses and walker don't make their body feel worse. They're responses to an underlying change, and in fact make them feel better than they would without them.

Similarly, I'd argue that the ML pipelines and complexities in Google search aren't why search results are worse today. Rather, the web has changed with more SEO spam, walled gardens, content in videos, and search has changed in that you try to find more kinds of information than ever before. It's the underlying changes that make the search seem worse, and all of Google's fancy algorithms are imperfect responses to that. Without them, I'd be surprised if Google's results weren't far worse than in 2006.

The comment I responded to:

> My search results were a lot better in 2006 when, I assume, they didn't have all these ML pipelines...

made it seem like maybe the ML pipelines were somehow causing the decline in quality, rather than simply an imperfect response to changes in the web since then.

It would be cool if we had a snapshot of the web from the time you think it was better and could pit the algorithm of today against the algorithm that was contemporary with the snapshot. It would also be interesting to take the old algorithm and apply it to the web of today.

My bet would be that each algorithm would perform best on the web of its day.

I find that Google search results are still the best of any search engine for specific computer science and other specific tech-related topics, as long as you construct a fairly complex search string. However, for general information on things like world events, local news, national politics, etc. it's become little more than a mirror for corporate and state propaganda outlets. This is likely due to those very ML pipelines mentioned above:

Vince (authority/brand power), Panda (inbound link quality), Penguin (content quality)...

This represents a pretty severe narrowing of results on information and opinions - possibly the worst results are on Youtube searches for newsworthy events. It'd be very interesting to see what kind of content a pure PageRank algorithm-based search engine would generate today, and I'd be very interested in using such a search engine. Now, would it be overrun by SEO? I don't know, but it'd be worth finding out.

I kind of wonder if Google Scholar is purely PageRank or citation-count based, it still gives very useful results with relatively simple query strings.

> I find that Google search results are still the best of any search engine for specific computer science and other specific tech-related topics

even without Google account?

This is my Google experience from my temporary workplace in Barcelona

https://i.imgur.com/X2Avw2v.png

Then I click on "I agree" and whatever thing I search I receive Spanish results because I am in Spain.

Not my idea of "the best of any search engine", but ok...

I never log in, I find the key to better results is to keep adding terms to the query, and force the 'verbatim' option under tools. Restriction to specific domains (.edu etc.) with site: helps a lot, and the not option is sometimes helpful (-this -that).

Youtube search is awful. I once went through news queries on Google searches of Youtube (site:youtube.com) looking for popular independent media outlets (BreakingPoints for example) by -MSNBC, -FOX, -CNBC etc., and ended up with a string about 25 queries long, and those shows are just banned. They were feeding me unpopular corporate media shows with hardly any views or subscribers at that point, but zero access to independent media. Full-on propaganda manipulation.

> That's like an old person complaining that their body felt a lot better back in 2006

It's simply a fact that in 2006 Google search results were better.

Reasons might vary and could well not be Google's fault, but it's not old man yelling at clouds it's provably true.

Of course people that were not using Google before 2006 can't really know, just like people that are not old cannot experience how much better being young is, body functioning wise.