>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.