Google tracks analytics on the quality of its search results, simply by observing which results users click on, how long it takes them, or whether they don't click on anything at all.
The idea that Search is somehow worsening doesn't make any sense.
What has maybe happened is that Search has improved for the population as whole, but gotten worse for certain subsets of users -- but still a net gain overall. Or alternatively, that the web itself has changed -- that Search is doing better than ever, but some users just don't like what the web offers in response. (E.g. nobody writes straight-up recipes without tons of intro anymore -- but that's also so they have tons of space to insert ads, it's not about SEO. It's nothing to do with Google.)
The "search experience" however, has degraded since the mid 2010s, for me at least. I'm in a constant battle to filter through advertising and bad content that is "optimized" for the algorithm to find the information I need. The constant need to monetize the technology more and more has certainly reduced it's usefulness en-masse.
But I don't think chatbots or alternatives (beyond curated indexes) will solve this problem - as you say the web itself has morphed around ways to optimize one search engine's ranking algorithm.
The reason that I don't think it's this is because often there are sites that offer exactly what I'm looking for. Google doesn't surface them in my results, but other engines do.
Do you honestly think that when Google is presented with an improvement in search results that would reduce its revenue that they choose the improvement?
Just look at Google Assistant. It has gotten significantly worse the last two years. Strangely, the only time it asks me for feedback is when it happens to work. Shouldn't be hard for it to detect when it craps out I talk frustrated at it, but they don't seem interested in getting feedback at that point. Ah, but it happens to turn one light on once (versus the 20 something went wrong times), prompt for feedback on that specific one time it worked.
What analytics are you thinking of that would show search is somehow MORE accurate? Because if it's just searches and click throughs and traffic and revenue...
More people with internet = more people searching for stuff. More mobile phones = more people searching for stuff out in the world. Worse results = user goes back to google and does ANOTHER search and search revenue just doubled again. Huzzah bonuses and vacations to Disneyland all around this year!
I think by any measure, growth and clicks and revenue are going to go up no matter what they do so I'm not sure exactly what metric you'd be tracking to see whether Google search results are actually qualitatively better? Short of the site going down entirely, there's probably nothing they can do to slow growth. But nowhere in that compounding money farm is the quality of results relevant.
The search is probably fine, but it's relegated to the bottom half of the page. It could also get worse if Google isn't able to keep up with the SEO and scammers. Personally I feel like Google has lost interest in providing a good search experience, they still have, what, 90% of the market. There's zero incentive to ensure it's a good experience and they can keep milking the advertisers.
Meanwhile the competitors have been forced to do better and especially Bing has. Any search engine that rely on Bing has become really good in the past five years. That might also be part of it, those of us who went to Bing, DuckDuckGo or other search engines for other reasons have learned to use those and when we then go back to Google it's worse, because we haven't used it for ten years.
But you're probably right, the search bit is fine, it finds the same results as Bing, so it's down to presentation and Google used to be the best and now they are the worst.
I've been using it for over a year, 100% of the time, and love it. Great results and awesome functionality like weighting certain sites, AI summarization, etc.
I don't work for Kagi, I just seriously love it.
Search is worsening. We've all seen it with our own eyes. I don't care how much analytics Google is gathering, that's irrelevant.
Just take on example: try googling for the release date of an upcoming video game or movie which you know for a fact hasn't had an announced date. Then view the top 5-10 results and let me know if you consider them to be of a high quality.
What do you get? Speculation? If so … I mean what did you expect? No one knows the answer so neither would Google.
Its job is to find websites talking about what you entered as your query. If all people are doing is speculating … that’s all Google will return.
Enough of course until someone shows them better results and then they will switch search engines just as we switched from altavista to google all those years back.
ChatGPT and other LLMs are also absolutely horrible on accuracy, don't get me wrong.
But, here's an example of what's wrong with Google.
I search something like "Can mangoes grow in Washington state?" and at the top of my results is the condensed "People Also Ask" question answer result. These attempt to read and condense a webpage (of questionable accuracy) into an answer for my query, but they are often full of shit.
For example expanding "Where are mangoes grown in WA" shows an answer about Western Australia rather than Washington. Another answer tells me "yes" but when I read the actual article it clearly says "no, they won't survive".
Perhaps the problem with Google is that it's trying too hard to convince people that it's smarter than it really is. I treat it as a stupid, mindless computer and it works fine most of the time.
Still, I agree that keyword search remains practical.
You can tell who all the old people are that were using search engines since back in the day. LOL
All I ever expect from a search engine is it find pages with the words in my query (and maybe exclude certain words as specified), anything else is just gravy.
Today, I think they are losing. Quality primary sources are often crushed by unusable websites, which understand google's analytics very well. If I make it hard to find the information, but I make it seem that it's the next paragraph down, my search results will improve!
Google itself is causing the enshitification of third party websites, many of which have paragraphs and paragraphs that are obvious spam. I'd take any videogame guide website from 2005 over the first page of google today
It does seem like they've finally removed github scrapers like gitmemory -- at least I haven't seen them in a while.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
Even in technical realms this holds true. One of the huge disappointments of learning JavaScript/typescript recently is how terrible and spammy searching for anything on it is. Coming from the golang world where I'm used to search results being highly relevant with few advertising spam blogs among them.
I look for recipes a lot. While what I find matches the "SEO-shaped recipe blog page" template mentioned in TFA, nevertheless the results still have the recipe(s) I'm looking for.
When I need to fix/build/repair stuff, searching just youtube almost always gets me what I need or want.
My hypothesis is that it depends on how you search. For me, Google has become unambiguously poor, and I've stopped using it because I get bad results.
But I think that the reason for that is Google's use of AI (not the LLM stuff, but the stuff they started using a number of years ago). Google is clearly trying to interpret "what I really mean" from my queries instead of just taking them at face value, and it's awful at doing that. For me. It's obviously good at it for other people. It may have to do with me actively doing my best to prevent Google from tracking me.
Digging through search results to find what you need is work. Having something confident make you believe an alternate truth is not.
People who actually try to use code output from chatbots quickly realize it just only _looks_ like code of the right shape and quality. There have been many blog posts and comments here touting how great the code ChatGPT generated is while the given example response is complete nonsense once you look a little deeper.
google still is king for every single type of search i do. specially code related.
i've tried again and again to use "Chat-AIs" and they get so much shit wrong while implying they are correct that i just gave up.
I'm not quite sure of the reason. There's a couple of possibilities:
1. DDG is relying on Bing for a lot of their search data, maybe bing's just got better, or DDG have configured their integration better. I don't feel that DDG's had a significant improvement, it definitely feels like they've caught google on the way down more so.
2. Google losing the SEO war. As it gets easier to run and monetise blogspam sites, more of them exist, and as time goes on, a longer tail of topics get "served" by these sites. Unlike the spam of years past which tried to convince Google that their viagra selling site was really about top ten movie downloads, these sites are nominally about the topic the user searched for, so maybe Google is having a harder time trying to evaluate "quality". LLMs are being given a lot of the blame for this, but this is an older phenomenon than that, there were plenty of sites doing e.g. templated articles fed product spec sheet, or pay a minimum wage intern to rephrase the wikipedia page before that.
3. I've cut down my usage of Google services to basically just YouTube and YouTube Music. I also run ublock origin pretty much universally. Maybe my de-Googling has just been successful to the point that Google doesn't have a accurate profile for me anymore, and this has more of an impact on search than I expected.
What are they losing, though? Isn't this more like a snake eating its own tail? Or the human-centipede of online advertising?
I'm not convinced serving quality results is really in line with Google's incentives. If they trick me into clicking some garbage and have to go back and try again, isn't that another shot at showing me ads?
In my own personal experience, I think the younger generations care less about search. They just don't use it much, nor do they value the information & cultural pipeline in which search is valuable.
I was literally unable to perform the search that I wanted, and all Google suggested repeatedly was adding a dozen quotes on each side. Most frustrating search experience I've ever had.
Its unfortunate but theres more money to be made being less helpful. For example, google ads pay based on session length.
See youtube killing its short form videos with the 10 minute monetization cliff --> gap filled by vine and then later by TikTok
Once you change the usefulness of your product it's only a matter of time
It’s weird. I suspect it’s more expensive to search this way or something because it’s such a basic feature that they haven’t done for a decade.
That makes me want to shout. "Did I say that?"
Then I replaced 'Google' with 'Bing', and Google returned results without the quote which were irrelevant - but that makes total sense to me.
Including one particularly panicked search because I sold the ceremonial weapons from Rosalyn Monastery.
Yeah that claim doesn’t get made in any sort of widespread way. There are variants of it that do (“kids only know how to use their phones not keyboards”) but your specific wording here makes me think this claim came from some hyper specific bubble or from your own subconscious.
Care to clarify or explain what I’m missing?
And after thinking about, it makes sense. Technology today has reached a plateau of quality and comfort, has removed the struggles of the past, and is now cheap and widely used in society. That's very different from the previous decades, where tech was an uphill-battle, where computers were expensive and only used by those who had demand for it. Tech today has saturated society, and this also changed perception.
Now more people can evaluate the actual ability of people. And old people today have legit reasons to learn and use technology. And the most notable change is: the old people today, are the middle-aged and young people from decades ago, meaning they are the ones who had already in the past reasons to learn technologies. So comparing old with young today in those aspects, is very different from 20, 30 years ago. And it seems, the young people today have finally lost their benefit of early access to technology, and now they compete again with experience and knowledge.
So regarding Googles search this means, maybe the youth is just lacking good google-fu, which older users with more experience have. Or they generally have a difference stance on how the search should work, because they have no deeper understanding on what the Search is, what it should deliver and can deliver, and what not. Some of the comments here go very strong in that direction, that people have a very different approach on what they expect from Google. So again, it's a difference in perception.
The rest of my searches are going to ddg after Neeva shut down and Kagi hasn’t fit the bill (though I’m not remembering why).
But if there’s something I need to buy or do commerce- google is by far the best. So I try and use it the least.
Imagine trying to find videos on the Cyberpunk genre and getting nothing but videos on that buggy video game that came out a few years ago.
I recently search for "raspberry pi uart hat" and Google responds with the following:
Not many results include the word "uart" so we eliminated it from your search terms. Here are thousands of irrelevant results about random raspberry pi hats you aren't interested in.
I run a fairly popular web game (Redactle https://redactle.net). Thousands of people play it and there are thousands of links on social media which Google doesn't seem to care about. When you search 'redactle' you should be getting my site or a clone of the original setup by a fan; This is how it works on Bing and DDG. But on Google the top results are ad-infested link-farm game sites, a domain squatter page at redactle .com and crap like that. They simply don't recognize the social proof that is out there. A thousand https://spammygames{1..N}.com sites linking to each other beats out all those people linking from reddit,fb,x etc.
This is always a strange claim for me, because it does not even remotely match my experience. And now we have the rise of Chat-AIs, and people who claim it's so much better than google, which also does not even remotely match my experience. And now I ask myself: am I just too stupid to see it? Or are the people too stupid to not see it? Do I search just too different things from what others search that I can't see it?
And then I also remember the claim that the youth is insanely uneducated about technology and the modern world, even worse than old people, and I wonder whether this is the reason for those claims. Do those claims all come from young people, who live in a very different world and are just very clueless about those things?
So at the end, does Google end, because it's not cool with the youth anymore? Not hipster enough and getting lost in the difference between the culture of the generations?