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.
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.)