Google wasn’t crushed by spam, they decided to stop doing text search and build search bubbles that are user specific, location-specific, decided to surface pages that mention search terms in metadata instead of in text users might read, etc. Oh yeah, and about a decade before LLMs were actually usable, they started to sabotage simple substring searches and kind of force this more conversational interface. That’s when simple search terms stopped working very well, and you had to instead ask yourself “hmm how would a very old person or a small child phrase this question for a magic oracle”

This is how we get stuff like: Did you mean “when did Shakespeare die near my location”? If anyone at google cared more about quality than printing money, that thirsty gambit would at least be at the bottom of the page instead of the top.

By the time I graduated highschool you already couldn't trust that Boolean operators would be treated literally. By the time I graduated college, they basically didn't seem to do anything, at best a weak suggestion.

Nowadays quotes don't even seem to be consistently honored.

I suspect the real problem is that search engines ceased being search engines when they stopped taking things literally and started trying to interpret what people mean. Then they became some sort of poor man's AI. Now that we have LLMs, of course it is going to replace the poor excuse for search engines that exist today. We were heading down that road already, and it actually summarizes what is out there.

Then Google decided to start enforcing that, because they had this idea that they would be able to divine your "intent" from a "natural question" rather than just matching documents including your search terms.

Google’s verbatim search option roughly does that for me (plus an ad blocker that removes ads from the results page). I have it activated by default as a search shortcut.

(To activate it, one can add “tbs=li:1” as a query parameter to the Google search URL.)

Thank you, this is almost life-alteringly good to know.

Seems that Firefox on mobile allows editing the url for most pages, but on google search results pages, the url bar magically turns into a did-you-mean alternate search selector where I cannot see nor edit a url. Surprised but not surprised.

Sure, there’s a work around for this too, somehow. But I don’t want to spend my life collecting and constantly updating a huge list of temporary hacks to fix things that others have intentionally broken.

Yes, it’s annoying that you can’t set it as the default on Google search itself.

Even more naive, but my personal preference: just ban all advertising. The fact that people will pay for ChatGPT implies people will also pay for good search if the free alternative goes away.

Google results are polluted with spam because it is more profitable for Google. This is a conscious decision they made five years ago.

Then why are DuckDuckGo results also (arguably even more so) polluted with spam/scam sites? I doubt DDG is making any profit from those sites since Google essentially owns the display ad business.

Google not only has multiple monopolies, but a cut and dry perverse incentive to produce lower quality results to make the whole session longer instead of short and effective.

For example: a beginner developer is possibly better served by some SEO-heavy tutorial blog post; an experienced developer would prefer results weighted towards the official docs, the project’s bug tracker and mailing list, etc. But since less technical and non-technical people vastly outnumber highly technical people, Google and Bing end up focusing on the needs of the former, at the cost of making search worse for the later.

One positive about AI: if an AI is doing the search, it likely wants the more advanced material not the more beginner-focused one. It can take more advanced material and simplify it for the benefit of less experienced users. It is (I suspect) less likely to make mistakes if you ask it to simplify the more advanced material than if you just gave it more beginner-oriented material instead. So if AI starts to replace humans as the main clients of search, that may reverse some of the pressure to “dumb it down”.

I mostly agree with your interesting comment, and I think your analysis basically jives with my sibling comment.

But one thing I take issue with is the idea that this type of thing is a good faith effort, because it’s more like a convenient excuse. Explaining substring search or even include/exclude ops to children and grandparents is actually easy. Setting preferences for tutorials vs API docs would also be easy. But companies don’t really want user-directed behavior as much as they want to herd users to preferred content with algorithms, then convince the user it was their idea or at least the result of relatively static ranking processes.

The push towards more fuzzy semantic search and “related content” everywhere is not to cater to novice users but to blur the line between paid advertisement and organic user-directed discovery.

No need to give megacorp the benefit of the doubt on stuff like this, or make the underlying problems seem harder than they are. All platforms land in this place by convergent evolution wherein the driving forces are money and influence, not insurmountable technical difficulties or good intentions for usability.

Good luck finding those, you end op with SEO spam and clone page spam. These days you have to look for unobvious hidden meanings which only relate to your exact problem to find what you are looking for.

I have the strong feeling search these days is back to the Altavista era. You'd have to use trickery to find what you were looking for back then as well. Too bad + no longer works in google due to their stupid naming of a dead product (no, literal is not the same and no replacement).

That's not my experience at all. While there are scammy sites, using the search engines as an index instead of an oracle still yields useful results. It only requires to learn the keywords which you can do by reading the relevant materials .

I'm sure they can. But they have no incentive. Try to Google an item, and it will show you a perfect match of sponsored ads and some other not-so-relevant non-sponsored results

Tailoring/retraining the main search AI will be so much more expensive that retraining the spam special purpose AIs.

The problem with Google search is that it indexes all the web, and there's (as you say) a rising tide of scam and spam sites.

The problem with AI is that it scoops up all the web as training data, and there's a rising tide of scam and spam sites.

You make this claim with such confidence, but what is it based on?

There have always been hordes of spam and scam websites. Can you point to anything that actually indicates that the ratio is now getting worse?

No, there haven't always been hordes of spam and scam websites. I remember the web of the 90s. When Google first arrived on the scene every site on the results page was a real site, not a spam/scam site.