No Stupid Questions

for many years now – stopped using them back when they started to ignore +include, -exclude, and "phrases"

Google is no longer a search engine.

It's a storefront.

Yes. If you do a search on this site for posts about google, you'll find multiple threads about this. Basically it seems that google is losing the arms race against SEO, and new LLM bots are mostly responsible.

I live in central Canada.

I am reading the comments, and I am noticing that other people's experiences are very different than mine.

For me, Google Search has reached the point where it will not even give me results for my search terms. I say this without an iota of hyperbole.

It's so coincidental that this conversation comes up, but I actually sat there yesterday agog, looking at my desktop Firefox browser window... Scrolling through the entire search results page and realizing that not a single thing was even close to what I searched

It is noteworthy because I have been observing a steady decline, but it was the very first time I could make use of literally nothing that they gave back. In an unsettling way, the gravity of it hit me emotionally right there.

Google search was so legendary when it came out, it was able to find me perfect results when I would even type in almost gibberish, it somehow predicted what I actually meant. Over time the results were worse and worse, then nothing but products would show in the results a few years ago. Buy this, buy what,etc. no more research, just trash products in the search results. Google greed killed itself.

Ars had an article about it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/

It's not just you—Google Search is getting worse. A new study from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence looked at Google search quality for a year and found the company is losing the war against SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam.

They're also not particularly motivated to try harder. They don't have a lot of competition, and they make a lot of money this way. And their leadership are idiots.

Yeah, the first measurements are rolling in and not looking great: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/

Basically, imagine someone built a machine that made it trivial to generate an infinite number of realistic-looking articles (=LLMs). And there's a monetary incentive to do so (=ad money).
So, I have to imagine, all search engines are absolutely being blasted with spam content, and they have to filter out realistic-looking articles to make their search results worthwhile at all, but as a result, some real search results will also get filtered out or ranked badly.

Not just Google. Duck duck go was good for awhile but now also getting worse. Assume this is Ai and other tools screwing with how their web crawlers collect data. Expect it to get worse before it gets better.

I don't say this to be dismissive, but Google's search results have been getting worse for the better part of a decade now, and they're still far above anyone else. While I do think that engines like Bing are closer to Google's quality than most give them credit for, Google is still the only game in town. There are other search engines that people use, but they are niches in niches, and are probably used for belief reasons over an improvement in quality.

Frankly, I think that for the first time in history, the search market is open for competition. There is an argument to be made whether Google either doesn't care about their search quality, or that it's simply a hard problem to solve for anyone. If the former is true, then a competitor could make a very real case for overthrowing Google, given the right backing and hype behind them.

The entire internet has drastically declined for me.

In general yes. I'm not going to pull exact numbers up but I think it started declining around 2018.

I've heard it said they switched to whatever was most profitable rather than what was actually useful or relevant. I still find good results when looking up niche tech issues, but if it's more mainstream I get really weird results, so that might indeed be what's happening.

Also, google images sucks now. Try googling for anything specific, like "sand in pc" or "red carb on plate" - all AI generated

Yes. I'm using the same search methods I've always used that used to get me relevant results, and I get a bunch of fucking sponsored links instead. I've noticed lately that if the result of a search is a YouTube video and I click on it, it doesn't go to YouTube but opens up as a search result and plays me ads somehow bypassing my adblocker that works just fine in actual YouTube. More than once after the ad was done, the video refused to load, which was utterly infuriating.

Google assistant on my phone has also become garbage. They changed the functionality of the few key things I liked to use, and now it's totally useless to me. Google is swirling down the shitter faster than yesterdays tacos. Honestly, if it wasn't for email, photos, and using an Android phone, I'd probably be done with them entirely.

Don’t miss this article (Lemmy discussion) from an air purifier review site for an in-depth look at how trusted publishers have been downsizing, then outsourcing generation of affiliate listicles. Drowns out sites who actually buy & test products.

alt-text: Google results for “best air purifiers "dotdash meredith"” showing People, Better Homes & Gardens, and a dozen other brands showing up, all reusing the same low-quality content

I stopped using it years ago because they were going downhill and still collecting your private information. I run my own SearXNG now. It proxies from multiple sources, no ads, no tracking. I really enjoy SearXNG as it's mine.

Yea, turns out that without competition companies are lazy as fuck.

Yes it has. And it's talked about all over Lemmy. Is there a circle jerk community on Lemmy?

YES

For literal months now because of ChatGPT and reddit, if you google "countries in Africa that start with the letter K" for the first two results Google will say that none exist.

So yes, I would say Google search results are getting worse.

On the flipside for advertisers, prices for ad clicks have never been higher. Its so outrageously high now, making Google such an obscene amount of money, that its unlikely to get better, I'd expect it to get much worse.

Yeah, they've been getting progressively less useful. UBlock Origin helps but I feel like Google Search was much better in the past.

I saw an article on a technology Lemmy the other day that showed how Google was pretty much helping to make sure you get shitty results. I'll have to see if I can find it and link it.

I don't mean this mean I'm genuinely curious. Do you not use the front page or only really occasionally use lemmy world?

I'm just so curious how you don't see this every day on the feeds. Again I'm not meaning this like, GO USE A SEARCH ENGINE! it's just that this is such a prevalent topic here, and lemmy is so niche, how you've avoided an answer up until this post?!

100% the page ranking system is too easy to abuse. So a lot of garbage gets to the top of results.

But the internet is just too big to do proper index searches like the old days.

Google has been useless for me for years now. I switched to DuckDuckGo like 5 years ago and every now and then if I accidentally even stray onto Google, I'm just scared by the results

I was just talking to some people about this. I use to be the guy who researched everything now I feel stupid AF because finding what I'm looking for feels impossible at times. Hell there's times where I search something and Google even says "there's nothing to find".

I use perplexity.ai

Hoping that one day it takes my job and I am okay with it. I already hate my job