Has Google search got noticably worse recently?

The puck has been traveling in the wrong direction for years now:

Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26460092

Google's search results have gotten worse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26352219

What Is Going on at Google? 'The search engine is becoming worse by the month' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26187421

Ask HN: Are Google products getting worse? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25139358

Ask HN: have Google search results worsened? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20275865

Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19132927

Ask HN: Is Google's search quality declining? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18653254

Ask HN: Over the years, has Google Search gotten better or worse (for you)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18266966

It has gotten worse in the recent years, i've been using DDG as a default for years now and occasionally resort to the !G bang.

What's more concerning is the blatant rise of SEO-spam even on page one - for technical queries at least (on Google).

Most of the time they're in the format of

threeletterrandomsubdomain.domain.tld/3to5chars/morerandomchars.html

Example:

xfvh.companydomain.it/yrrz/vhhv3asdf.html

To be honest, i didn't bother to take the chance and look what's behind such an URL - but i guess it's some sort of malware or - best case scenario - just ads...

Once you've seen them, it's kinda easy to notice their patterns and avoid them - but it just takes a second where you have your guard down and then... who knows...

I shudder to think what attacks happen to less technically minded people, like my parents. I bet they don't give clicking a result on a Google SERP a second thought...

Aside: I've seen those being mostly from Italy (.it TLD) - not sure if it's because i'm from .de and those are ranked higher because of geolocation...

Agreed. Same general thing: I wind up putting search strings in to find specific things that I know exist and Google happily spams me with all sorts of irrelevant garbage. I often have to go crazy with quotes and with lots of extra keywords to finally make all the spam-results go away and find what I was looking for.

It's fine for general search queries but really poor for long tail queries.

Generally its low quality content designed to rank top over high quality articles written by unknown publication.

Its pretty horrible now. I append 'reddit ' to almost every search query.

A less cringy demonstration of Google's problems with monetizing searchies are greek letters.

If you search for delta you have to sift through delta airlines and delta stores before you can read about the letter or the geographic feature.

Same for finding images of the letter iota, no, just a page full of some cryptocoin's logo.

I tie this trend to the recent announcements that free storage for gmail, google photos and drive, is ending. Google offers services that have a recurring cost for free, as time goes by this cost scales linearly, so the pressure to monetize other assets increases every year.

Also, whatever information you're looking for you tend to mostly get products as a response.

The amount of SEO-spam I encounter on my searches has definitely grown a lot.

I'm a bit afraid that this will make it more difficult, if not impossible, to reach good webpages. Personal blogs seem like they're not prioritized anymore. I have to append operators like `site:*.github.io` or `site:reddit.com` to get good results now.

Does anyone have any idea on how we could work on mitigating this degradation of search results?

Creating manually maintained lists of the best resources, blog posts, discord servers, articles, videos, etc. related to a topic seems like a viable solution to me. Some subreddits maintain their own wikis that already achieve this for some topics and so do the awesome-* repos on GitHub, but these are few in number.

I want to see more efforts being poured into this, but see no community actively working on this with goals in sight. Do their exist any that I have missed? Or is anyone interested in creating one? I'd be happy to help!

I switched to DuckDuckGo on a permanent basis for around a year now. What I’ve noticed:

- I find myself doing “!g query” every now and then because I can’t find some very specific things (typically dev-related), but I can find 80-90% of the stuff I want in the first page. - The index takes a long time to update (if I post something on my blog - which uses ddg for site search - it may take up to a week to show up) - Comparatively zero nuisances (although there are so many spam blogs out there with gear reviews that they have pretty much the same effect as search ads)

In general, I’m happy, but I would agree that search, in general, has become worse over the past five years or so, as regardless of what engine I use, I now have to be much more specific about what I want and scroll through one or two pages of results before I find what I need.

Is Google search getting worse or are spammers playing SEO better?

I continue to find Google search immensely valuable and am continuously impressed at how well it performs in finding something I know exists as well as getting me to the right information I don't know. Often I get the answer I need right in auto-complete like when I was recently trying to remember the name of the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence race.

To me it seems they are way better than before. Very often I get my answers immediately without even needing to click on a link.

Not sure but Google could do something to help improve DDG search results.

For sure it's a reason to try something else.

Are there any benchmarks for search?

Yes, I've noticed that also.

Hi OP. Out of curiosity, does any other search engine come up with the Battlefield 1 sales numbers?