Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
Google used to be my first stop whenever I had to research anything, but of late, I've increasingly found myself appending site:reddit.com or site:stackoverflow.com to get any meaningful results.
Most of my searches lately have either revolved around a couple of medical issues (my wife's slightly complex pregnancy, and my own neck injury) or technical problems.
The medical results are absolutely hopeless. Almost all the top pages are the same article written in five different ways, and each only has the most basic, broad information. You can tell from a glance that the article wasn't written by a subject matter expert. You can also tell that the article is trying its best to "play it safe" and list out only the broadest possible range of results.
It's the same problem with technical searches. Outside of Stackoverflow results (which, thankfully, are at the top of the page), most articles are written for a broad, beginner audience (like a React article starting with a tutorial on installing React). Most content, again, feels like it wasn't written by subject matter experts but article writers copy-pasting solutions from multiple different articles.
I don't know if I'm the only one, but as a long time Google power user, I find using the search increasingly frustrating.
Or is that just me?
Google is increasingly useless, but there is a Garbage In Garbage Out aspect given that the vast bulk of what they're indexing today is junk. Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising. There seems to be a growing chunk of automated site propagation as well (90% identical content but with keywords/names/etc tweaked), perhaps for scams, perhaps again for advertising. There may not be great ways to filter this. GPT3/etc will exacerbate horrifically.
Google is now a "recommendation engine" not a search engine...
I type something in and it ignores the words and presents something it thinks I might like.
For good measure, it prepends a word-spaghetti advert that's optimised on-the-fly to maximise confusion with the missing useful search result. When I accidentally click on it then they'll get paid.
It's not just you.
First, I wish you & your wife all the best.
For me it's the same. The search has been made more easy for everyone by Google. But that implied the reduction of some Poweruser functions.
In the early times, one could use "+" and "-" to define the search in detail. Nowadays, no +/- anymore accepted in the search, but... There is a link somewhere for "advanced search ".
If you get onto that page, you can define the search in detail. I, for me, automatically use the advanced search, with exclusion of certain terms within the search results.
May be this is not be known to you - if it's already used by you, then:
Yes. The SEO-Cancer has brought us link farming. The reason for existence of such sites is just to raise the "creditability" of certain domains and having a lot of Backlinks & clicks - thus, being listed by Google at the foremost top.
I usually skip the first page and start my search with the 2nd page of results.
Or, I start the search and whilst not getting good results, I use the very same search page, and type in different/further search terms for my topic. The results become more refined in the second run..
Goog is still the best, but one needs to adapt to the search workflow of theirs.
Alternatively, you can try www.startpage.com..
Yes indeed. The SEO industry has finally worked out how to beat Google and get their stuff pushed to the top.
Meanwhile the real experts, who don't have any SEO skills at all, are disappearing down the results. It's a tragedy.
I recently switched to Kagi (and pay so they can sustain it) and I have to say it's very good, I rarely have to use g!, maybe for maps only. It also previews
code snippets nicely.
"Outside of Stackoverflow results (which, thankfully, are at the top of the page), most articles are written for a broad, beginner audience (like a React article starting with a tutorial on installing React)."
This is the result of a confluence of two issues that plague (yes, plague) our industry: the disinterest/dismissive attitude towards documentation and the infection of celebrity status/hero worship as having importance. People apparently feel the need to self-promote, and a quick-and-easy way of doing that is "publishing" articles like the ones you mentioned. And thanks to the lack of documentation discipline, that depth of content is more or less the norm.
The quality has dropped massively, even compared to 5 years ago.
Partly it is an input issue. Interesting conversations are increasingly happening in walled gardens like Telegram.
Academic websites rarely show up any longer. Even for simple keywords the number of search results is sometimes only 8 pages. If you read all of them or your queries get too specific, you are classified as a bot and get the "unusual activity" nag screen.
It was good while it lasted. I think Google could be disrupted now.
If you boil this down, it’s actually a fundamental issue with Google’s ranking algorithm not keeping up with the times. They’re now a monopoly giant with zero incentive to innovate.
We all know the algorithm is too easily gamed (1)(2), but they make way too much money to ever blow it up and start from scratch.
Why care about the free results below the line, when the real goal is to get people to click on the ads at the top of the SERP?
——-
1. If it’s general information you’re looking for, you’re hit with low-quality keyword spam sites, with 900 ads playing all over the page. Google makes the vast majority of its money on ads, so they can’t penalize sites bloated with ads due to anti-trust issues.
2. If you’re doing research on products/software/etc, the results in almost every category are now bloated with affiliate marketing spam. Again, Google cannot de-rank sites that monetize this way due to anti-trust.
I switched to kagi and the results are far better since.
I can block SEO spam results like pinterest, and boost SO/Reddit/language docs results.
It stopped being helpful a while ago. It's now moved into being harmful.
A popular scheme among shady SEOs and marketers is "rank and rent." This is where they choose a major city and a common contracting service (eg, plumbing, carpet cleaning, fence building, home remodeling, etc.).
Then they register domains using generic search terms. They build a website presenting itself as an independent local business. They even go as far as lying on the about us pages claiming years of experience.
They create content on the site, social media profiles, and business listings.
When the site begins to rank well enough to generate leads, they either rent the website to a local contractor and/or sell them the leads.
It sounds helpful, but it's shady. First, they're usually competing with the local contractors for search space. Second, they usually rely heavily on fake Google Business Profiles.
While the latter practice violates Google's guidelines, getting them removed is tough. That's because they pay local residents to "borrow" their home addresses. This allows them to get the verification code sent out by Google to verify addresses.
For our family business, we've even had them report our Google Business Profile on several occasions because we were outranking them. Then they had the gaul to try and rent one of their websites to us.
In the end, the practice is harmful to local contractors and customers who don't realize they going through a middle man.
Speaking of software engineering related searches, the quality of the results have gone off the cliff. Now instead of seeing the original github issue, pull request or discussion, the first search results point to some crappy websites that mirror the original content. The UI/UX of those websites is awful: part of the content is hidden behind a registered account, they are slow, I get popups and other garbage.
Google Search needs to be disrupted and, while I've tried using DuckDuckGo, I don't think that's it. However, my concern is that so much of the really good user content is hidden behind walled gardens, such as FB groups, discord, slack etc.
I find myself turning on "Verbatim Mode" for almost all of my searches.
Seemingly Google is being "helpful" by removing large chunks of my search query, so as I can more specific, Google just throws all of that out and I get the same junk SEO results. You can go back to Old Google, but going Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim. This is NOT the same thing as quoting your entire query, it just doesn't let Google simply drop 50% of your query's words.
If Google wants to improve it needs to place bans on domains using automatically generated content and threaten lawsuits if the webmasters try to evade the ban. The bigger problem is that most content is no longer on the public world wide web, it is on private chats in Discord and on closed Facebook groups.
How about when they promise you there's thousands of results, then somehow there isn't a third page of those results...
Been using ddg for years and my use of !g has reduced considerably because it doesn’t result in better (but often worse) results.
Google stopped being an innovative company many years ago.
They’re in their Ballmer era. They’ll hopefully get a Nadella soon but not before it gets worse.
I think google has reduced their weights for github drastically. The other day, I googled a github url verbatim (without the https:// - Firefox Android somehow didn't have the option to open the url when I selected it) and the repo was nowhere in the search results.
Sometimes I worry about how long the "site:reddit.com" gravy train will last...
It is getting too hard to make the Internet useful these days.
Too many Ads. I usually scroll down half screen for the first page. And then still more to avoid the "aggregate-sites" (sites that aggregate info from other places).
when X marketplace becomes valuable, it becomes a worthwhile target. we see this everywhere. remember pinterest and rapgenius polluting google searches? etsy opens up and becomes a crappier and more expensive aliexpress.
we yearn for curation and expertise, but aren't willing to pay for it with money. instead we pay for it with behavior modification attempts (ads), time (bad ux), and unintended societal side effects.
I recently went through a very similar experience as yours and agree that the medical sites provided by Google are basically pamphlet material. It has indeed become very hard to get detailed, complex information from simply googling things, to the point that I don't trust getting valid info from a google search. Instead, I look for books by authors that are cross-referenced by multiple sources, I look at forums to see what different people agree/disagree on. In other words, I like to look at people from different backgrounds and places agreeing on similar issues or facts to confirm that the possibility of information being true is larger than otherwise.
I find myself having to add `site:reddit.com` to an increasingly large of queries to have any useful result. I wonder if I should make a little userscript that can add it for me with a hotkey/text combination..
Try adding site:uptodate.com for medical information. A large percentage of US hospitals pay for access to the full app for all their docotrs. The idea is that UpToDate pays people to constantly review the literature on topics and update the summary in their article for a fast reference on the job. (Not sure what the downside to this free web version is but you can find the whole catalogue on your typical pirate sites)
I recently wanted to learn more about the python match operator and was hoping to find some good blog posts explaining them and I only found low effort, practically useless SEO sites that are probably all hyperoptimised for any searches containing python... At some point I just gave up.
In contrast, I also do SwiftUI development, and here you often find tons of useful, beautiful blogs from people where you can see that they really care about this and dont just do it for SEO.
SwiftUI example:
- Google search "SwiftUI in app purchases" -> https://blckbirds.com/post/how-to-use-in-app-purchases-in-sw... (extremely helpful article, and they are only at the very bottom briefly advertising their book)
So in conclusion, I do agree, Google search is becoming useless as for popular searches, i just brings up trash.
DDG is my default but I regularly switch back to Google if the result I want doesn't appear in the first or second search.
Oh well. I stopped using Google entirely around 2006-2008-ish and I never looked back. I do not know the exact time I stopped, but it was way before the company was called "Alphabet" and before smartphones really took off. Back then Google was a Search Engine with an advertising company, but I was getting annoyed by what I thought was mixed interest (ads/information) as reflected by the increase in their analytics tag being put on lots of web sites and I thought I'd do the experiment of blocking them out and see how that panned out (some thoughts about privacy mattered as well). So, I stopped using Google, and not only that: I blocked Google.
Now I use all kinds of other Search Engines and I always find an answer to whatever problem I'm searching a solution for.
(edit: elaborated slightly)
In South Korea, the domestic search engine giant Naver also operates a blog platform and the search engine is partially optimized to surface blog content, partially because this simplifies the indexing problem to the few sources that are dominant in Korean-language content.
That has an interesting effect on how Koreans access information. Sometimes it works out badly, because top search result is not subject to any wisdom of crowds but often just one person's anecdotal view. On the other hand, you often find high-effort content by informed individuals or direct experience reports instead of SEO spam much easier than on Google.
My wife is Korean and much more fluent in the lang than I am. Her Naver search often outperforms my Google search lately in speed and quality.
I have no idea what you mean! Receiving 15 images and then the message: "The rest of the results might not be what you're looking for" is totally useful! Well, much more than when it decides to fill half the image search results with ads to products...
I agree! The top 7 links are usually all ads anyway, or low quality content like you mentioned. I tend to use Bing (not much better) but only switch to Google for getting scores, e.g. 'world cup' to see the current games.
Seems like search could go in two directions (away from Google): Personally curated search results, not sure of a good example on this but thinking of something that takes the best reddit comments on a query, something like that. Or search with the GPT-3 models, a recent demo that's cool is: https://metaphor.systems/
It's not just you. Feels like unless I'm searching a specific quoted error message all I get are what read like vague non-insightful AI-generated articles that were fed whatever keywords I searched on. Usually from a very generic almost humorously content-farm-sounding domain.
I've recently spun up a self-hosted SearXNG instance which, while it doesn't really solve that problem, pulls and collates top results from a bunch of different search engines on the back-end, so the page 1 ratio of actually useful results to SEO garbage feels a little better to me in most cases.
Why are you surprised. Querying others for useful or authoritative answers, whether it is something as inconsequential as tips for an upcoming trip or matters of life and death has always being a complex task fraught with risks. Our response has been relying on networks of trust, building up indicators of authority through scholarship (proof of work :-), vetting for potential conflicts of interest, sniffing out malevolent objectives and blacklisting bad actors etc. etc.
We have somehow assumed that all this can automated away. We've got what we deserve.
Google started with nerds; nerd learned to write good queries. Then normies appropriated Google and wrote dumb queries in massive volume; Google optimized for handling dumb queries. To get good results today, you have to write dumb queries. For example, a nerd would never write a question as a search input – nerds would write a series of hyperrelevant keywords. Normies don’t understand keywords – they ask questions of Google, like it’s a person. So, only way to get good results for most queries is to reform them as questions.
Judging by the "related searches" and supposed questions that people apparently ask, Google assumes the average user to be an imbecile and generates search results that cater to them most accurately. Unfortunately on the other hand it also seems that individually catering search results poses its own issues. Some folks are concerned that this could be used by bad actors to influence certain people (like targeting specific ads to specific groups of people) which is already commonplace.
Google results are way too political and censored nowadays, if I wanted to get some uncensored results I have to go to Yandex, Brave, maybe Kagi, but I agree Reddit is good option as well.
Yeah the worst are the long wordy articles that I could have written myself with the knowledge I’m bringing to the search (which is usually limited).
Yesterday I was trying to figure out the World Cup sub rules and I knew they had gone up to 5 but my friend was saying “are they limited to three sub occasions to make the five subs?” and the top ten results were complete garbage with any actual info in the 5th paragraph and none were aware of the limits except that the rules had recently moved up to 5 from 3…
Its not just you. I noticed this since around 2017. They changed the algorithm to control information. Its eternal September, the powers that be don't want the broader public knowing too much stuff.
Before the internet was only accessible to a small percentage of the world population so they would let them have any information they would want but as more and more people enter the internet they need to control the information to control the population.
The Youtube video tutorials popping up when searching for specific documentation or programming language features is especially disheartening.
I've also noted that COVID, vaccine related or climate fact checks are pushed to the top when I search for specific topics which are only tangentially related at best.
The outcome is similar for me. I find myself using domain specific searches more and more. This is unfortunate, because it creates a monoculture of information.
I personally do something similar, pretty much all my searches have 'reddit' as an extra keyword.
Last night tried to research some lodging for a vacation. Very poor google experience. Just ads and the current SEO contest winners.
Google's problem is akin to Windows virus problem. All the hackers wrote viruses for Windows, because that's what everyone used. Now the hackers retrained as SEOs and they attack the search engine that everyone uses.
Switched to Bing generally (why use extra redirection in the form of DDG?). Image searches are better done by Yandex.
Pretty much all useful areas are being spammed ad nauseam. Humans are being overwhelmed with information overload and increasingly that information is AI generated or in some way misleading. If someone can implement the online version of Heinlein’s honest witness idea that would make the world a much better place.
Interesting. I use brave search on a daily basis and when I can't find what I'm looking for, I use !g as q last resort. For dev inquiries google is still king (Brave search is getting better and they're focusing on crawling SO posts).
Google is focusing on ads and it's really hurting them.
I keep finding top 5 results that are literal reproductions of SO questions and answers. It's genuinely useless to find rundowns of products--I either go to a few trusted sites or search with "site:www.reddit.com". God help you if you're doing any Windows troubleshooting.
There is a growing possibility that any search engine using advertising-based business model will either not exist or will have to carry 'for entertainment' label in cca 10 years (as in 'do not take these results seriously, they are here for your entertainment only', similar to the disclaimer some ad-based media like Fox news already has in their terms to avoid liability [1]).
The conflict of interest produced by ad-based business model is so strong and will continue to grow like a malignant body. Public's erosion of trust in information served by an advertising company and at the same time realization by the users that what information we put in our heads is as important as what food we put in our bodies will inevitably lead to a major shift in the way search works.
We will see the rise of search engines with paid subsription business models that will align the interests between the information provider and customers (I am the founder of one, not trying to promote it but participate in the discussion close to my heart) and increasingly better AI that will be able to condendse multiple pages of information to produce contextual answer with references (an example here in fighting misinformation [2]).
Once we have this, there will be only one way for search to go and that is becoming better and better for the users, as the positive feedback loop between the search engine and its customers will drive such behavior.
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/terms-of-use (beginning of the third paragraph)
[2] https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1597423319598305280
I agree and IMO Google is the new Yahoo, just a lot bigger. So we all need new search engine, again?
Google used to have an option to exclude sites from search - but then advertising... bit painful especially with all the scraping and frequent domain changes now, but better than nothing. IIRC there's some browser extensions which can do this for you.
"Almost all the top pages are the same article written in five different ways, and each only has the most basic, broad information. You can tell from a glance that the article wasn't written by a subject matter expert." Thank you! I agree 100%.
Unless I add in quoted search terms with "site:" filter i feel like it has become harder and harder to find "Quality" results. I am almost on the verge of creating personalised crawlers with custom search capability for personal usage.
Almost all of my searches start with site:reddit.com, possibly even a specific subreddit.
Google+iCloud Relay is an even bigger mess.
I get a captcha ("our systems have detected automated queries") and the wrong language. I suspect this might be deliberate to get users to turn off iCloud Relay as YouTube doesn't do this.
It's not just you. The quality of Google search results has been declining for a long time. It reached the point of being no better than alternatives a while back for me. These days, it's worse than several of them.
I sometimes see surprisingly good results from this gpt3 based search engine, if I take a bit of time to write out a sentence or two:
https://metaphor.systems/
Google is an advertising engine, not a search engine. Someone has to pay for Google search and users don't. Advertisers pay. And what is advertising? It is a way to convince you to spend your money unnecessarily.
Hey you can search for ads with it. I find their ads relevant - sometimes.
It's just you. Google is an extremely useful search engine. As a demonstration of its abilities, note that searching for "Is Google becoming useless as a search engine" with our without the quote marks turns up this obscure article that's only 1 hour old.
I use Google hundreds of times every day. I use it to search C++ STL documentation, where I generally get an exact hit in the first slot. I use it to find out whether some cafe is open or closed right now. I use it to find city records.
Your actually complaint appears to be about the web itself. Yes, the web contains a lot of junk and often does not contain the article you believe should exist, which is annoying. But no search engine can make good articles spring into existence.
I only use google with the site keyword helper now. For searching the net in general it's not entirely useless, but I haven't felt lucky enough to smash that lucky button in ages.
Not only you. I remember when Google was new.
Amazing. You typed in your query and pretty much always found something relevant.
Now the standard procedure is to open the first 10 results in a new tab and weed through them.
I no longer use Google because it was serving up incorrect, corporate sponsored answers to my technical questions. I pay for kagi.com, I highly recommend it.
It's bad. I used to be the guy who could find anything. Now it's a "2022 here's what you need to know from my sponsored links!"
It's surprising how often I'm just adding "site:reddit.com" to get some semblance of a human answer to questions.
Yeah, it's getting increasingly riddled with spam. I use kagi.com and DuckDuckGo and pay for the former.
For medical isssues one thing you can try is searching for .edu or .gov web sites. site:*.edu should work.
Since last 6+ years, my default search engine is either Ecosia or DuckDuckGo. F*ck Google.
Not just you. There's a thread about this topic on here almost monthly
I use a technique of going to the search items beyond the first ten pages.
Not only that, but Bing search results look highly competitive now, if not better in various comparisons.
I do not disagree with anything you're asserting here. Google is a mess of gamed results most of the time. The internet in many places has become a series of sites searching for eyes to get ad dollars. The only thing I think I'd question is your claim of being a "power user." A power user would be able to construct queries that removed (or at least lessened) the gamed results.