Has anyone else been struggling with search lately?

Question

Doing research is extremely frustrating these days. I feel like either I'm going nuts or search has been nerfed.My search queries are frequently misinterpreted. Google, bing, duckduckgo have a strong recency bias and don't surface older webpages.These problems get worse for niche and technical topics. I can't even find existing webpages that I know I've found / read about in the past.What's going on? Why is the modern search experience so frustrating?

RJ000 · Accepted Answer

Yup. Feels like we're being dissed.> Whats going... That's trivially easy: The big gorilla engine is a monopoly and it "thinks" this is the way to make get more money.What methods, algorythms, rational they're playing with - sorry, I got no chops in that lane.

faidit · Answer

Google search quality was deliberately harmed to boost ad revenue. Forcing you to search multiple times and refine your query means you see more ads and are more likely to click on them. Ads were also obviously prioritized over real search results long ago. The good guys within Google who wanted to preserve search quality lost the internal debate to the ad people. Emails that surfaced in the recent antitrust case strongly indicated this.

Sytten · Answer

I use Kagi and my search experience as never been better.

rurban · Answer

No, because I use seek.ninja. The LLM's are also better.

smt88 · Answer

I gave up entirely and use LLMs unfortunately

timothyduong · Answer

Have you tried Kagi?

entropyie · Answer

Search is great, using Kagi. Just bought the family plan, never going back to google. Also FastMail.

andyjohnson0 · Answer

Kagi is still working pretty well for me. I think its partly that, being a paid-for product, the commercial incentives are different. And party that I can customise search results by promoting/demoting/blocking particular sources.I have to use Google and Bing at work (I'm a developer) and the difference is very noticeable.

nicbou · Answer

I struggle more than ever to get Google to recognise my query and not a watered down interpretation of it. It was bad before and now it&rsquo;s even worse. Yesterday I struggled to find the most popular salary tax calculator in our country.From the other side there is also a massive drop in traffic reported by the entire industry. I am gearing up for a post-Google existence.

n1xis10t · Answer

I don&rsquo;t know exactly what&rsquo;s going on, but what you describe fits with my experience as well. This article describes events since 2015 that also fit with the same thing: https://archive.org/details/search-timelineGoogle is supposed to have decent competition, but for some reason it doesn&rsquo;t.