There’s an Atlantic article basically saying Google Search has been getting worse over the years. I do not really agree. Going back to the days of Netscape, Google simply offered more relevant results. While it is true that advertisers and optimizers likely still game the service, on the whole it usually seems to pick quality sites of adequate relevance. Maybe other browsers have reduced the distance?
Do you agree with the article, that Google Search has become dramatically less precise with time? I don’t. Why do you think what you think?
I don’t particularly think it has gotten worse. I have the vague sense that it used to favour giving you more verbatim results (e.g. a search for ‘safe cars’ wouldn’t necessarily give you the same results as a search for ‘safe vehicles’), but I could be wrong, and at any rate I don’t think that’s necessarily worse.
The change is not a reduction in found results. It’s a massive increase in the number of false positives.
Advanced Search used to nail results to exactly what you put in. Then they loosened it, on the apparent theory that people don’t know WTF they’re looking for so give them any approximation.
You can retro-coerce it to give you verbatim results… but not in conjunction with restrictions on timeframe.
When it changed from “finding what you asked for” to “finding something that you can buy that’s somehow related to what you asked for”, the wheels really came off.
If you’re trying to search for something to buy, it’s far better than it was e.g. 10 years ago. If you’re searching for information unrelated to a purchase, it’s far worse. Which makes sense since fundamentally they’re an advertising company now, not a search company.
The fact that the ratio of sales-oriented web content to factual / informational /opinion-oriented web content has also radically changed doesn’t help.
I concur that it’s significantly less useful than it used to be. I blame the influx of “content farm” websites that post barely intelligible articles that will be served up for search queries. Every time I look up how to do something or try to research a product I have to wade through dross hoping to find a site that will give me actually useful knowledge. There was a point where Google was literally guessing your search query before you asked and giving you exactly what you want. Now I’m lucky if anything on the first page of results is useful.
John Oliver did a piece on tech the week before last. He broke down how Google has changed the way they present search results. Google now pushes their own services as the top results. You’ll also see a list of questions before you get to any websites. Getting an answer from those prevents most searches from ever leaving Google.com. The relevant Google content starts at the 8.50 mark. Tech Monopolies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) - YouTube
I find it less useful because it loves to try and find synonyms and such rather than finding what I ask for. And even when it doesn’t, it seems to not pay attention to how far apart the words are. The result is that, if I ever need to look up something that is similar to something else, I get tons of answers about the something else. And that something else can even be the opposite of what I’m looking for.
I don’t actually find that Google is better about finding things for sale, due to the fact that they favor some places over others. The exception is with Google Lens, which seems to think that the main reason people look up images is to try and find the product in that image in order to buy it. It does a great job with that, but it’s largely useless to me.
And Og forbid you look up anything that might tangentially touch on something that’s been in the news lately. The only way to get good results there is to do a time limited search, deliberately omitting any results before said news event. They won’t just put that in the News tab.
The same is true with mixing results from other tabs in general. These make it less likely I’m going to find what I’m looking for, as I’m smart enough to know to use the correct tab (Images, Video, Shopping, etc) for the results I want. But, if I’m searching for text, my only option is the “All” tab that gets results from everything.
The sad thing, however, is that it’s still miles ahead of the other search engines (except in very specific cases, e.g. risque content). So I still use it. I just more often have to actually go through multiple pages of results or mess with my search query, because Google can’t just surface what I want, nor does it seem to value diversity of responses to make sure it covers everything.
It’s still great, but you have to know more than you used to about strategies for searching and you have to work harder to find what you want.
Two of my pet peeves are that the first 5-10 hits are ALWAYS ads (at least they have the decency to label them as such) and the fact it gives you results without one or more of your search terms. True, it says in smallish print at the end of each entry “missing: candelabra” or whatever, but you have to be looking carefully or you’ll miss that. And most of the time, I don’t want my results to be cluttered up with hits that don’t include “candelabra.” If the word wasn’t important, I wouldn’t have put it into my search.
I haven’t read the Atlantic article, or watched the John Oliver, but this 5 minute video sums it up pretty well
I block the ads, so those usually don’t bother me. These farms of articles copied from other sites and slightly changed are my biggest complaint. It means that first page of results are the exact same article, just slightly different. If it’s a simple question, with a simple answer, usually that’s fine. If it’s a question with a complex answer, then this is terrible.
Me: how to flurble the grimbot on a Mac
Google1: Flip the snoz in the flubber
Google2: Flip the snoz of the flubber
Google3: Change the snoz of the flubber
Google4: On the snoz flubber adjust
Real answer: You can’t do it anymore since MacOS 11
Simple answer, yes I find it much worse than it used to be.
I don’t know if my example is Google’s fault, or shady sellers gaming Google’s algorithm, but… A few months ago a wanted to buy tickets to a production of Rent at a local college’s performing arts center. So I Googled the name of the theater to find their official box office site. It used to be that when you Googled something, the first result was almost always the official website for that thing, so I blindly clicked the first result. It took me to a site with a list of upcoming shows at that theater with links to buy tickets, so I initially thought I was at the right place. Clicking the link for tickets took me to a seating chart of the theater showing me the prices for the different sections. Again, that seemed perfectly normal, except the prices were basically Broadway level prices – not entirely out of the ordinary; this theater has booked touring productions of Broadway shows before. Then I noticed some disclaimer that said something to the effect of “we don’t actually have tickets, but we will work to obtain them for you.” That’s when I realized I wasn’t actually at the venue’s official website, but some shady ticket reseller.
So I hit the back button and returned to the search results and scrutinized them more closely. The first several results were all these shady reseller sites. The actual website for the theater, where you could buy tickets directly from them, was like the fourth or fifth result. So I went there and bought my ticket for like $20 (because this was a student production, not a professional one). Like I said, I’m not certain it was Google’s fault, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they prioritized sites that paid to advertise with them, something a local community college theater probably didn’t do.
Google for e.g. [Marriot Cleveland {actual address here}] and the first 5 links are to 3rd party reservations “services”. You may have to scroll to page 2 to actually get the link to the actual Marriott.com site.
Sorry his enter and missed the edit window.
When I complained, it was about Google deciding it knows what you want more then what you do. You don’t want to look up Appel, you want apple. You don’t really want us to do searches with the word “vagrant” in it. Etc.
And LSLguy nailed the latest incarnation. Booking.com has scammed us twice and we refuse to use it and we have to be extremely careful that when we look up “Kumquat City Hotels” they don’t put us through Booking.com no matter how careful we are in our clicking.
A few months ago a wanted to buy tickets to a production of Rent at a local college’s performing arts center. So I Googled the name of the theater to find their official box office site. It used to be that when you Googled something, the first result was almost always the official website for that thing, so I blindly clicked the first result. It took me to a site with a list of upcoming shows at that theater with links to buy tickets, so I initially thought I was at the right place.
When we were in Vegas, we wanted to see a show at the Flamingo. I went to “show name” tickets and it took us to Ticketmaster. I so distrusted the results that I went through the Flamingo site and yes, Ticketmaster was the correct site, but the point is I had to trust Flamingo instead of Google.
Yes, exactly. Heaven help you if you need instructions for something that’s changed at all in the last 5-10 years. You’re probably going to come up with a message board thread that was super helpful in 2014 but is now completely worthless. It’s almost bad enough to make me actually want to watch a youtube tutorial video.
Another thing came to me too, I feel like 5-10 years ago if I needed a specific image I could search with descriptive terms and find it. Now, like other people have pointed out, Google is really keen on throwing similar words into the mix, but words that don’t describe what I’m looking for. It’s a search that advertisers aren’t interested in and isn’t going to sell anything, so what’s the point of making it better? I’m going to have to go back to my 20 year old habits of hoarding pictures in case I can never find them again.
Do you remember the google search game where you put in two words and tried to get the lowest number of matches? I just did that with ‘alabaster biscuit’ (no quotes of course in the search)
I did that on my iPad, and switched to Bing on my phone. They both suck. I’d described google as becoming increasingly useless by the day, until I switched. Now if I have a serious or complex search, I go back to google. Sure, it’s ad driven but you generally eventually get to good results. With the others, you sometimes never do.
