INFOSEEK was the best search engine ever. I used to do comparisons between it and whatever else was around back then.
That’s the problem I run into. When I’ve tried Bing (I ran Edge on Linux for a few weeks, partly for the irony, but mostly to try a chromium based browser again), it was just as bad with the junk sites as Google, but not nearly as good at actually finding the useful stuff. Sure, any simple search worked fine, but the complicated ones ended up having to be redone at Google. This was even for stuff where the actual answer was on a Microsoft Tech site.
Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo is just Bing with a builtin cookie blocker.
It was fun back in the early days, when Google was a revelation over Alta Vista, and each new person you showed it to was amazed, and they went off and showed it to 5 other people who were also amazed.
For a brief time, Google had an option to “not show results from this site again,” but that went away. Would be nice to have that option back.
I get slightly more hits than you did. I initially put in “alabaster cookie” by mistake, and that got 21,000,000 hits! “Green cat” yields an astounding 4.18 billion results. Down to a mere 16,000,000 results for “blockchain unicorn”, and only 1,320,000 results for “blockchain antelope”.
I also enjoy results from clickbait sites that have gamed their way to high Google rankings and that just blindly insert your search term into their results. Like, just for a made-up example, I might Google something like “constitutional amendment” and one of the results might be “Get the best deals on constitutional amendments here”. 
It doesn’t happen very often, TBH, but it’s one of the depressing signs of the commercialization of the internet in general and Google in particular.
So as an example of what we’ve been talking about with Google changing your search
quotidian effervescence = 4.4M hits
“quotidian” “effervescence” = 77.3K hits
I still miss Alta Vista’s Advanced Search. If they’d only had the huge index that Google did, and hadn’t thrown in their own paid placement results… but I loved the way you could enter
(hitchhiking or hitchhiker) and last and mystery and not guide and not galaxy and (shane or shayne)And it would come back with maybe four hits and one of them would be Brett Halliday’s Last Seen Hitchhiking in paperback.
Brought you exactly what you asked for and would let you ask for anything in very precise terms.
Hmmm.
I seem to have quite a different Google experience.
I googled “challah bread recipe” and got no ads, just a link to a number of challah bread recipes on a bunch of sites that do recipes.
I googled “changing outdoor light fixture” and got a link to a bunch of articles with instructions to change an outdoor light fixture, with one ad at the top for a handyman service.
I did Google “dog friendly hotels [city, state]” and got a bunch of ads and results that weren’t particularly helpful.
I agree with most of the complaints in this thread so far, but the biggest drawback in the past few years has not been of Google’s making: it’s paywalls. Googling anything that is likely to have an article behind a paywall somewhere is very likely to have such a link in its top 5, sometimes the majority of the first page.
Even if I wanted to and did subscribe to a fair number of news sites, including paywalled links at the top of search results is still a step backwards informationally. Unless I were rich enough to have someone subscribe to all the paywall sites for me, managing these subscriptions so that I almost never run into an unsubscribed paywall would take a serious chunk of my time, and that’s not getting into the high three figures, if not four figures, a year it would cost to have such a thorough subscription coverage.
I guess my ideal solution would be for Google to allow users to turn on and off individual sites. That is probably too high of an ask, so I think an easier solution would be for Google to have a checkbox where you can filter the results to exclude paywalled articles.
My experience has not been as bad as some of the above. I did have one bad experience yesterday. I was trying to find out something about a doctor and typed in “Dr. xxxx” and got a zillion sites medical related but none with xxxx. When I insisted it included that, it found nothing. 0 hits. I may have gotten the name slightly wrong, but google used to be good at that.
On the other hand, when I google some mathematical term (try Pythagorean quadruple) it almost always takes me to either a Wiki page or a Wolfram site, but no ads. When I try cheating on a crossword clue, I usually get taken to a crossword solver, almost surely because many thousands of others have searched for the same clue that day.
That said, it certainly does happen that I search for some organization and it does not put their web site first. But I just tried Montreal Symphony Orchestra and the very first entry was their official site. So it is something of a mixed bag.
Originally as I understand it, Google’s big advantage was that they ranked their search results by the number of other links TO those results. Sort of a relative popularity ranking kind of thing. Of course, they’ve made numerous tweaks to their algorithms in the past 20 some-odd years, so there’s no real way of knowing how it’s done anymore, if we ever really did.
The real problem like others have said, is that there are a lot of bullshit sites out there with the explicit goal of affecting the search results. It’s the same basic problem that Amazon faces with their reviews; the signal to noise (signal to BS?) ratio is extremely low, and the search result accuracy is correspondingly low.
I also think that their application of natural language processing confounds a lot of people’s best attempts at fine-tuning search queries, because it tries to make assumptions about what it thinks you’re trying to ask, instead of just taking it at face value.
On the whole, it’s still pretty damned amazing. It’s way better than other search-centric websites, like say Amazon, where the searching is so primitive and beset by ads and garbage products that finding what you’re looking for is often very annoying, time consuming, and troublesome. (why, if I search for “3 foot USB-C to USB-C cable” and sort by low cost to highest cost, should a 3 foot USB-A Male to Micro B cable be the first result? I literally have to scroll through a page and a half of non USB-C cables before I find the first USB-C to USB-C cable!)
Does anyone remember when Yahoo Directory was a curated taxonomy rather than a crawled ranking? Did you ever use DMOZ? I didn’t think so…
… but, if you do (ever did), you may be up for a search engine that returns curated results first. You might try http://search.brave.com , which is the host side of a hardened browser for Windows, IOS, and Android. Tip: You don’t need their browser.
If you use Firefox (or a derivative like the TOR Browser), you can make Brave a selectable search-engine option by adding the “Brave Search” browser extension. You can take the extra step to make Brave your default search engine. Then whatever you type in the address bar that doesn’t look like a URL is handled by Brave.
Yeah…they went from
X Y yielding X Y
to
X Y including X’ Y’ ("did you mean X’ Y’?)
to
X Y yielding mostly X’ Y’ (We are sure you meant X’ Y’ because we think you are probably stupid)
A hundred times this.
Yup. It will just ignore the parts of your search query that are harder to match, and throw you all the results for the parts that were easy to match. Which are useless because they’re not relevant to the crucial parts that were ignored.
Does any expert Googler have techniques for improving matches, excluding drivel, etc. that they wish to share?
Ads and manipulation have been part of search for over a decade. Generally I can find what I want pretty easily, especially with regard to a purchase. I find it easy to find, say, videos about repairing old items but sometimes much harder to find parts or old instruction booklets. This would not seem to be Google’s fault though.
I find the gibberish masquerading as something useful is not that big a problem. This has also existed for years and seems worse with regard to used book reprints and some quasi-academic writing. I was recently annoyed to buy a used book which turned out to be a “change a few words” manuscript marketed to many different areas but mostly irrelevant to all of them.
I wish Google let you down-vote irrelevant search results, especially the top 10 or top 20. I just skip the ads. I use Google a lot for technical acronyms like CIDR when I just need to know what Thing stands for. More serious research… have to dig deeper, and be a little skeptical, before accepting the information as “likely” vs “compost”
This is the worst thing about Google now. Ask something about Windows 11 and you are sure to get a couple of replies from message boards that stopped working decades ago and are still talking about Windows ME.
I agree. It’s become really frustrating for me for the last few years. I find Bing better for Image searches these days, and many text searches. Google Lens is just useless to me. Lots of text searches end up with a full page of irrelevant videos and shopping shit that I’m not looking for. It’s irritating. And, yes, it looks for synonyms – and I get why it would do that – but it’s been many many years, if ever, that actual literal searches worked on Google. That seemed to be more the realm of altavista.
I wish I could specify my grievances more finely, but I just know that in the past few years I’ve become more and more disgruntled at the results Google gives me for subjects I’m trying to research. I don’t feel like it’s confirmation bias – the experience feels much worse for me now than it was ten years ago.
I agree with all the complaints posted above.
I am a DuckDuckGo user. I find LSLGuy’s comment spot on for DuckDuckgGo. DDG never seems to zero in on the obvious search target site.
I’ve found that I have to set the search tools to ‘Past Year’ (or more recent) for pretty much any search I do or else what you describe above happens.
Is there a way to set the default search to ‘Past Year’ so I don’t have to set it manually every time?
I also wish any search I make that begins with “How do you…” could automatically eliminate the scores of videos that always come up. It’s always a losing proposition to count on video “how-to’s” unless you know in advance of a source you can trust (in which case you don’t really need to do a search). Because most video tutorials on the net are crap.