Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

Google now also has an extreme recency bias. Most things I search for will give top results for recent SEO optimized blog posts/Youtube videos instead of established authoritative resources. If you search for something that happens to overlap with a recent movie name, good luck, it'll drown. And I constantly "have" "to" "search" "like" "this" because Google thinks it knows better than me.

It is incredibly worse than it used to be. They hate organic content that is not under their control. Think forums, blogs, etc. you have to add stuff to your query to get it to bubble the organic content to the top. The worst is when you are searching for enthusiast information that is typically found on forums, newsgroups, etc. I will often include the word “forum” or “blog” on my queries to find what I am looking for.

Amazon's search engine was systematically destroyed from within starting 5 years ago. It's entirely driven by revenue now and not at all by their faux customer obsession tenet.

Just try searching for a high-end appliance and watch all the Chinese knockoffs that will get ranked higher than the actual thing you're looking to buy. Sure, they cost less, therefore you're more likely to buy something therefore such changes tend to win web labs and go into production. But they've completely destroyed the intent of the search doing so.

The results here are interesting.

`shirt without stripes` definitely fails (and I see it is a natural-language meme because that's what is returned most prominently against that phrase. Hilarious.)

`shirt -stripes` as an image search is also not foolproof. It does a better job, but some leak through (I would assume for two reasons: if the text just doesn't mention it, the negative key filter has nothing to key on, and we have different words for "stripes" that Google doesn't consider synonyms. Is a plaid shirt striped? What about a checked shirt?).

But hilariously, all of the ad results are stripe-heavy. Looks like there's a bug: negative keywords in image search aren't passed as negative keywords to the ad engine, but instead as positive keywords. Wasted money for those advertisers; that's definitely not what the user wants.

For this sort of search, I'd actually use Shopping... Except that while there is a "Striped" category, I know of no way to do a negative category search on the Shopping UI, so I get the opposite of what I want. I can get all the striped shirts ever, but non-striped would be harder.

I suppose I should amend my previous comment to say "If you don't try natural language queries on the fringe of known unsolved problems, it works better than keywords." ;) And since Google is forever targeting the common use-case, perfect may be the enemy of good here for getting most people what they're looking for most of the time.

There are a few factors at work.

Primarily, quality content and discussions are now all paywalled (e.g. journals, magazines, newspapers, comment threads, and original content).

Secondarily, remnant content is trivial search engine marketing content. This content is low quality, low information, often false, with a low-grade reading level.

Third, google is actively down-ranking & removing “controversial” content in the name of ML fairness & integrity. In many cases this may be just, but it’s also going to lower the overall content quality because almost everything innovative is going to be controversial .

So you have at least three massive forces preventing quality content & discussions from being found on web search.