Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

This has been a thing since Google did their RankBrain update 5 years ago. They essentially released a system that used ML to negotiate unknown "long-tail" queries into more common queries and then returned the common queries results.

One of the immediate effects was quoted strings became less relevant, sometimes completely ignored, and a lot of the other tools for negotiating with system were lost. It's only continued to progressively get worse since then.

Trying to not be a pure Google hater here but I can expect a lot of their products will become shittier (in terms of U X) in the next few years. It’s what happens to every web property after they have their insane period of growth. Now in order to continue growing without naturally adding users, they will have to get more $$$ per user. In order to do that, they will need better/more ads. In order to do that the UI/search experience will need to prioritize ads rather than an end user experience. It is not even limited to web properties. Every company lures users in with something really great at the beginning in order to capture the market, and then once the market is captured gradually raise prices to monetize users. Think uber with ridiculously cheap prices at the beginning to get users onto their platforms. In Google’s case ad-free great UIs are the “currency”. Now we’re going to have to sift through more and more garbage to get what we need, and it’s probably going to get worse.

You mean you can't just fix the problem by writing better product requirements - "Google search results shall give me more relevant results."

Definitely. Possible reasons include: * A lot more information, including low quality sources, making it harder to prioritize * The SEO cat and mouse game * Google's commercial interests