Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022

“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”

My personal philosophy is: if Google wants my money they should ask for it. Put their search engine behind a paywall. If they try to coerce me to give them money by selling my personality, needs and wants to advertisers I’ll try to prevent them any way I can.

If SEO works and a result appears closer to result #1 in the SERPs, then the "true", non SEO-assisted result it is displacing would appear further from result #1. Apply this across the board and what we have are many, many non-SEO results that are pushed down in Google's ranking. No one is "penalising" these pages, however they suffer visibility problems because they have not engaegd in SEO. The incentives created by Google's secretive ranking system and online advertising commercial focus are perverse or at least in conflict with the user's goals. Google discourages and even prevents any user from looking at results that were hits but were not ranked high. Pages that may not succombed to the the influence of such incentives may "disappear".

What if a user understands this and wants ignore the Google ranking system. What if the user wants to see the true, non-SEO results. Google actively limits the user's ability to see those displaced results. For example if a user searches for a common term, such as "example", she will not be able to view more than 200-300 results. Elsewhere in this thread someone also noted even with a paid API, Google limits users to 1000 results. If the user wants to the see the full range of pages that have hits for the word "example", she cannot do so. If the user would like to perform a single search for all pages containing the term "example" and then sort by some other objective criteria such as alphabetical by domainname, date, page size, etc., she cannot do so.

Under Google's model of the web, pages that do not acquiesce to an online advertising company's secretive ranking system may become nondiscoverable, despite the fact that they may indeed match the user's query. Computers assist us in searching through data but "relevance" is ultimately decided by the user. That is why we can have HN threads that claim search result quality is declining. Though they may be slower, humans can determine relevance better than any computer. From the disclosures of Matt Cutts and others we know that humans are involved in Google's ranking implementation. Penalties are used. The search process is not 100% math/computer-based. However, in Google's model of the web, filtering results is the exclusive domain of the online advertising company and only the humans on its payroll, not the user performing the search. There is no option to disable the online advertising company's "assistance" in filtering.