I live in central Canada.
I am reading the comments, and I am noticing that other people's experiences are very different than mine.
For me, Google Search has reached the point where it will not even give me results for my search terms. I say this without an iota of hyperbole.
It's so coincidental that this conversation comes up, but I actually sat there yesterday agog, looking at my desktop Firefox browser window... Scrolling through the entire search results page and realizing that not a single thing was even close to what I searched
It is noteworthy because I have been observing a steady decline, but it was the very first time I could make use of literally nothing that they gave back. In an unsettling way, the gravity of it hit me emotionally right there.
Google search was so legendary when it came out, it was able to find me perfect results when I would even type in almost gibberish, it somehow predicted what I actually meant. Over time the results were worse and worse, then nothing but products would show in the results a few years ago. Buy this, buy what,etc. no more research, just trash products in the search results. Google greed killed itself.
Ars had an article about it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/
It's not just you—Google Search is getting worse. A new study from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence looked at Google search quality for a year and found the company is losing the war against SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam.
They're also not particularly motivated to try harder. They don't have a lot of competition, and they make a lot of money this way. And their leadership are idiots.
Yeah, the first measurements are rolling in and not looking great: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/
Basically, imagine someone built a machine that made it trivial to generate an infinite number of realistic-looking articles (=LLMs). And there's a monetary incentive to do so (=ad money).
So, I have to imagine, all search engines are absolutely being blasted with spam content, and they have to filter out realistic-looking articles to make their search results worthwhile at all, but as a result, some real search results will also get filtered out or ranked badly.I don't say this to be dismissive, but Google's search results have been getting worse for the better part of a decade now, and they're still far above anyone else. While I do think that engines like Bing are closer to Google's quality than most give them credit for, Google is still the only game in town. There are other search engines that people use, but they are niches in niches, and are probably used for belief reasons over an improvement in quality.
Frankly, I think that for the first time in history, the search market is open for competition. There is an argument to be made whether Google either doesn't care about their search quality, or that it's simply a hard problem to solve for anyone. If the former is true, then a competitor could make a very real case for overthrowing Google, given the right backing and hype behind them.
The entire internet has drastically declined for me.
In general yes. I'm not going to pull exact numbers up but I think it started declining around 2018.
I've heard it said they switched to whatever was most profitable rather than what was actually useful or relevant. I still find good results when looking up niche tech issues, but if it's more mainstream I get really weird results, so that might indeed be what's happening.
Yes. I'm using the same search methods I've always used that used to get me relevant results, and I get a bunch of fucking sponsored links instead. I've noticed lately that if the result of a search is a YouTube video and I click on it, it doesn't go to YouTube but opens up as a search result and plays me ads somehow bypassing my adblocker that works just fine in actual YouTube. More than once after the ad was done, the video refused to load, which was utterly infuriating.
Google assistant on my phone has also become garbage. They changed the functionality of the few key things I liked to use, and now it's totally useless to me. Google is swirling down the shitter faster than yesterdays tacos. Honestly, if it wasn't for email, photos, and using an Android phone, I'd probably be done with them entirely.
Don’t miss this article (Lemmy discussion) from an air purifier review site for an in-depth look at how trusted publishers have been downsizing, then outsourcing generation of affiliate listicles. Drowns out sites who actually buy & test products.
alt-text: Google results for “best air purifiers "dotdash meredith"” showing People, Better Homes & Gardens, and a dozen other brands showing up, all reusing the same low-quality content
Yea, turns out that without competition companies are lazy as fuck.
YES
On the flipside for advertisers, prices for ad clicks have never been higher. Its so outrageously high now, making Google such an obscene amount of money, that its unlikely to get better, I'd expect it to get much worse.
Yeah, they've been getting progressively less useful. UBlock Origin helps but I feel like Google Search was much better in the past.
I saw an article on a technology Lemmy the other day that showed how Google was pretty much helping to make sure you get shitty results. I'll have to see if I can find it and link it.
I don't mean this mean I'm genuinely curious. Do you not use the front page or only really occasionally use lemmy world?
I'm just so curious how you don't see this every day on the feeds. Again I'm not meaning this like, GO USE A SEARCH ENGINE! it's just that this is such a prevalent topic here, and lemmy is so niche, how you've avoided an answer up until this post?!
I stopped using Google as my primary search engine all together. I now just use bing or duck duck go. Google is the last place I try searching.
I use perplexity.ai
Hoping that one day it takes my job and I am okay with it. I already hate my job
It's garbage full of seo spam and malicious links
When I'm on a VPN connected through the US, absolutely. When I'm not on a VPN, also yes, but not nearly as bad.
I recently tried switching to DDG for my browsers default searches... Instead of Google. It's wasted so much time.
The others are significantly worse. Even using very specific search terms for threads and content I've already gone to.
Bing was nice for porn for a while... Not so much anymore.
Yes.
Yes, I unironically use bing now because it yields better results
Big time.
Yeah, here's a fantastic recent article about it:
The Discussion Forums Dominating 10,000 Product Review Search Results - Reddit's dominance and the downsides of that https://detailed.com/forum-serps/
Yes. It varies by topic, but on many topics now it's 100% useless.
What I will find interesting since it seems I find better content on stuff like lemmy. I wonder if we will go back to the model of webrings and human aggregated with a mix of user generated links search like yahoo used to be to combat the AI wasteland that is current search. With a web of trust model.
I haven't used Google in years in favor of DDG, which had a degraded search already, but I have noticed the YouTube search is super unreliable now as well, but it seems to be getting better the last few months
If you want to pay for search (and some other stuff) you might consider Kagi. Check out discussions on Hackernews, the consensus is quite good for Hackernews Standards. I personally use it since it matches my view about privacy and I like to pay for that since that's seem a logical way to enable me not to be the product. The results are good and you can prioritize sites easily.
It is rather terrible.
Yep, and now you have to scroll through ads and the AI bs. I switched to DDG a few weeks ago. It's mostly good, my biggest issue is that Firefox on Android always takes several seconds before loading the page. Gotta do what ya gotta do for uBlock Origin though.
Yes, google has been badly managed for years and the business model doesn’t make sense for users. I’ve moved to Kagi and am paying for my search (yes, I’ve tried searx and others).
YouTube as well https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3dSkkEr-wk
Now that every website has a search function, Google has slowly turned into "I'll show you to the website and let them take it from there". It's absolute dog shit. I think the AI has already taken over, and it's progressing really slowly so we aren't aware of the change. It's already too late to pull the plug, the AI knows we're all driven by greed for attention and occasionally money, and it turns out those are both easily created and distributed in the modern age of the Internet, and very very unregulated.
EVERYONE else.
Not significantly because I'm always stupid specific with my searches, but I do notice that roughly every 5 results they put something in that has nothing to do with what I searched.
Yes. Bring back blogrolls!
In this article, we will certainly discuss why the results from Google search engine are declining. But before continuing, it is important to first outline what search engines are and how they present results….
Yes, search results are terrible these days. I switched to DDG and Bing
It's been getting worse for a while, just like anything sold by a large corporation, but I have noticed it getting especially bad in the last year or so. Even Google Maps is getting less accurate. I never used to have a problem with it, but now it can't figure out what road I'm on usually a couple times per trip
Yes.
Big time decline in the last few months.
Very yes
the only cenario i actually use google search for but only in very rare occasions is when i am curious why i don't find more results in another search engine, i then sometimes want to validate "missing" results are also missing in other/minor search engines that could theoretically have hits instead of misses, but usually i don't find in google what i was already missing elsewhere, so mostly no gain, only sort of validation.
It's worse: google.com has started to remove the "also available in English" button and defaults to the localized version based on IP geolocation on every call to the home page. Seriously, I wish that company every bad and rotten thing in the world.
Edit: For now, the only workaround I know is to append /en to the URL
I went digging and found one called Qwant which seems pretty good too.
In contrast to all the other comments here, Google has worked perfectly fine for me in the past, and still continues to give me the results I want. I have uBlock Origin to avoid sponsored results and live in the EU, so maybe that helps. So far I haven't felt the need to switch search engines because Google works perfectly fine.
It seems gradual to me. It's a combination of Google's actions (They make money from ads and storefronts so they promote sites with ads and storefronts) and adversarial attacks on PageRank by spammers. PageRank used to work well until people started designing sites to game the system.
Yes
No but only because I stopped using google search years ago.
It has been getting worse for the last decade.
i don't know, i'm using qwant.com
Not that I could tell.
