Haven't you noticed how search results quality has changed let us say from 2007-2013 and comparing recent time period? I used to get the best information, websites, media material that I was looking from the rarest sources on the web, even probably rare to find given my geo location. Today I usually get information not by the quality, but from "the biggest brands" on the web. I was surprised that I didn't find one specific forum in over 20 search pages, but then I had checked my bookmarks and the site was still running and functional and contained what I was exactly looking by the keywords and other possible search factors. These days I just feel I get the information sources that are the most advertised or well branded, but do not reflect the accuracy of what I'm looking for.
it's starting to get really hard to believe that, as people repeat 'wow, search used to be better and now it's trash', remembering only the good parts, rewriting their memories of it, and just having it literally be 'well somebody said it, so it must be true'. 'i remember how it used to be a decade ago', well, sure you do. and yeah, somebody could dig out their search history takeouts and do some kind of opinionated pondering about it, but this ain't it.
and if one wants to experience real search results difference, just switch back to, say, duckduckgo for a bit, and see how many times you just end up giving up and googling stuff instead.
Google results are markedly worse than they used to be. SEO spam routinely pushes the site/content I'm searching for down/off the page. These sites are often just straight up copies of StackOverflow.
My perception is that search queries need to be much more specific in order to avoid SEO trash as well. It used to be fairly common to find special interest forums when looking for product reviews. Now the first page is almost exclusively auto-generated spam sites referral linking to Amazon product pages. Adding "Reddit" sometimes provides helpful advice but there's often a lack of in depth insight that was present before.
I pondered on this for a while, unsure if my memory was false. Then I switched to Kagi and it felt like Google 15 years ago. I was served the content I was looking for, not the content Google wants me to look at. It's not perfect, but 9/10 cases (and I do 50+ searches a day) it's great, and validates my perception of the quality of Google going down (or less cynically, the likelihood that Google is optimising for the general public, and I'm an outlier).
because the rarest sources of the web were relatively speaking much more popular back then when the internet had about 20 pages in total. The entire scale of the web has been growing x-fold every year.
So what was relatively relevant back then is now irrelevant to a general audience and as a result has been pushed back. You could argue Google should bias search much more towards individual history but that has its own pitfalls, both in terms of results and privacy wise.
Basically blame your fellow searchers for clicking and wanting big brand stuff, Google just gives you what the internet considers relevant.
I blame Google and the third party ad model for profiting from and encouraging the creation of the lowest quality cash grabs. Search for any kind of product review and you're faced with a sea of auto-generated shit, the only purpose of which is to serve you an ad and hope you click an amazon affiliate link. It's a prime example that the "value" delivered isn't value to society or the individuals using the service.
I stopped using google a while ago, but try searching for something unusual, add doublequotes around it and notice how your search engine blatantly ignores double quotes (and even your verbatim operator) in order to inflate results.
This cost many minutes most times and is seriously annoying because the search engine ignores me and lies to me.
