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Google Search Keeps Getting Worse
I am hardly the first person to complain about Google search results circa Fall 2022, and I'm not the first person to recall how search used to feel like magic (1). It's become a commonplace (if a bit overstated) that for Google search to have any value at all, you need to point it at reddit.
Here's a case study: I've recently begun performing with a band so I went to look for ideas about how to improve my stage presence. Ten years ago, I would have just typed two or three words, perhaps just "guitarist live" or "watch guitarist live" and as I recall it, Google was reliably excellent at providing results that matched my intention, by either sorcery or science. Nowadays, perhaps superstitiously, I use complete sentences, so I typed "guitarists that are fun to watch live." The results were very bad. In order:
A group of video recommendations, all four suggestions useless:
Rock Guitarist Live Streams For The 97th Time ! - With Guitar Solos, Chat, Games and Fun
Three Chord Dave Live 50 Guitars music and good times
Three Chord Dave Live 52 Guitars music and good times
Three Chord Dave Live 51 Guitars music and good times
Next, a few links to articles:
13 Scorching Guitarists on Tour Today - Ticketmaster Blog
The best live streams and virtual concerts to watch while social distancing (take note of this one, from April 23, 2020: we'll come back to it later)
and 8. The next results were the "People also search for" and "People also ask" suggestions, none of which were helpful.
A link to an Insider article called "Musicians you need to see live in concert". That sounded promising, except none of the musicians were guitarists (none of the headline musicians advertised on the search results - once you drilled in, Lenny Kravitz and the Red Hot Chili Peppers probably qualify).
A youtube video, "Top 10 Guitarists of All Time (REDUX)". Closer, but not really what I'm looking for.
More useless results followed, including three of the next five focused on streaming ("A Guitarists Guide to Live Streaming").
Finally, coming to the culture war angle, I want to ask why this might be. Why are Google search's results so bad, compared to the five or ten years ago, or even farther back, when they had inferior technology? Clearly, some of the problem is spam, as many people argue. But that doesn't really decribe what I saw. Is it because they are prioritizing social justice in results? I know this flatters the Motte, but it also explains a handful of the noise in my search above, on a fairly anodyne topic. I got three results about streaming performances: sure, maybe "live" is often linked for "livestream" (Plato's pharmakon strikes again, three cheers for auto-antonyms!), but what explains the second non-video recommendation, number 6 above, "The best live streams and virtual concerts to watch while social distancing"? In my mind, I'm trying to find tips about how to perform live on stage for people in sweaty clubs, gleefully exchanging airborne microbes, and Google's trying to shove an article from April 2020 down my throat. I couldn't do better if I tried to parody this.
If you think my expectations are crazy, I get it, except until recently (geologically speaking), Google would have delivered EXCELLENT results on this topic.
Some other possible explanations:
SEO has gotten better than search - this could explain some of what I saw.
The internet is crowded now, there's more surface to search! That doesn't seem likely - certainly not substantially more so than five or ten years ago.
Maybe google never was magic! I have a bad memory or it just seemed incredible because it was novel.
Goodheart's law / overfitting, definitely part of the story: optimizing for revenue reduces engagement and relevance. But then again, so does optimizing for justice! It's hard not to suspect how the often comical and heavy handed attempts at "alignment" have marred ChatGPT.
Google engineers are bad. Non-starter, based on the ones I know. Google has lost a lot of excellent people over the years (like Steve Yegge, etc.) but this doesn't add up.
Google hires good people, but they don't funnel their best talent into search, because they continue to have an effective monopoly, even in the age of Bing, Duckduckgo, and Kagi.
???
Which is it?
1 https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/
I swear Google is deliberately hiding a large portion of real results.
Often when I search exact phrases from lyrics or samples, I'll get nothing. Zero results for "I love the island" and "I love the palm trees". Zero! I don't believe it. Google is telling me that no one on its history of the entire indexed internet has included those phrases together. I refuse to believe it. Those aren't Chomsky sentences that have never been spoken before. Where are the travel blogs? Where are the Hawaiian tourism ads? Where are the yelp reviews? Where are the misheard lyrics? (turns out it was "I love the islands" and the sample was from a Janet Jackson interlude)
But Google says no. 0 results. Zilch. It just makes me wonder what else it's not showing.
Yes, they are delisting giant parts of the Internet. I have done searches on old usernames that I used on webforums in the 00's and I only get a few dozen results even though I made thousands of posts with those handles, and some forums I posted on aren't listed at all. I've gone back to some forums to check directly that my posts are still there, and they are.
Ironically, this is good for my own privacy, but it proves that Google search has gone completely to shit and is simply refusing to index much of the web. I've written at length about my problems with Google search elsewhere but I'm too busy to hunt those writings down now.
I also have major problems with how Youtube ruined their search algorithm in order to "promote authoritative sources" about Covid. You can no longer find raw video of anything, such as protests police shootings or other public events. You can only find edited, slanted news reports about them from government and corporate channels. And of course when you search for non-political topics all you get are shitty 11-minute videos by full-time monetized professional Youtubers instead of from regular people. They've defeated the whole purpose of Youtube and largely turned it into another form of TV.
Are you sure the forums aren't excluding Google with robots.txt?
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Google something that does have results (usually they says x million), and go like 20 pages in. There's nothing. Hell, results repeat over and over throughout those pages.
And another experience I had the other day, I googled something and it told me there were like 5 pages of results. Clicked to the last page and suddenly it millions of results and pages after pages.
Anyways, I think there are multiple reasons this is happening. First, Google is constantly trying to keep spammy results out of the search (they've gotten pretty bad lately, imo). It is relatively easy to get a website to the top of the results for most searches. Google is constantly adjusting their algorithm to deal with shit like that, but people learn pretty quick how to overcome that.
The side effect of this is that you're only ever going to get results from large websites that have a dedicated team who are working to get their results on Google, and spammy websites that are literally solely dedicated to getting a high rank. Basically 99% of the internet from even a year ago will be penalized in the results, because they aren't following whatever 'best practices' Google has decided on today. You won't find the internet of the 90s or 00s on Google anymore.
Another thing is that Google wants to control what you see. The concern over 'misinformation' means that most websites are going to be penalized, while the mainstream media and some social media sites get prioritized.
I also personally believe that Google is beginning to create a walled garden. 95% of people are searching for the same 5% of content. From a business standpoint, Google can prune 95% of their results and most people won't be impacted (or at least most searches won't be impacted). This would save them a lot of money, and make them profitable as all hell. This is even more true for YouTube, which has an even WORSE search than Google. I'm simply amazed at how many repeated videos I see when I search something, how many videos completely unrelated to my search, unrelated to my search terms, and they are all from 'big' accounts. I pop on over to Google and search for YouTube videos, and suddenly there's an unimaginable amount of content that I am actually looking for. And I can only imagine that if this were the old Google search, that I'd get an even better experience.
Honestly, I prefer Yandex these days. DDG, Bing, Google, they are useless.
Yeah, there's a reason the search tier containing that stuff used to be called (and may still be) "landfill".
Same idea; if there are good results in the higher search tiers, it doesn't search the lower ones. Presumably clicking to the last page signals you didn't like what was found higher up, so it searches deeper.
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I think a better way to tell for sure would be to work backwards: find a page that you think is suitably rare and not well-travelled but probably still got indexed, pick two random phrases from it, search for them together and check if Google finds the page.
I did this, but with reddit - just typed in random post IDs (sequential, every ID is/was a post), picked posts that have long text, and googled substrings - e.g. from here googled ""being in a business together" "a professional environment together" or "me after the meeting with extremely accusatory", and often no results. Google search is a big complex distributed system, maybe it misses some posts, maybe having it be perfect search for long substrings for all of internet history would be too much effort for not enough benefit to users, maybe it's a bug, idk. Camas/pushshift did better, it caught many but not all posts/comments.
Googling that now gives me this page, because of your comment. DDG still has zero results.
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There's one result now -- this page :-)
Bing also comes up blank.
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DuckDuckGo also turns up zero results. Bing turns up a couple of images, but that doesn't mean that they are actually responsive. I am guessing that the "problem" is with your query, not with Google.
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I have full page of results.
The same.
Maybe you search limiting to specific language?
It's the combination of "I love the island" and "I love the palm trees" that returns 0 results. Now, maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe those two phrases have truly never appeared on a single page, but it seems very unlikely. Of all the personal blogs, facebook posts, travel diaries, fanfiction, forums, auto-generated SEO text, etc. etc., I would expect it to have happened once. There are a lot of people in the world posting a lot of text on the internet.
I think you're underestimating how many unique possible combinations of words there are.
It's plausible that was said before, because 'island' and 'palm trees' are very related. As seen above, google can miss existing text. Generally agree though
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I think he means both of them together as a query
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That's probably because no one on the history of the entire indexed internet has included those phrases together.
Notice that everything found when you correctly spell it "islands" is the song. There's nothing else containing the two phrases whatsoever with the correct spelling; why should there be anything with the incorrect spelling?
Because there are tropical islands full of palm trees that are very nice, and people love them. "I love the island" and "I love the palm trees" are basic, common sentences that you would expect to see in a review or travel blog about such an island (eg.), and it seems extremely unlikely to me that they have never appeared on the same page together on the internet.
I think there should be a lot more results with the correct spelling too, for the same reason.
Many years ago, when I listened to and explored music more, my standard method of identifying a song was to memorize two or three short phrases exactly like that, and then plug them into Google once I got to a computer. It almost always worked, and was almost always unique.
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I would expect reviews and travel blogs to use fancy sentences, not basic ones.
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You used to be able to use imperfect queries to get what you wanted.
Not when using double quotes to confine the search to an exact phrase.
You'd still expect it to provide the "Did you mean" prompt if there are search results that it would catch but for some small difference in spelling.
Sure but that's an add-on service to search itself. I'd prefer no results to deciding that close enough from an explicit search is fine. Just to double check I ran the exact phrase search for both phrases on marginalia which runs on a variant of the original PageRank algo albeit on a smaller index and both (1, 2) came back empty with a suggestion to rephrase.
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