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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.
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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