Link: “Google Search Is Dying”
“YES, THIS!” to this whole post, and of course it’s not just Google. I use DuckDuckGo and its search results (based on Bing’s) are also full of these spammy sites that read like they were slapped together by a not-very-good AI. Plus the thing that many modern search engines do, where you typed in a query that was extremely specific that didn’t have a lot of results, so they do this “also showing results for: irrelevant other thing” malarkey just so they can show you more “popular” results that they think you really wanted instead of the thing you actually typed in…
Another thing I’ve noticed: ten years ago, if I straight-up typed in song lyrics, usually trying to find the name of the song, the top results would be the full lyrics of that song basically every time, even if I didn’t encase the lyric in double-quotes (which indeed I usually wouldn’t want to in case I’d misheard a word). I don’t think this ever happens any more. Search engines now force it on you to also search for synonyms of the words you typed in and then all the results are useless. You can add double-quotes, but then you have to be certain of every word of the lyric you search for and have it be unique enough that other songs don’t just come up instead…
As the further discussion on HackerNews and Reddit (linked to from the original article) goes into, there are other problems too. One of the most infuriating is when you know a specific webpage is out there, you’ve seen it before, you know exact quotes from it that you can type into the search engine to uncover it again… and all you get is “no results found”. And these are not pages that would’ve banned indexers. Just ughhhh
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Jessica Smith on .