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.
They also can’t. The algorithm is a black box to them, so figuring out why a given SEO tactic works is a fool’s errand.
It’s a cat and mouse game, where a working tactic will rapidly proliferate.
Yes, and that’s why I switched to Kagi
It’s paid though? Hmm.
Kagi
Does it personalise the result based on your tastes, pages you visit and previous searches?
I tried duck duck go but I don’t like how u personal are the results. This last month I switched to bing and it was better. Some years ago I wouldn’t belive that bing could be better than Google.
It does not. It doesn’t even keep track of your past searches. They may make this possible in the future, but already have it set as off by default, should it ever happen. It’s honestly, really, really good!
ETA - you can indicate what sources should filter up higher in your results if you want
I, too, switched to Kagi a while back. I was highly skeptical because duckduckgo etc. never worked for me. Instead of finding crap, I found nothing instead. I tried kagi’s 100 free searches, and decided that it’s worth it. The feature that allows you to block, lower, or raise the appearance of website makes things a lot better after using it for a while.
I don’t blindly accept cookies, and at some point noticed just how many health-related pages link to the same lock-out page after denying cookies. So many pages with different fronts that are all the same on the backend of things. Now, none of them even show up in my search results. Slowly, I can actually find useful results, even when searching for something in a field like health which seems to get beaten in nonsense/useful ratio only by few topics.
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….
I use perplexity.ai
Hoping that one day it takes my job and I am okay with it. I already hate my job
What do you do? Maybe we’re can hate it in solidarity
cool who owns this particular ai
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.
Yes
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?!
He probably googled it and got an LLM telling him Google search is still amazing and it’s all his imagination
Big time.
i don’t know, i’m using qwant.com
100% the page ranking system is too easy to abuse. So a lot of garbage gets to the top of results.
But the internet is just too big to do proper index searches like the old days.
Google sometimes tells me there were only 4 results (and none of them are the thing I’m searching). It’s super annoying when it’s something I know is online.
It’s super annoying when it’s something I know is online.
That may also simply no longer be true. Things do disappear from the internet; quite often actually.
What’s the thing you were looking for? I want to try whether Kagi can dig it up.
Google has twice told me this.
But I got the page by searching browser history. The page refreshed too (not cached).
Yes, I know things are taken down but that’s not what I’m talking about at all. By “something I know is online” I mean that literally.
For example, cases where I was trying to use google to get straight to it instead of navigating multiple menus on a website.
Or a website I was at the previous day but I don’t want to wade through my search history to get back there.
Then when google fails I go and navigate to it myself and it is still there.
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
I like when I have a route designated and it just arbitrarily changes it up on me without my approval. No Google Maps, I don’t want to drive through the shitty part of the city at 2 AM because it will save 3 minutes. Thanks though.
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.
For literal months now because of ChatGPT and reddit, if you google “countries in Africa that start with the letter K” for the first two results Google will say that none exist.
So yes, I would say Google search results are getting worse.
wowwwww
I think this is because of how transformer style LLMs tokenizers work, the models don’t really understand the spelling of the words when asked like that. Karpathy has a great learning video on the GPT2 tokenizer that just came out.
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
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.
