What's going on with Google's search engine?

It's been progressively getting worse over the past few years as they've continued to "optimize" their search engine for more ad placement and sponsored content. I'd say these past few months, it's become borderline unusable for finding actual information.

This is the thing. It really has become unusable. Trying to find obscure information is insane no matter the keywords. It's always the same results and, ugh, YouTube videos. You can't find parts for older stuff easily, simple answers are gone.

Amazon is similar. Change the keywords all you like you still will get the same 'amazon choice' products and recommended alternatives for whatever you searched for lead to the same list. But i have to agree it really got worse unreasonably fast last few months.
- https://librex.devol.it/
  
  Someone posted it on here, it works soooo much better and no ad bullshit

Enshittification

This
- Is it the way? Omg 😱

Define "sudden".

This has been a progressively worsening problem for a good while now.

To be fair to Google, it's not entirely their fault, there's a whole industry now that's entire purpose is to fuck up the results. But even so, Google has absolutelly lost what made it useful. It's far too concerned with try to curate for you instead of just doing damn search for the words. That helps them get more bullshit and some ads in there.

To be fair to Google, it's not entirely their fault, there's a whole industry now that's entire purpose is to fuck up the results

I disagree, Google has encouraged and profited massively off of SEO, they could've maintained the integrity of result but instead they bent over backwards to make sure SEO methods worked as long as folks were paying Google
Can you explain a little what you mean by “a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results”? I’ve never heard of that before and it sounds alarming to say the least
- I’m guessing they meant SEO - Search Engine Optimisation. It’s much more complex than this, but essentially finding high volume search terms and writing website content based around those terms so your page shows up higher organically.
  
  It’s why recipe pages or simple how to guides have paragraphs semi related text that sounds like it was written by committee. The content needs to be human readable, otherwise Google flags it as spammy, but at the same time it only serves to drive up clicks based on those search terms.
- I'm assuming they're talking about SEO(search engine optimization). There's companies that offer it as a service to boost websites rankings so they are closer to the top.
The worsening has definitely been progressive over the last 10 years, but I feel there were some sudden changes over the last couple of months that make it a lot less usable than before. For some searches I get the feeling that there's some kind of whitelist of websites that are included in the search and a huge part of the internet is being excluded. I was looking for a pretty basic diagram some days ago, nothing too obscure, and there were maybe three dozens of results in the image search. I also find more and more pages that are obviously badly translated English content when I search for German terms. I never had that problem in the past. The same goes for product testing. I tried to find a good office chair, but the websites that claim to test different models obviously try to lead you to one specific product. The texts feel like auto-generated content to simulate real articles about the products being tested, but at the end chair X, and only chair X, is the right one to buy.

Google has really gone down hill to the point I can no longer find obscure searches anymore. Even youtube searches sorting by new has gone downhill to the point that most of the results are youtube shorts with half of them having multiple hashtags in the title.

I REALLY wish there was a way to exclude shorts from YouTube results entirely.
I've found myself using DDG and Bing (fucking BING!) more than google lately.
Search operators for YouTube might help with that

It's because of money. Google is a place where you can find the least irrelevant ad for your search query.

I wonder if their CIA money has dried up, maybe funds are tight and they're forcing the algorithm for all it's worth. Sorta like how spez is burning reddit to the ground trying to maximize the metrics for the ipo or whatever.

It depends on which bit you’re talking about.

ChatGPT and SEO optimisation ruined the quality of results so sites who have no right to be near the top spot for particular terms get there by cramming as many pages full of tangentially related rubbish as they can.

The SERPs (search engine result pages, where you see the list of links) have been taken over by Google guessing at what you might be looking for, local results, shopping results, instant answers (which is usually aren’t relevant) and of course lots and lots of ads, leaving little to no room for the actual links you want.

If you are sick of it I would suggest trying DuckDuckGo, the results are a whole lot nicer :)

DuckDuckGo has some of the same problems too. It is mainly just a proxy for Bing search results. But they are less full of ads and crappy personalisation indeed. Also search.brave.com is worth a try.
- Don't use anything by brave

ComSci here. Lately Google for tech searches, and especially low level shit, gives a few relevant results on top with the bottom of the first page always being scam sites that my corp firewall blocks. Always sites with just random letters

I've switched to using ChatGPT for simple but weird stuff like "give me a list of verbs to describe bird behaviour" or "what part of the leg can you be hit at by a bullet and have a chance to survive for a few days, using a tourniquet" (I'm a writer, lol). Try to google that, no chance you'll come up with anything useful.

Chatgpt doesn't give factually accurate information

My guess would be that it's increasingly using AI/ML and natural language over search terms to sort the results, which results in much shittier results. Power users are used to specifying the search term precisely and it no longer does anything about it.

It tries way too hard to also return news articles and blog posts instead of forum posts and other types of user-generated content. If it can find a plain "well written" english blog it'll return that over a 10 year old forum post that's super detailed but full of grammar mistakes. It's gone full corporate and strongly favors corporate interests and pushes commercial offerings more.

It used that ads were clearly labeled ads but it wouldn't surprise me now regular results gets quietly prioritized based on some sort of financial incentives.

I think you're right (and I recall Google engineers have been open about using AI in past press releases.)

I suspect that Google is on the bleeding edge of what happens when a bunch of AIs try to convince other AIs to pick their schlop over the next schlop over. Very few of the involved parties are still focused on helping people (it's hard to get an AI to focus on anything) and it's starting to show.

Are you sure it's true? I tried googling it and didn't find anything...

All of a sudden? It's been terrible for at least 10 years now. I have about 5 or 6 FireFox extensions just to make Google not suck.

Funny how much better google is when you block any Pinterest answer

Yeah.. Cant provide an answer why probably ads. I had very good search terms and it should be the first hit but it just resulted in crap. Currently using duckduckgo and i got the first link that i was searching for correctly. Not looking back anymore.

I’ve mostly been using DuckDuckGo for the last few years so I haven’t noticed. I mostly only use Google for Google Translate & YouTube.

deepl is even better than gtranslate, IMHO
- I still mainly use deepl, but Google translate has made some impressive progress in the past few years and I'd say they're pretty even now.

Do a search on mobile and you need to scroll through an ENTIRE SCREEN full of ads (4-5) to get to the first result. And even that might be SEO'd. That's the current sad state of affairs.

Maybe all the deleted and edited Reddit posts and comments are finally syncing up.

I’ve read somewhere that the Reddit debacle has something to do with it.

Use duck duck go

Yes, but it also sucks. I want 2001-2010 google back
- Alta Vista!

Ribbit

Seconded; something funky today.
Had multiple searches today that either produced no results (just the little guy fishing), or just links to junk sites that contain massive word lists and nothing else. Bing came through; usually it is best for video and image searches, but at least it got me going today.
I hate that bing (and dependent sites like DDG) will not let you exclude results; if they would address that, they would be a more serious search competitor imo; days like today would make them compelling.

You really have to be careful. Sometimes browser add-ons can really fuck with your search results. A YouTube enhancer extension was a culprit at one point. If you're on Android, it's possible for apps to do this too. Stuff is constantly being patched and blacklisted, but it might not be purely the search engine's fault. I don't main Google anymore, but I still occasionally do use it when other engines let me down, and Google has been different enough.

I'm not saying it's worse or not worse, but that, if it's REALLY bad, it's also possible it's something else.

Edit (a week later): no, Google has actually gotten weirdly worse recently. Confirmed on multiple PCs. Not sure if it's just Google, the entire spread of the internet, or just search engines getting SEOd.

Yeah, I think ublock origin is the only extension I have on my browser - I prefer not to let some random extensions have access to everything I do on my web browser. Who knows what data they're logging