[naravara]

It's not just the maps. The signal to noise ratio on search has gotten worse too. It used to be you'd get your good results buried underneath obviously bullshit content farms doing absurd SEO.

Now it's buried underneath somewhat relevant content that is either manipulative/sensationalist, actively trying to spread disinformation, or just hosts a very generic pabulum version of what you're looking for. Instead of trying to find useful information amidst irrelevant nonsense I feel like I spend a lot more time now trying to sift out useful information for relevant nonsense, which is much harder.

[Sendotsh]

This has been seriously grinding at me lately. Google is pretty much useless for me personally as a search engine lately. I find it so frustrating that I just end up not wanting to search for things.

- It ignores that I tick "Australia Only", and shows me endless US results and international results despite me KNOWING there's Australian results for the thing I'm searching for, eg products in a store. I have to use site:.au in nearly every search.

- It insists I mean some other word that my query was close to, and doesn't give any way to say otherwise. Sometimes it shows a "Did you mean ____?" but a lot of the time it just doesn't.

- The sheer amount of spam in the results now is mind boggling. Searching for lots of common products or projects now is like trying to find that one email you know is in your spam folder in Gmail. Pages and pages of crap until you get the page you're after.

- and so much more I could write a book

I feel like Google Search is no longer about giving a user the page they want as quickly as possible, but to get a user to click through as many bullshit ad-filled content farms as they can BEFORE giving them the real result purely to make more money for Google. Or at least some point somewhere between Hanlon's Razor and "We know it's broken but we won't fix it because we make more money this way"... and closer to the later.

[rurp]

> It insists I mean some other word that my query was close to, and doesn't give any way to say otherwise. Sometimes it shows a "Did you mean ____?" but a lot of the time it just doesn't.

I noticed a large uptick in this kind of behavior for the queries I was making a year or two ago, and it's what finally spurred me to make the switch over to DuckDuckGo. It's extremely frustrating how Google search will ignore a quoted term and instead return useless results for a different, but more popular, term.

[PhantomGremlin]

It insists I mean some other word that my query was close to, and doesn't give any way to say otherwise.

Here is a tip (I forget the attribution) that seems to work for me: If you put &tbs=li:1 at the end of your search URL, you'll get verbatim results.