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by darkpuma 2526 days ago
You're not alone. From my perspective, the value of google search results has been dropping for years. And the quality of their search results seems to be dropping in a way I suspect is profitable for google. Most of the results I get back from google these days are trying to sell me something I have no interest in buying.

For example, suppose I do a google image search for "pear", because I want images of pears obviously. The first result is indeed a pear, good job google! Except the first search result just happens to come from Amazon, and also happens to be a pretty shitty thumbnail quality photograph (355x336). It's a pear alright, but why is this particular image of a pear first? Google didn't try to give me the best image of a pear, they tried to give me the pear image they thought most likely to induce a financial transaction. Or alternatively, google let itself get cheaply manipulated by Amazon's SEO. Neither is a good look.

A much better pear image, 3758x3336 from wikipedia, is further down the search results. So it's not like google was unable to find good pictures of pears. And a non-image search for "pear" returns the wikipedia page first, so it's not like google failed to noticed the relevancy of the wikipedia article about pears. Yet the shitty amazon thumbnail of a pear shows up higher in the image search results than a high resolution photograph of a pear from wikipedia.