[testudovictoria]

> Google Search has gone so far downhill. I'm not sure what they're optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems.

I assume they're optimizing for the most common denominator: standard, non-power users. Early search didn't return great results for human-like questions such as What are the wavelengths of the colors on the visible spectrum? The result might be within the first two pages, but that query had too many irrelevant search terms. A better query would have been wavelengths color visible spectrum. That query only has the necessary key terms. Sometimes queries required the user to know search operators (e.g. exact match, date range, synonyms) just to get relevant results.

The average person probably didn't know that early searches gave better results when constructed in the second way. Google changed search to adapt to how normal people search. Now the human-like query will return good results. Combine that with locales, search history, and personal interests, even the most basic user can get worthwhile results from asking Google question. The cost is that power users who understand operators and the power of key terms get less relevant results but likely still correct.

[acdha]

I'm skeptical that it's all that much better for any group of user. I search for normal things all of the time and it doesn't do a good job at returning relevant results for things like businesses, recent movies / TV shows, etc. and natural language syntax doesn't make the results less bad.

What it looks suspiciously like to me is a lack of an effective feedback loop for user frustration — if it takes a number of queries to get correct results or someone doesn't stop using Google search entirely, this would be easy to confuse with improved engagement and I'd especially believe that managers whose job it is to get a number to go up are not in a hurry to question whether that growth is meaningful.

[stevesimmons]

If Google actually used its search history, it would see I was a sw eng power user, and return the types of results that users like me want to see.

Then again, I have been using Google Maps for 16 years and it still cannot show me distances in km rather than miles. A boolean setting ffs that I've had to manually switch probably a thousand times.

If billions of dollars of AI R&D can't even figure that out...

[Kiro]

Funny how people complain about Google tracking them and then get angry when they are not being tracked enough.