[Barrin92]

Am I the only person on earth who hasn't noticed any decline in Google results that everyone keeps talking about? To me it seems like people conflate the fact that there is now significantly more stuff on the internet (what's the data volume today compared to 2010, 100x? 1000x?) than there was years ago with the performance of search engines.

People say they now have to append "reddit" to their search and they didn't in 2008. Which is obvious because in 2008 there was only reddit and like 3 other sites, now there's dozens of relevant ones.

[lazide]

Yes. There is massively more spam, and they’ve made it do a lot less direct search matching (many results don’t include the actual word that matters for instance)

[google234123]

I’ve noticed more spam and shit sites but I’m not sure if that’s entirely googles fault. There might just be 1000x more spam sites now then a few years ago.

[mushyhammer]

You don’t give Google enough credit: They totally can add a “report spam site” action in the search results, but they don’t, because they don’t care. It would help immensely to have websites disappear from search after 100 trusted Google users complain about them (after manual review). This stuff already exists and works on Google Maps.

Even the data collected from a personal blocklist would be useful for them, without explicitly reporting sites, but again they just don’t care.

They’ve been in the business of parsing websites for 25 years, surely they can tell ad-infested spam websites apart from good ones.

[knighthack]

I think this is also because of potential abuse: there's nothing to prevent malicious SEO gamers from reporting legitimate sites as 'spam' to remove competition, as a means of extortion, etc.

[mushyhammer]

Yes but I mentioned how to limit that:

> trusted Google users

> (after manual review)

> already exists and works on Google Maps

[firecall]

This is super useful: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

Removes sites that copy SO answers etc...

[Schroedingersat]

It is their fault when they've actively pressured real content into being indistinguishable from spam sites.

If you don't write like a drunk two year old and fill everything with key phrases now you simply don't appear in results, so any site that can become known has to be rewritten by gpt into barely intelligible garbage that dances around the point for four paragraphs when it could be communicated in four words..

[sidibe]

I've also not noticed. But this is the most common topic on HN so I probably had/have different search habits to have missed the wonderful experience of Google 10 years ago.

Google meets my expectations for a search engine but maybe I'm not expecting enough from search?

[AniseAbyss]

Honestly I use startpage and I'm blocking ads so aggressively I barely know what Google search is supposed to look like.