[Cacti]

It’s become noticeably horrible lately. Half my search results these days are bot sites, just entire sites of copied material or material generated by neural nets that is completely worthless.

I don’t know what’s going on at Google but the search engine quality has dropped off a cliff in the past 6 months.

[smolder]

They just haven't sufficiently escalated the arms race. The "link juice" signals that g search has traditionally dealt with, and it's relevence measurements, etc., have been thoroughly gamed.

What they need to improve search quality is the intelligence to identify things as spammy and low value and then drop the rank of all the SEO optimized crap that people hate.

I can only imagine that google sees this as politically impossible ("you destroyed my business, Google! I'm gonna sue!") or they have decided the return on investment simply isn't there. They do not need to give you better results to keep getting search queries that help them to show you ads.

[otherotherchris]

Google's key problem is that it seems to prioritize "freshness" above all else.

Experts on a given topic have no need to continuously spam their sites full of minutely modified "best of x in April 2022" listicles. They were authoritative when they published their views ten years ago, and they're still authoritative today. Google doesn't care. Ten year old information isn't relevant or useful.

[lupire]

When everything you learn about the Internet stinks, maybe it's not the messenger's fault.

[Cacti]

Well since there are other search engines that don’t suffer from this, it is in fact precisely Google’s fault.