[nocsi]

Is Google biased, or are it’s users biased? If someone is looking up something technical or diagnosing a problem, the most recent post on StackOverflow would be more relevant. Old stuff can be important, but if users searches mostly comprise recent stuff - what’s the point?

[clnq]

I have some old articles on my blog that always decrease in readership. I do a pass every year, change a paragraph here and there, change the alias/url, and then get 5x the readership for a few months. Rinse and repeat. Most of my traffic comes from Google. Also, most of my content is in such a specific niche that it doesn’t really age much in 5 years.

So recency bias kinda works against people discovering useful content. But whatever. Google is in decline anyways.

[ansible]

Heh.

I just ran a Google search on some code I was working on 15 years ago, posted to blogspot.com. It was about card game X, using programming language Y. The relevant keywords appear in the blog post. However, it completely failed to show up in a Google search. Just... nothing, even when I scrolled through the "more results" stuff. There were relevant and more recent links to the same topic (and likely better implemented, but let's leave that aside).

I did find my page on a Bing search after getting it to not ignore an important keyword, so that's something.

[basch]

Recipes. Historical things.

There are way too many google searches where the best result was the top 10 years ago, and still should be the top. Instead it’s something from this year that has no information.

Googling is now like talking to that person who repeats your question back to you as a statement, as if they added to the conversations. The results are some social media manager who’s job it is to make “content” by writing filler.

[treeman79]

Content is clearly being auto generated. Even the new Zelda game. Trying to search anything and it’s Tons of pages that all are extremely verbose with a consistent grammar style and not actually saying anything useful.

[pessimizer]

Most people aren't looking up techniques on how to work with cutting edge software. Sometimes, even usually, they're more likely to be looking for almost anything else.

[6D794163636F756]

I think it's user bias. It's shockingly hard to get Google to default to docs on Java 17 over java 8. Users want 8 so Google servers that even if it isn't as new.