[birken]

I'd just like to note the irony of saying how bad Google is while at the same time saying that Google's general purpose search engine is still better than any of the specific search engines of these individual sites.

Perhaps the issue isn't that Google is bad, and the issue is that search is incredibly hard.

[2pEXgD0fZ5cF]

No I disagree, because this simply wasn't the case a few years ago. Back then I could just search something, and Google would give me results, and that was it. It wasn't too long ago when googling was a proper skill to be learned and it felt like that could get you anywhere on the web. Google was exceptional once.

Now Google won't even acknowledge "" anymore, and having to hold its hand and guide it towards a single website which I already need to be aware of, is pretty pathetic compared to what Google was once able to do. Also the fact that it gives back so much spam and even puts it at the top of results.

> Google's general purpose search engine is still better than any of the specific search engines of these individual sites

This is only partially true. Google's search engine is definitely better than Reddit, but that is really not hard (I need to emphasize this, as reddit's search is really bad, unless it is old.reddit, then it is at least somewhat OK), but for many other sites the reason to pick Google is just convenience.

> Perhaps the issue isn't that Google is bad, and the issue is that search is incredibly hard.

I think the issue is more Google deliberately allowing and pushing all that spam, because users that find what they seek will spend less time on the site. Otherwise I find it hard to explain this drastic drop in quality. Would also explain why they are taking away all the useful search and query tools.

Or the people responsible for working on it just don't have the skill anymore, who knows.

[apple4ever]

You hit it exactly. It never was this bad, and now it's all junk results. And even worse, every page is the same junk results. It just repeats. It's maddening.

[yterdy]

The answer is somewhere in between pushing people to click ads, the zealous bias towards automation, the pivot towards AI (no, the one that happened in 2016), and (tinfoil hat time) the influence of entities that saw Google's previous adroitness at quickly connecting the average person with specific and accurate information as a threat.

[omnicognate]

It's not bad because they can't build a decent search engine. Building a decent search engine is a solved problem, which they solved.

It's bad because their incentives aren't aligned with their users. The shit results they are giving aren't because they can't give good ones, they are because they don't want to.

[slig]

They are bad now, but they were exceptional few years ago. Same thing with Gmail, now I get obvious spam in my inbox and real email in the spam folder. Looks like they gave up.

[dvngnt_]

been getting the same obvious CVS spam email message like crazy

[manmal]

I’ve had zero gmail misclassifications in the last 2 months.