[lhorie]

I'm stumbling into this thread right after experiencing what appears to be a pretty catastrophic failure of Google's main product. As I write this, the search results for "Google stock" (among other queries) returns zero results ("Your search - google stock - did not match any documents").

I'm not really sure what to make out of these discussions about how X or Y Google engineering is, while the production service is broken for an end user like me.

[roody15]

The decline of google’s search engine has really been dramatic. It honestly is just a poor product at this point and I find myself having to use yandex, bing and variety of other tools now to find what I am looking for.

My guess is that between SEO companies and Google just trying to maximize ad profits the product is in terminal decline

[systemBuilder]

They really don't give a shit how many search engineers they drive away with 50+-hour weeks and their endless criticism. When it became uncool to have Google Search on your resume in 2018, I left.

[crazygringo]

Searching for "Google stock" shows me correct results. A stock chart followed by various search results.

There's no news of a widespread Google failure. Maybe you have a browser extension interfering? Or there's some kind of very localized hiccup.

In any case, your experience right now isn't even close to representative. For its scale and complexity, Google search is probably one of the most reliable services ever built.

[lhorie]

Small update: It's definitely not extensions, it's giving the same result on two different devices (mobile and laptop). I've narrowed it down to there being something going on w/ being logged into specific accounts. On my work account, I get no results (and this is a query that used to return results under the exact same setup just last week). Trying on an old personal gmail account, I'm getting the UI localized to what seems to be mandarim for who knows what reason (I don't speak mandarim, and don't even use this account on a regular basis).

As for why this happens, I have no idea. I've had Google Maps completely black out on me and then eventually magically fix itself many months later.

As for reliability, I would probably have agreed if it was a "simple" system (which the original Google was). Today, I'm not so sure. I at least understand that Google today is made up of a large number of subsystems, and subsystem failures like the ones I'm experiencing (and bad search results as others have also reported) do in fact erode my trust in the product. "Your 99.9% is not my 99.9%" feels like an apt quote here.

[bradley13]

Possible. I noticed recently that Google search no longer works with NoScript. It used to work. Not sure when this changed, since I don't often enable NoScript.

[crazygringo]

[Deleting -- I thought I was replying to the same commenter. Never mind, bradley13! Thanks.]

[bradley13]

I'm not the original commenter. I was just tossing in a hypothesis based on my experience.

[0x000xca0xfe]

Don't know why you are getting downvoted - search quality has declined drastically.

I've had multiple occasions where Google reproducibly fails to find exact matches in the page title (no problem for Bing). This cannot be explained by mysterious AI ranking or Unicode issues since Google gave me zero results, the website is non-political, and the title is just plain ASCII.

This never happened ten years ago. Whatever they are doing now, they are seriously screwing things up.

[dekhn]

Are you really sure your machine isn't running malware that intercepts queries?

The query [ google stock ] would never return zero results.

If this is really happening to you, please post an actual screenshot demonstrating that a standard browser in incognito (not logged in) mode on a standard OS returns no results for [ google stock ].

I'm not saying Google's core product hasn't slipped but that's one query I run every day.

[chinchilla2020]

Search has significantly declined in quality in the past two years.

[johnnyrandom]

found this comment thru google's "filter by latest 24 hours" search

currently logged on a google account, indeed the "google stock" search shows "Your search - google stock - did not match any documents"

it happens with other searches, too; not all of them, but some.

no solution found at the moment except logging on another account / not using an account. no extensions installed either.

[alex_lav]

I’ve been unable to “Mark as read” in GMail for two years now.