[jdietrich]

The problem isn't Google, it's the internet.

Google might be deliberately making their search results "worse" (for whatever value of "worse" you prefer), but nobody else is doing all that much better, despite the obvious motivation to do so. I'm a DuckDuckGo user, but I don't think that the results I get are particularly better than Google results.

When people complain about Google, the root cause is usually that the thing they're looking for doesn't exist anywhere on the internet. Spam publishing sometimes drowns out the thing you're looking for, but often that's illusory - if you clicked through every single results page, you still wouldn't find what you're looking for, because it isn't there. A search engine can boost the signal-to-noise ratio in the results that it gives users, but it can't generate signal where none exists. Fixing that problem is altogether more difficult.

[DamnInteresting]

> The problem isn't Google, it's the internet.

I partially agree, but Google itself has also been going downhill in my experience. For example, in recent months the topmost Google results often omit one or more of my search terms, and I have to search again with quotes to force words to be included. I understand the reasoning behind including results that omit a term, but putting those at the top is just silly. Yesterday I did a search that included "discontinued", and the top result along with most of the first page of results ignored "discontinued"[1], so the results were mostly the opposite of what I was searching for.

1: With the text below the result "Missing: discontinued ‎| Show results with: discontinued"