[georgemcbay]

Google search for me (and I've been using it a very long time, having been an Internet user since the late 1980s and around when Google first appeared) has generally gotten worse over time, not better. I don't think the changes are to sell more advertising, though, I think they are a combination of:

1) The web is just much bigger and noisier than it ever was. There are so many SEO-bait sites out there now, it is a wonder search still works at all. I can't really fault Google for this part.

2) Changes Google made to make search more accessible to the mainstream user. Google search now tries way too hard to be "smart" about what the user meant to ask for instead of what he or she actually asked for and this can be a huge negative if the person is looking up precise information and knows how to use a search engine.

They somewhat recently added a "Verbatim" option to search that can help you avoid some of this too-smartness, but even with that enabled Google is still inferior to what it used to be when I'm looking for very targeted technical information that I am sure exists out there.

Sadly, this sort of thing is a trend impacting not just Google. The success of Apple has created a culture of creating things for the mainstream consumer user which often comes at the expense of the power user. I get why this is done and ultimately it is the right call for any business that could potentially serve the mainstream, but I do wish more companies would leave in the highly technical expert options as settings for those who are comfortable using them. I feel that in recent times most software in general has swung way too far on the pendulum from being too hard for normal people to use to being totally gimped for experts and feeling like a toy more than a tool and I wish attempts to try to support both sets of users became a "thing" instead of constantly hearing the mantra that "options or settings are bad, no options or settings for you"!

[revelation]

The biggest thing for me has been localization. If you happen to use a localized version of Google, it will heavily favor results in that language, and give you mostly crap when searching for stuff in a different language using the localized search machine (so pretty much all the time for programmers).

Thankfully you can still tell it to use Google.com and in english.