Google Search getting worse every year? Blame, or complain to, Danny Sullivan.
(Also, yes. Yes it is.)
I actually have the opposite impression. I feel like Google has gotten a lot better through things like personalized results and that feature where they extract text that is relevant to the question you searched for. Can you or somebody else explain why it’s getting worse?
I have the strong impression that Google search has become nigh uselessly bad, based on tons of experiences where it feels like my nuanced search query gets rounded off to a generic, common, and to me irrelevant question. And in particular, Google loves to answer each query under the assumption that I want to buy something, when I actually want to know something (and rarely buy stuff, so one would expect search personalization to help me).
For instance, when I search for how to find clothes for tall & thin people, Google answers with random Amazon product links (which wouldn’t fit me), rather than with answers to that question. (In fact, if the answer were on Amazon, I’d already know it, so this kind of search result is always useless.)
Or: I want a product comparison, and am reliably barraged with those useless SEO-optimized comparison websites that regurgitate Amazon stats rather than testing their own products.
Or: I ask any question, and the answer reliably is (or pretends to be) from 2022, i.e. SEO-optimized garbage rather than good, timeless content.
Remember when Google Shopping used to be an actual search index of pretty much every online store? You could effortlessly find even the most obscure products and comparison shop between literally thousands of sellers. Then one day they decided to make it pay-to-play and put advertisers in control of what appears on there. Now it’s pretty much useless to me. I think a similar process has happened with Search, just more gradually. Your experience with it probably has a lot to do with how well your tastes and preferences happen to align with what advertisers want to steer people toward.
I actually have the opposite impression. I feel like Google has gotten a lot better through things like personalized results and that feature where they extract text that is relevant to the question you searched for. Can you or somebody else explain why it’s getting worse?
I have the strong impression that Google search has become nigh uselessly bad, based on tons of experiences where it feels like my nuanced search query gets rounded off to a generic, common, and to me irrelevant question. And in particular, Google loves to answer each query under the assumption that I want to buy something, when I actually want to know something (and rarely buy stuff, so one would expect search personalization to help me).
For instance, when I search for how to find clothes for tall & thin people, Google answers with random Amazon product links (which wouldn’t fit me), rather than with answers to that question. (In fact, if the answer were on Amazon, I’d already know it, so this kind of search result is always useless.)
Or: I want a product comparison, and am reliably barraged with those useless SEO-optimized comparison websites that regurgitate Amazon stats rather than testing their own products.
Or: I ask any question, and the answer reliably is (or pretends to be) from 2022, i.e. SEO-optimized garbage rather than good, timeless content.
And so on.
Posted three examples that I thought to screencap when they occurred, but if I tracked everything there would be hundreds. https://twitter.com/craigtalbert/status/1586952770170388481?s=20&t=8BtJYArZ9wtMJrJQK2IR4g
Remember when Google Shopping used to be an actual search index of pretty much every online store? You could effortlessly find even the most obscure products and comparison shop between literally thousands of sellers. Then one day they decided to make it pay-to-play and put advertisers in control of what appears on there. Now it’s pretty much useless to me. I think a similar process has happened with Search, just more gradually. Your experience with it probably has a lot to do with how well your tastes and preferences happen to align with what advertisers want to steer people toward.