I used to think the same way, and I still google things a lot, but at some point I had the vivid impression that the “Google Oracle” had been compromised or seriously deteriorated in quality.
If I want to find a particular product on Amazon, or a particular game on Steam, Google will pretty much always find it. But if there’s no straightforward way to make money off of answering my question (or at least that’s my impression), then Google will usually try to answer a similar-sounding question instead, one somebody could make money off of.
Some consequences: Idiosyncratic questions get banal answers to similar-sounding but uninteresting questions. Any questions about product comparisons are answered by pages upon pages of auto-generated product comparisons (which are usually crap) full of affiliate links to Amazon, irrespective of which product features I asked about and whether they’re even mentioned in the “answers”. Any medical questions (like “Is X unhealthy?”) are routed towards useless websites like WebMD. Lifestyle questions are answered by pages upon pages of essentially the same article written by different writers, all providing the same answer based on Institutional Common Sense or the same source material; often there’s no diversity of opinion in sight. And so on.
I’m curious why we experience search engines so differently—maybe we ask different questions, or we have different expectations or something, but my personal impression is that Google used to be the Oracle you mentioned, but that it lost its powers to Goodharting years ago.
I used to think the same way, and I still google things a lot, but at some point I had the vivid impression that the “Google Oracle” had been compromised or seriously deteriorated in quality.
If I want to find a particular product on Amazon, or a particular game on Steam, Google will pretty much always find it. But if there’s no straightforward way to make money off of answering my question (or at least that’s my impression), then Google will usually try to answer a similar-sounding question instead, one somebody could make money off of.
Some consequences: Idiosyncratic questions get banal answers to similar-sounding but uninteresting questions. Any questions about product comparisons are answered by pages upon pages of auto-generated product comparisons (which are usually crap) full of affiliate links to Amazon, irrespective of which product features I asked about and whether they’re even mentioned in the “answers”. Any medical questions (like “Is X unhealthy?”) are routed towards useless websites like WebMD. Lifestyle questions are answered by pages upon pages of essentially the same article written by different writers, all providing the same answer based on Institutional Common Sense or the same source material; often there’s no diversity of opinion in sight. And so on.
I’m curious why we experience search engines so differently—maybe we ask different questions, or we have different expectations or something, but my personal impression is that Google used to be the Oracle you mentioned, but that it lost its powers to Goodharting years ago.
Addendum: There’s lots of discussion of this post on the SSC subreddit, including several claims that Googling has gotten worse.
e.g.: “The thing that’s rather shocking to me is how bad Google has gotten at understanding a highly-specific and detailed search.”