My guess would be that it’s increasingly using AI/ML and natural language over search terms to sort the results, which results in much shittier results. Power users are used to specifying the search term precisely and it no longer does anything about it.

It tries way too hard to also return news articles and blog posts instead of forum posts and other types of user-generated content. If it can find a plain “well written” english blog it’ll return that over a 10 year old forum post that’s super detailed but full of grammar mistakes. It’s gone full corporate and strongly favors corporate interests and pushes commercial offerings more.

It used that ads were clearly labeled ads but it wouldn’t surprise me now regular results gets quietly prioritized based on some sort of financial incentives.

Google is really useless for some things unless you know how to use search operators

Seconded; something funky today.
Had multiple searches today that either produced no results (just the little guy fishing), or just links to junk sites that contain massive word lists and nothing else. Bing came through; usually it is best for video and image searches, but at least it got me going today.
I hate that bing (and dependent sites like DDG) will not let you exclude results; if they would address that, they would be a more serious search competitor imo; days like today would make them compelling.

Are you accidentally using bing?

Or google without an adblocker when you are used to google with an adblocker?

ComSci here. Lately Google for tech searches, and especially low level shit, gives a few relevant results on top with the bottom of the first page always being scam sites that my corp firewall blocks. Always sites with just random letters

Yeah… Cant provide an answer why probably ads. I had very good search terms and it should be the first hit but it just resulted in crap. Currently using duckduckgo and i got the first link that i was searching for correctly. Not looking back anymore.

It depends on which bit you’re talking about.

ChatGPT and SEO optimisation ruined the quality of results so sites who have no right to be near the top spot for particular terms get there by cramming as many pages full of tangentially related rubbish as they can.

The SERPs (search engine result pages, where you see the list of links) have been taken over by Google guessing at what you might be looking for, local results, shopping results, instant answers (which is usually aren’t relevant) and of course lots and lots of ads, leaving little to no room for the actual links you want.

If you are sick of it I would suggest trying DuckDuckGo, the results are a whole lot nicer :)

You really have to be careful. Sometimes browser add-ons can really fuck with your search results. A YouTube enhancer extension was a culprit at one point. If you’re on Android, it’s possible for apps to do this too. Stuff is constantly being patched and blacklisted, but it might not be purely the search engine’s fault. I don’t main Google anymore, but I still occasionally do use it when other engines let me down, and Google has been different enough.

I’m not saying it’s worse or not worse, but that, if it’s REALLY bad, it’s also possible it’s something else.

Edit (a week later): no, Google has actually gotten weirdly worse recently. Confirmed on multiple PCs. Not sure if it’s just Google, the entire spread of the internet, or just search engines getting SEOd.

You are not alone, google search results quality has declined.

Enshittification

Google has really gone down hill to the point I can no longer find obscure searches anymore. Even youtube searches sorting by new has gone downhill to the point that most of the results are youtube shorts with half of them having multiple hashtags in the title.

It’s been progressively getting worse over the past few years as they’ve continued to “optimize” their search engine for more ad placement and sponsored content. I’d say these past few months, it’s become borderline unusable for finding actual information.

Are you sure it’s true? I tried googling it and didn’t find anything…

Ribbit

I’ve mostly been using DuckDuckGo for the last few years so I haven’t noticed. I mostly only use Google for Google Translate & YouTube.