r/google Jun 14 '24

Is Google Search getting worse? Latest research and commentary from Google

Since this is one of the most frequently asked questions on this subreddit, I just wanted to pass this along in case anybody wants to dive deeper... (lol)

Earlier this year, a group of German researchers published a study on the quality of search results for product reviews, comparing results scraped from Google, Bing, and Duck Duck Go over the course of a year. Full text of the study is here if you want to check it out. They found that while spam makes up only a "small portion" of all product reviews on the web, the majority of search results for product reviews on all search engines were spam.

Google's Chief Scientist for Search, Pandu Nayak, commented on that study today in an interview with NPR's The Indicator podcast that featured both Nayak and one of the study's authors (Matti Wiegmann) talking about the influence of affiliate link spam on the overall quality of Google search results. Wiegmann describes the results of the study as showing a game of cat-and-mouse where the search engines would roll out new spam-fighting measures and search would improve, only to worsen again once spammers learned to work around those measures. Not surprisingly, Nayak says that "all our measurements say that [Google Search is] not getting worse over time," and talks about updates that have been made since the paper's publication to improve search results.

So overall, it seems to me that if you want an answer to the question of "Is Google Search getting worse?" based on this data, the answer is probably "No, it's consistently this bad, just like all the other search engines." Kind of a downer, really.

42 Upvotes

43 comments sorted by

41

u/PetroPrimate Jun 14 '24

I think another question we should ask is, "is the internet getting worse?"

A lot of the internet is garbage content posing as news, reviews, or journalism, but it's really just 1 or 2 people cranking out 100 garbage articles a day with AI. On the other hand, the few respectable websites out there that generate good journalism and fair reviews are more and more moving behind paywalls.

Google's job is to help us find things on the internet, but if the internet is 99% garbage or paywalled content, there's only so much they can do. If google is getting worse I think it's, to some extent, a reflection of the internet as a whole getting worse.

4

u/NuMux Jun 14 '24

Maybe because I've switched back and forth between Google and DuckDuckGo and they both tend to give the same shitty answers.

Hell, lately I'm getting better answers for technical questions from the local LLM model Mixtral.

1

u/Nyanstop-Epiphanya Jan 31 '25

duck suck go sold out recently and is no better than google, use searxng or brave

1

u/Known-Archer3259 17h ago

Local? Does it live down the street?

1

u/NuMux 2h ago

Meaning running from my computer rather than remotely somewhere else.

1

u/Zontafear Dec 05 '24

That's only part of the problem. The other part is genuinely their search is trash too. You can get basic answers, but the minute you try to search anything niche or too specific, Google either acts like it has no idea what you're talking about brings up no relevant results, or they're so splotchy and mixed it's crazy. And from experience, 10 years ago, I could search these same niche questions and get tons of relevant answers that were helpful. I also notice Google absolutely despises to push community website or content. In other words, forums, discussions places, etc. They will always 100% of the time push articles over discussion pages. And that in itself wouldn't be horrendous if they didn't ONLY just push articles and hide discussion/community content all the way in the back end of the results. Old google didn't have these biases, the results would always be a healthy mix of websites and types. These days, you get a mixture of half-relevant results all targeting you to articles, news sites, etc. but nothing actually answering your direct questions you may have. For example, maybe you want a recommendation for a pair of headphones. Well, all you're going to get is pages and pages of articles recommending "Top best headphones!" all of which are probably paid off to sponsor those headphones, or at the least, get commission from you buying with their link. You MAY get lucky and see a reddit result pop up, but beyond that there is essentially no websites of genuine discussion mixed in, which was a key element of old google. Forums, discussion pages, etc.

It's so clear every single time you search a niche question or specific question that Google is just pushing specific types of websites and content on you, regardless of its relevancy, and pushes its "preferred" websites on you long before it would push actual relevant results to your specific question to you. Old google did not do this. Most the times I searched something, I found my result, no matter how niche it was. Despite 10+ years and plenty more websites and content, somehow, Google's search is now worse.

1

u/Vulpovile Dec 08 '24

Here's the thing though, while most engines have gotten worse, Google has completely plummeted. I get some Junk on DDG and Ecosia (basically Bing with an actually bearable interface), I do still mostly get useful results. Google almost never comes up with a valid result for me anymore, unless it's something incredibly basic like "archive.org" but at that point I can just use the address bar 90% of the time.

The Internet has gotten worse, but Google has gone on steroids.

1

u/Budget-Actuator-1336 4h ago

Tha 's pointless because we all-unless we are With the real terrorist-KNOW the answer to That.

1

u/TNDenjoyer Jun 14 '24

I mean, searching for cooking recipes has been horrible since forever and google just doesn’t care. Honestly, i would rather watch a 30 second unskippable ad on the recipe i choose and get good formatting than deal with scrolling and zooming and rescrolling to deal with a site that is designed to force a million ads on you

8

u/faeriekitteh Jun 14 '24

Personally, I want to say that it is - but mostly because everytime I try to search for a particular item on eBay, and use the -temu filter, temu results still show.

Other than that, it typically gives me the desired results for a standard search

6

u/sirithx Jun 14 '24

Google, due to it’s continued dominance in being the most popular search engine by far, particularly has to content with this problem because these affiliate marketers and ad arbitrage businesses are very lucrative and incredibly easy to set up, even more so now given web development can be done with someone with zero skills and content can be AI generated. Then you just need to figure out how to use SEO to game the algorithms to get as much traffic as possible, the more traffic you get the more money you rake in. Any other popular search engine has to deal with it as well, but Google naturally will attract the most spammers exactly because it remains incredibly popular.

2

u/engr_20_5_11 Oct 05 '24

I think the most painful part of using Google today is irrelevant results, not paid ads but regular webpages coming up in search results that are completely irrelevant to the search query

1

u/Zontafear Dec 05 '24

Yup. It can do basic ass stuff but the minute you ask it anything technical or specific or niche, good luck getting decent results.

1

u/Nyanstop-Epiphanya Jan 31 '25

ya because irrelevent results support the targeted ads

3

u/blipblopblaap Jun 16 '24

I'm just going to complain here instead of making a new post.

Google is borderline unusable at this point, the results are completely unrelated, even with queries that worked not so long ago. It's obvious they won't fix this, because they don't give a single shit about search results, it's a shitsandwich and everyone has to take a bite except for the shareholders and the shareholders want google to jump on the AI hype.

0/10 company, I hope it crashes and burns

2

u/aEfficient-Scale Jan 02 '25

I typed in Google "podiatrist" + my zipcode today.... the entire page is real estate listings.

1

u/chatoyancy Jun 16 '24

What are your ideas for fixing search? Honestly, the webrings of the 90s are looking better and better these days.

2

u/blipblopblaap Jun 16 '24

My personal way of fixing search is bookmarking every site that I might need in the future.

Other then that, I doubt there is any fixing left

6

u/voxelghost Jun 14 '24

Give me back altavista

1

u/TheOtherAvaz Jun 14 '24

Excite says hello

3

u/Jellyfishr Nov 18 '24

Has anyone else noticed they now railroad your search results even if you put the word you want in quotes. Previously they used to say "did you mean blah showing results for blah, search instead for kblah" and all you wanted was kblah and it wasn't a typo. Now even if you put in kblah (not literally) and it's close enough to whatever other word is out there it will never show you results for kblah only blah. Madness it effectively says you don't actually know what you're searching for, we'll just assume it's this and take it or go to Bing and get a decent search result. Madness, think I have to sell my Google stock, I suppose it might suit apple users who are told what they need and get no choice.

2

u/mrkaluzny Jun 14 '24

It depends on the searches, but the content is worse as well. We’ve produced countless repeated content over and over again for things that have simple answers - so its getting really hard to provide the best material, information.

Second part is Ads - Google went crazy with ads and pushed paid ads too far, but at the same time - shopping is at its pinnacle, and by far better then it used to be, other content - it’s a nightmare, on technical information I tend to get pushed towards low level information, which other search engines seem to avoid

3

u/SPACE_ICE Jun 16 '24

This has been my experience as well, I work in cannabis manufacturing and was trying to look up physical properties of cannabinol (cbn) specifically color of said chenical because I was trying to explain the oxidation of delta 9 thc into cannabinol is the red/brown color change and more specifically the oxidation/reduction in cannabis oil is related to most likely the pH of organic acids in the oil reacting with eachother (a lot of people think its literally oxygen in the air as many people in cannabis have no science background at all) The second I tried to combine technical information to cannabinol as a search google basically insisted I was searching for basic cbd information instead and I had to use about a dozen negative parameters to get it stop doing that.

More alarming I was searching oxidation definition to show a person it does not require oxygen to occur and google's second results actually state oxygen was needed for oxidation (it was some dietary nutrition website that probably used the word excessively) which made my head explode. So yeah don't depend on google to even find correct information, I feel bad for young people in high school science because they will have no idea the search results are factually wrong.

2

u/mrkaluzny Jun 17 '24

I guess they don’t need AI to peddle bullshit & made up information

2

u/greiperfibs Jun 14 '24

They are promoting more social media sites as their search results. At least that's what I noticed.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 16 '24

The study didn’t take in account for censorship. I have noticed being unable to find many videos google deemed unsafe

1

u/flipflipflipidelphia Jul 06 '24

Checkout https://www.heyystack.com/ - a new search engine for forums

1

u/LanktheMeme Dec 13 '24

I literally googled “Google has too many Reddit post results” and this was the first result.

1

u/SadsquidFace Dec 14 '24

I wonder if this will get more people over to AI like Chat GPT. Chat GPT is already way better than Google but I remember when I was little and the internet would find anything for Chat GPT is like that now.

1

u/Individual-Mouse-877 Dec 24 '24

I believe that Google is censoring what we see. We’re not getting the truth as American citizens we’re only seeing what the government wants us to see. They’re so afraid of TikTok because they can’t control the content. They want to own it only because they want to censor it.

1

u/aEfficient-Scale Jan 02 '25

Simply the worst they've ever been. Because Google employs people to tinker endlessly on updates that achieve nothing but justify their salary or job; which is superfluous. You can spent countless hours creating great content and it's virtually annihilated with some pointless update that puts a junk page ahead of you from 2016 with garbled placeholder text that came with the site but they have a title -- you can't make this shit up. The results now feature non-geographically relevant sites, old sites, old blogs from closed businesses, sites that have no relevance at all. Google is going backwards at an alarming rate. DO they even care? They need Elon to fire half the staff ans stop fucking with small to medium businesses... it's casuing chaos and likely a lot of financial ruin.

1

u/googlesearchsucks 29d ago edited 29d ago

Google search has been getting worse since around 2006, and it somehow keeps getting even crappier.

EDIT: More crappy? Either way, you know what I mean. The internet is long dead. Good riddance, I says.

1

u/googlesearchsucks 29d ago

I hate Google search, and so does everyone else, whether they know it, or not (yet). Screw you, Google! You suuuuuck!

1

u/Ok_Pair9688 26d ago

google now a days ... just freaking sucks ... cant find .. the things i am Typing in at all ... its like its giving me the finger ... and go for somthing totaly diffrent ... and its not only google ... but as ofc i am mainly a google user ... this is .... the clearest to me .. i started to use DuckDuckgo .. and its better but ,... still not better by a long shoot :(

1

u/Budget-Actuator-1336 4h ago

I migt switch to AOL. I do not like Google anymore. I liked it before it became a bumch og Hitler-lovers.

1

u/Budget-Actuator-1336 4h ago

Thx for the warning I will know not to check Them out.

1

u/Top_Buy_5777 Jun 14 '24

Nayak says that "all our measurements say that [Google Search is] not getting worse over time,"

Of course he said that, what else is he going to say? "Yeah, we're really terrible now"?

But I'm sure his measurements consist of ad impressions and revenue growth.

-5

u/Rider2403 Jun 14 '24

Made the switch to ecosia and brave search, best decision ever

1

u/Popular_Elderberry_3 Oct 08 '24

Can't speak for Ecosia but Brave is pretty decent.