Google search is getting to be borderline useless...

Seriously... Not just saying this but the search quality is honestly getting worse and worse!!!! It was way easier to find something years ago before all these retard-tier algorithm "updates". I almost never had to use special operators, now I find myself forced to add quotation marks, + and - operators and more for simple f*cking queries. I'm searching for "make your own youtube video play in hd automatically" and I tried a variation of that with the word "default" instead of "automatically" and I'm getting pages and pages of results about how to make YouTube play OTHER videos in HD which you click on. When I search on YouTube for videos on this there doesn't seem to be any issue and helpful videos come up immediately.

For medical terms it's even worse. The authority site symptomchecker.webmd.com comes up ALLLLL the time, and it is honestly so bad that it's pretty much spam. I am tempted to report it for a laugh (it does legit anger me sometimes too) but I don't contact Google in any way as I'd rather fly under the radar as a ghost. It's close to being one of those sites which are like "Looking for great lawnmower 2010? This page has all the great lawnmower 2010 you could ever ask for!" and you click on the result and it's a search engine result. Symptom checker is basically the same thing. It NEVER actually works. Same problem when I search a topic about skin on Google, just unrelated crap again. It keeps thinking I want to learn about aging skin no matter what I type in, it's making me angry as f*ck!

I'm just having a shit tonne of problems with Google search lately.

And it's not even all because authority sites automatically win (though that is also a problem in some cases, just not as often)... I think it might be Hummingbird or whatever bot/AI is responsible for trying to determine the "real" meaning of your question. It doesn't work. It's broken. Hummingbird is not quite as bad as Windows Live Movie Maker which is the worst thing to ever exist on a computer and the most pathetic excuse for software I have ever personally witnessed in my entire life, but it's still terrible.

I've been using quotes and + and - more and more as well to test my niche. I only use DuckDuckGo.com for my own searches.

Google is becoming a pay per inclusion. Top ranked sites are big adwords spenders. Google better watch out for this - their new "AI" is geared towards shareholders, not searchers.

Personally enabling "verbatim search" (optin on every search, kind of annoying. Is there a way to enable it by default?) and disabling "private search" greatly improves my results. But yeah, search quality has been better. Rankbrain, etc still lacking. DDG is alright but absolutely terrible with technical queries (imho).

bartosimpsonio said:

I've been using quotes and + and - more and more as well to test my niche. I only use DuckDuckGo.com for my own searches.

Google is becoming a pay per inclusion. Top ranked sites are big adwords spenders. Google better watch out for this - their new "AI" is geared towards shareholders, not searchers.

Click to expand...

I found that to be the case only sometimes actually... For a lot of queries there are low authority sites at or near the top, it's just that they are completely irrelevant because the sh*tty search engine thinks it can second guess me. That said, for one of my main keywords, an authority site put up a crap 200 word "article" and it shot to position 1 immediately out of nowhere, when my very informative 1500 word-ish article which held the position for a long time has been linked to from strong sites in my niche (NATURALLY!!!! Yes they are Do Follow btw) and been shared on FB over 1700 times (again, naturally).

Never thought to use Verbatim, will try that.

yeah, agree google search results are getting worse and worse especially after the introduction of the zoo... i virtually stopped using google for searching and I have a few friends who actually use both google and bing to search now.

As mentioned before me, some big authority websites put a crappy article about topic they don't know and google automatically puts them very top... very frustrating.

I have to agree here. There are pros out there gaming the google search ranking system and milking it hard. I too have to use duckduckgo here and there. Sometimes...some searches has lots of pages with the same content, just rephrased and its all in the first page. Terrible. You definitely have to go deeper into the pages now to find good content.

bah
i thought i was the only one..
i keep searching things up and its just crap it takes so much longer to find what im looking for.
when i give i go to duckduckgo and 8/10 times its much better results
what will happen few years from now?

everydayimhustling said:

what will happen few years from now?

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People leave google en masse. DDG performs a violent takeover (acquihires) whole of alphabet.
Page, cutts & co. as honorary heads of the loo health and inspection team? I like it.

Well here's a good comparison....

For a WIDE variety of reasons, people have been saying that the NFL has been getting worse and worse for years now.

How's that working out for them?

I understand if you go elsewhere when you want to search for something. We are NOT average users though. I too have seen plenty of shitty google results for searches. But like the NFL they're not going anywhere. In fact they are just going to keep getting bigger.

On the other hand altavista was the bees knees back in the day.
I agree though, nowadays the oligopoly created by the top 100 pretty much guarantees a completely static landscape. In other words it will take a lot to offset goog.
I'm waiting for fb to roll out their search tech lol

Yup that's a problem, but my gripe is that for many searches I just get a page of ads with an image or video banner.
Literally not one genuine search term result above the fold on an HD monitor. Even if I turn off extra toolbars on my browser I still get NOTHING.

At that point it's not even a search engine. It's a plain straight forward advertising platform - that people are for some unknown reason - choosing to use.

Google really is crap these days. My mobile devices came with Bing as default and I've never had cause to change them - and wouldn't want to. (though Bing is only a bit better)

Scritty

Hey google search is still useful when you need to find a hot pornstar's name with only a picture.

In other news, GOOG went up 2% today and it is climbing toward $1,000 stock (again)

All is see is news to fire GSA SER the fuck up.

edit: I use DDG+Google too. I just get tired when google captchas you after a few advanced operators. Fuck'em.

SkyrocketSEO said:

In other news, GOOG went up 2% today and it is climbing toward $1,000 stock (again)

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Google stock is so strong it soars even when the stock market is closed.

Still....people are not going to stop using it. The Big G is a big brand now and they are taking advantage of the same. !

cottonwolf said:

All is see is news to fire GSA SER the fuck up.

edit: I use DDG+Google too. I just get tired when google captchas you after a few advanced operators. Fuck'em.

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Those captchas are SO ANNOYING! They appear after we make only a bunch of searches!

Scritty said:

Yup that's a problem, but my gripe is that for many searches I just get a page of ads with an image or video banner.
Literally not one genuine search term result above the fold on an HD monitor. Even if I turn off extra toolbars on my browser I still get NOTHING.

At that point it's not even a search engine. It's a plain straight forward advertising platform - that people are for some unknown reason - choosing to use.

Google really is crap these days. My mobile devices came with Bing as default and I've never had cause to change them - and wouldn't want to. (though Bing is only a bit better)

Scritty

Click to expand...

Yeah and they are finding more and more ways to keep people off of web pages and on their search engine. They have one of those little answer-containing boxes for almost every "what, how, who, where, why" type question now. Plus the shopping spam and ads. Years down the road there will be a Google answer box on the top of almost every single query, even queries which aren't phrased like questions, so the best result we can achieve when that happens will be #2. Even if you get into the answer box it doesn't matter because for short and sweet questions people get everything they want to know from that box and have no need to read anything more.

If you hear the dev team talk they don't have a passion for the World Wide Web, they have a passion for Google and making it into some sort of AI supercomputer. They speak of making it like a Star Trek computer where you ask it something and Google itself will respond to you without you ever needing to visit websites or leave their website. The world wide web will become more of an afterthought.

But what's good for us in the current climate is that I think a lot of people are naturally inclined to avoid their labelled ads. Plus the ads are usually barely relevant to the query at all... So I think most people skip beyond all of that junk. I don't see it at all due to ABP I only see the ads when I use one of my other browsers that I use for testing things.

google is just a money machine they dont give a fuck about me and you

SkyrocketSEO said:

In other news, GOOG went up 2% today and it is climbing toward $1,000 stock (again)

Click to expand...

Excellent...........