Google search quality keeps dropping like a rock

A few years ago I posted about how it's getting awful difficult to find anything non-mainstream on Google

Sure, it's great search for popular stuff like current news, mainstream topics like Apple or Tesla or Bitcoin, whatever.

But it's becoming impossible to find tiny stuff. Take, for instance, something like a hobby or DIY, such as repairing a washing machine or whatever. The more focused you get into a subject, the harder it becomes to find anything on google.

Folks are beginning to notice too:



There he mentions homework, but homework's just one example of search niche in which Google fails miserably.

If you're a programmer, you'll have noticed that automated code scraping sites are dominating all over the place.

You search for a python function and it's no longer the #1 result, now you get a bunch of code scraping sites which simply scrape github 24x7 and replicate snippets of code. It's like content rewriting, only for code. They're auto generating code based on other code. In fact this is a major trend right now, with things like Github Copilot. Generating code is the future of coding.

Back on topic: it's getting impossible to find anything specific on Google. It's becoming a general directory of sorts.

As a result, we need actual textual search engines again.

We need another Altavista (or even early Google) that'll once more scrape the WWW and let us search raw, without all this AI and obvious privileges for large brands.

The problem with this idea is storage. You used to need a couple terabytes storage in the days of Altavista. Now you need a terabyte per minute of scraping and indexing.

Anyway, I think the future will repeat itself once more. Search engines which allow you to search raw, without all this filtering and manipulation, will once more become a thing. By not indexing and not refreshing quickly, Google is becoming Yahoo Directory faster than I'd ever imagined.

Damn do I hate those automated programming sites, they don't even have a question or a solution most of the time, they just go to another gateway page of questions.
Most of my searches now just are site:stackoverflow.com lol

I couldn't agree more as both a regular user and a programmer

Panther28 said:

Damn do I hate those automated programming sites, they don't even have a question or a solution most of the time, they just go to another gateway page of questions.
Most of my searches now just are site:stackoverflow.com lol

Click to expand...

Exactly.

And we may generalize your example.

When you're doing site:stackoverflow.com you're filtering.

I recall vividly in the latter days of Altavista, we'd use like 7 or 8 filters per search.

But there's a problem with doing that with Google : it uses NLP and AI to try and semanticallly understand your search, which fucks everything up for advanced searchers.

Altavista allowed raw filtering. Google doesn't (it did back in the day). For example, searching for gmail emails is blocked. Google blocks things all over the place, it's a heavily manually censored search system.

What advanced searchers need is a raw search engine which allows filtering and controlling the results like old time Google and Altavista.

I was working on plain html and couldn't change color of a paragraph text using classes (probably due to cache). I spent like 10-15 mins searching all possible combinations of words, but Google spits same authority sites that teach me "how to change color of text in html"

This is a pretty basic question and not any advanced stuff. But still Google messed it up. They are ridiculous for any serious work. There should be an option to turn that AI off and show us results without any interpretation.

all great empires have collapsed. Now it's google's time to do it