Is Google Search Deteriorating?

This is an analysis made by a guy who worked on Search Measurement at YouTube, Twitter, and Microsoft:

https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/is-google-search-deteriorating-measuring-search-quality-in-2022
TL;DR:

So why might Google Search be deteriorating? A couple plausible reasons:

1. Google has been prioritizing short-term ad revenue over search quality. Interestingly, Google has a well-known paper explaining why focusing on the long-term is better for users and their business!

1. Information is moving beyond traditional webpages. These days, content often lives on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Medium, Reddit, etc. The Internet today is very different from the Internet that Google Search was born in!

1. Historically, Google Search contained little ML. From what I've heard, this has changed in recent years, due to changes in leadership and improvements in AI. Is it possible that ML is inadvertently making quality worse?

1. Crucially, measuring search quality is a very difficult problem. Naively, for example, you might think that a better search algorithm leads to more clicks: when I search for "databricks series b valuation", you might think that I want to click on a website containing the information. But ideally I might never click on a website at all! The ideal SERP may be one that displays the valuation at the top of SERP itself. What’s more, clicking is often a bad sign: I might click on Google's first search result about the Series H, because I mistakenly think it contains information about the Series B too.

...

First of all, how do you even measure the quality of a search engine in a rigorous way? As mentioned above, it's very difficult to measure search quality using traditional metrics.

• Clicks aren't necessarily something you want to optimize for, for the reasons above.
• Neither is time spent searching: is a short session a good thing (perhaps you found your answer immediately) or a bad thing (the search results were so bad you quickly gave up)?
• Perhaps you can measure reformulations: if your initial search query failed, you may rewrite your query and try again, so an increase in reformulations could be viewed as a bad thing. But many people will give up instead of reformulating, and how do you tell whether a query is a reformulation anyways?
• Maybe long-term metrics are the solution. Happy Google Searchers will continue searching on Google. But running long A/B tests is painful if you want to quickly iterate, and even if you're unhappy with Google, is it likely that you'll switch to a competitor?

Interestingly, it appears that Bing is not so far from Google in terms of accurate search results (you can read about a Google vs Bing comparison in this article, too)

Lets just keep on spamming mate

As a small business owner, my observation is many people use google primarily to source their local service needs. So in that sense, it's not obsolete. It's considered more trustworthy than a social media post not to mention more immediate. If you ask "where do i find a good plumber in San Jose" on reddit, it could take minutes to hours to get a response. With google it's immediate. As you know people love immediate gratification.

The deteoriation I've seen is the dominance of 'lists' of places like yelp that have little to no value but are consistently showing up on the first page. The other big one is the increase in ads. There are now twice as many ads as before and it's annoying to everyone.

I enjoyed the read, I will bookmark this to look into it more.