It all of a sudden became TERRIBLE and now I can’t find anything? When did this happen? Why did this happen?

  • Dettweiler@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Cihta@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 years ago

      This is the thing. It really has become unusable. Trying to find obscure information is insane no matter the keywords. It’s always the same results and, ugh, YouTube videos. You can’t find parts for older stuff easily, simple answers are gone.

      Amazon is similar. Change the keywords all you like you still will get the same ‘amazon choice’ products and recommended alternatives for whatever you searched for lead to the same list. But i have to agree it really got worse unreasonably fast last few months.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • MajorHavoc@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 years ago

      I think you’re right (and I recall Google engineers have been open about using AI in past press releases.)

      I suspect that Google is on the bleeding edge of what happens when a bunch of AIs try to convince other AIs to pick their schlop over the next schlop over. Very few of the involved parties are still focused on helping people (it’s hard to get an AI to focus on anything) and it’s starting to show.