Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse No, it's not just you - search engine results really are getting worse as the internet is flooded with low-effort garbage from SEO farms and affiliate link sites, a group of German researchers has concluded. The boffins made their determination after spending a year reviewing results for 7,392 product review queries on Google …
With Google the supersoaraway search engine still, our article focuses on the Big G. If you want to see how Bing etc fared, it's a mixed bag - some good, some bad - see the linked-to report for the details.
It's why we link to reports and original sources wherever we can - not all publications do that - so that you can dive deeper beyond our take of a situation. Articles are like products: you have to make a decision to ship at some point, and we shipped this story with a focus on Google.
There's still scope for a followup that compares Google with others, and it's on the todo list.
C.
In reality, the system is tuned to profitability, and the results reflect this. SEOs are also paying customers, just through the other door into Googles cash pile, and the optimization problem at hand is well understood. Google makes the rules and decides which counter measures to employ. The SEO's are stuck with what Google gives them. If Google wanted to it could gut the content farm industry by tweaking its site and host reputation systems. That would hurt Google's bottom line, and also irritate regulators who are spending as much time listening to the SEOs lobbyists as Googles.
Once Google serves you a good link for what you are searching for, you stop looking. So the optimal profit is found in seeking the maximal number of monetized but useless results a given or average user will tolerate before giving up or switching. That is competition bound in the real world, and even without collusion the system will converge toward the "lowest common denominator" user experience.
Google is unwilling to drop the boom on content farms, if they were the SEO sites would dry up pretty quickly, as it would cost them more to run or acquire high reputation sites, and their use would burn down their value immediately and rapidly.
Not to say the prospect of having Google gatekeeping the internet even more doesn't raise other serious issues.
Thank you for that tip, I'll try to keep them in mind. As I read the article and they mostly stated Google's decaying search results quality, the only thing that came to my mind was DuckDuckGo saying, "Hold my beer". I'm an almost exclusive DDG user and, for many results, the relevance simply sucks and I've been growing tired of it for quite a while now. Glad that I'm not dreaming - I'll try Qwant.
I believe the challenge that DuckDuckGo has is that it's very reliant on Bing's data for its operations. That is why I advise clients who wish to be found by search engines to not just submit their site to Google but also to Bing because you actually feed into a long tail of search engines that also (at least partially) rely on Bing's data.
If Bing's data is not as good as it once was (and there appears to be serious indications that they have declined just like Google Search) then that will ultimately also impact DDG.
I'm an almost exclusive DDG user and, for many results, the relevance simply sucks and I've been growing tired of it for quite a while now
Mileage may vary, I suppose. I too use DDG almost exclusively, and it nearly always comes back with what I'm looking for. To be perfectly honest, I haven't noticed much "decline" over the past decade or so. Perhaps it's a question of what sort of things a user searches for.
Thank you! I just tested it out, and I am very impressed. Tried it with a search term that I know gives poor results in google and only marginally better ones in duckduckgo. The article that google fails to find at all was the top result, every result was relevant, and the relevance ranking was pretty much how I would want it. Very much like the results google used to return..... 10 years ago, maybe? I don't even know how long it's been garbage for.
Thanks! Brave on mobile also includes it in the list of default engines. I just changed it and will be test driving it for the rest of the week.
I've been a DuckDuckGo user for a long time, despite some doubts about its income sources. I must say that their results in languages other than English are really dissappointing
Sure, since TLS is just ticking a box and there are no issues whatsoever with PKI, implementation of cryptographic protocols, etc.
In any case, this is the wrong request. We already have a successor to HTTP: it's the wildly-misnamed HTTP/2. The technology change made no difference to web pollution or search engines, and neither will any other. You could have a "good web" with HTTP/1.1 (and TLS, where it's needed) simply by restricting what's on it. Nothing's stopping anyone from creating one.
The fact is, most people don't want a curated web, or even a curated search engine with an actual information model. That's how Yahoo! started, and the market didn't want to pay for it.
“We put the WOW in WWW!”
If you’re going to have the same letter three times, at least don’t choose it to be the one with the longest name.
Back in the early days of the mainstream media becoming aware of the Web, I recall the BBC held a survey to choose a pronounceable name for “http”. The two candidates (finalists?) I remember were “hitweb” and “happytap”.
Of course, web browsers soon solved the problem by dropping the need to specify the protocol prefix if it was the common one.
I wish.
Last week, my better half and I were discussing purchasing something and I ran a google search for the item (whatever it was) and the first page of results were all for the same domain, but several different websites. The problem was that they were all https://$RandomEnglishWord.wasedfrnplokmjinhubji.com/$TheSameRandomEnglishWord and the text blurb was a damn word salad. And they were behind CloudFlare.
Google should start ignoring domains, not by domain name, but by network addresses. Start with /24 and see if that helps. If it doesn't; up it to a /20. If enough collatterally damaged companies complain.
Ignore all of cloudflare? Nice, but I don't see it happening!
Anyway, they must have found a way around things, because I have sites that resolve to multiple addresses (not for nefarious reasons) and google cononicalises them: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/03/how-to-discover-suggest-google-selected
What's more annoying is actually using Google (via Startpage).
Put in search terms. Then scroll past the ads. Which leaves fast decreasing space for actual results. Not interested in the order - but the link domain. If it's an IT problem then we all have a number of sites we trust. OK I'm probably going to page 3 before I have sufficient choice.
Really annoying for us who remember early Google where the top result was nearly always the best answer.
Why shouldn't you need to? If you are using a search engine to search for a phrase including the word Wikipedia, why should another site that mentions Wikipedia be excluded from those results? It would be trivial for the search engine to add a filter that replaces that for you, but it shouldn't do it because you might be looking for information about a site rather than information on the site. It makes a lot of sense for limitations on possible search results to be an option, not a guarantee.
the point is that if you include wikipedia in your search terms, then the results from site:wikipedia.org should be on top of the returned results for obvious reasons. And that's what Qwant does. That lower down in the list you also get other results that merely contain the term wikipedia is acceptable, as long as they appear after them
I don't think that filter makes much sense because just having the term Wikipedia in a search doesn't mean that the user wants Wikipedia articles. For example, if I search for "Wikipedia funding", I probably don't want Wikipedia's article on the concept of funding. I might want the page on how to donate to Wikipedia, which isn't on wikipedia.org because it's on wikimedia.org. I might want Wikimedia's charitable tax filing. I might want one of the numerous news or opinion articles about donations to Wikipedia. By interpreting all uses of Wikipedia as preferring searches on it, I'm likely to produce worse results for any meta search like that.
The same is true of many other terms. For example, if I look up "Google data collection opt out", I'm more likely to get useful information if news articles or pages about privacy than if it sorts by site and gives me twenty Google corporate pages first. Substitute any other company and I think you'll quickly find examples where you may want information about them rather than information from them. If you really want to limit your search in that way, the site: tag is available to make that filter explicit, so rather than assume for you, something that usually gets worse results, it would make more sense to make sure people know the option exists and can use it when it gives the desired behavior.
If you want to search for something which you think is on Wikipedia, just cut out the man-in-the-middle and search on Wikipedia, or install the relevant search add-on in your browser and use that to do so, if, for some reason, it isn't already installed.
Because Wikipedia is edited and curated by humans (and, especially, humans keen to support its core purpose [1]), doing a search on Wikipedia works really well, and a "Do What I Mean" search usually gets you what you were looking for. The editors seem to have put in place redirects for most common ways to refer to a particular topic or event, as well as for many common 'informal', but commonly used, acronyms.
For example, search on Wikipedia for "iceland volcano ash cloud" and you'll instantly get pages returned about the eruption of that particular volcano that the rest of us can't spell (or pronounce). Note that there's even a redirect page from a less specific title to the canonical correct page for those of us who had completely forgotten the name of the volcano. That's really nice attention to detail, so, kudos to all involved.
[1] No, not the dubious begging mission, where the Wikimedia Foundation pleads for (and gets) considerably more money than it actually needs for Wikipedia and related genuinely core activities, but enough about that for now.
Mediawiki's search function isn't that great when compared to search engines because it doesn't index the content of articles as well. If you're looking for a certain topic, you can usually enter a term related to the title and get there. If you're looking for articles that, somewhere in them, mention something, using a different search engine limited to the site can produce better results. I've found this more often with smaller wikis, where using a DDG search with a site limit produces better results than the search box on that site. Perhaps Wikipedia's search feature works better than that, but when I'm using Wikipedia, I usually don't have to search because I already know what article topic I'm likely to find my result in and can go there directly instead.
In a past life in IT support, I still recall watching a user open their browser and use Bing (which was default start) to search for Google and then use Google to search…
I’ve reflected on all the possible reasons for this… group policy almost certainly prohibited them from changing their homepage or having plugins… but why not have a favourites bar button… why not just type Google in the URL bar…
Humans are going to human. The average person doesn’t know, see or care about the difference. They almost certainly didn’t know that not using Bing was a smart move… they just associated ‘search’ and ‘Google’ and this was their routine that muscle memory dictated they follow. They perhaps didn’t even know that Bing was ‘a Google’ and could have used that. They just want an answer. Whether it’s the right or a useful answer is often secondary which is why all these spam farm continue to exist.
Whats most infuriating is those reverse-engineered questions that appear near the top.
Search for "BANANA".
Results:
- "Is BANANA any good?"
- "How much is BANANA?"
- "Can I BANANA?"
Which when you click on them conveniently take you into the top listed result. Obviously the top results are fed into some sort of LLM that is programmed to generate a question related to the result.
I don't think this is necessarily google being evil (although they almost certainly are), this is focus groups concluding something along the lines of "users too stupid to string together a coherent search phrase, we should do it for them".
As well as their incestuous / nepotistic relationship with YouTube, Reddit, and numerous other advertisers +/- aggregators. As well as some AI algorithm that claims to know better than I what it is I was looking for.
If I wanted a YouTube video, I would go to YouTube.
If I wanted a Reddit brain dump / fart, I would go to Reddit.
If I wanted search results that leave out the first word in my search term, I would have left out the first word in my search term.
Whatever this study says about how behaviour outside Google is ruining Google search, it doesn't seem to be paying attention to what Google are doing to ruin it themselves.
Google now assumes that all searches are written in dialogue. For example "How do I prune an Apple tree?" rather than "Apple tree pruning". So it will ignore words that it thinks are fluff.
But this has made it impossible to search for a less common thing that is only 1 word away from a more common thing.
Plus if crappy cheap advertising is one of the causes of the problem, there's a good chance that Google are selling some of that advertising.
Another Google generated problem is that they've made being higher up the search results self-fullfilling. If lots of people click on the link, then the link goes higher up the list. So once a link's at the top - it tends to stay there.
We sell in the commercial building services industry. It's a niche within a niche, so I'd imagine search volumes are low. We used to sell an imported German product, but stopped about 5 years ago. We still get phone calls about it, from random web searches. I've just checked on Google, and the page from the French distributor comes first (I'm on google.co.uk) - they do have the only dot.com though. Our website is second. And the actual UK distributor's website is third. The company in Germany are only fourth, and then we're fifth for some reason. Sixth is the website of a company that went bust 7 years ago, and only sold marginally related products anyway.
I remember we used to get a lot of crap quote requests through, using the wrong technical info. Because design engineers were clearly basing their specifications off the French website, and all the product names were different. For some reason they didn't use the same model numbers as the Germans - which we just sensibly copied.
In the whole UK there are probably under 500 projects a year with these on them, each with a design engineer and between 3 and 10 contractors quoting for the job. But there's also the installed base needing repairs. So we're only talking at most 1,000 searches a month. So Google aren't terrible - in fact thinking about it, maybe it's the users to blame. As they've now got the French website labelled as such, which it didn't used to be - so I guess it's as much people blind clicking on the top results. But then I feel that's something Google also encourage, with the way that they now display ads almost indistinguishably from search results, rather than clearly separate as they used to be in the good old days.
But also once you've reached the top, it's hard to get demoted again.
So you don't click on it. What I care about is getting some links on the first page or two that are useful for what I'm looking for, and a search engine that obeys restrictions for search terms or date - Google is terrible and getting worse all the time at that latter.
I've used DDG for years, only going to Google in the 5-10% of cases where I couldn't find what I was looking for with DDG. Most of the time I can't find it on Google either. So in my mind they are basically the same as far as search success (but in favor of DDG if I want to quote or exclude a particular term which Google sometimes refuses to do) but Google's revenue motives cause me to stick with DDG. It is painfully obvious which certain terms where Google is trying to steer you, and that's always where it would make the most sense they are getting paid a lot to do so.
.. search results also appear to be from a smaller, more predictable pool of sites.
Google has stopped being a discovery mechanism, a way to find new information related to your query. Instead, it serves up sites that are likely well known. The cause is the same, but the end result is there are fewer reasons to go to Google, and more to ask questions or seek answers on forums and social media.
I dislike Quora, but it isn't an aggregate site.
<rant>
I deleted my profile there after admin power abuse, After them twice putting me on the naughty step for invalid reasons, I gave them a final warning: "3 strikes, and YOU'RE out." - I'm not providing content to them for free for them to behave all shitty.
I had some quite detailed and well received tutorial posts there too.
Also, their posting rules are so draconian, that you won't find decent discussions there, because everyone is either too scared to be anything other than fluffy - either the non-fluffy posts are deleted, or the non-fluffy posters have left. I'm not even talking about things like swearing or personal abuse, just some of the stuff you need to be allowed to air in a scientific or other forum.. Don't you DARE tell someone they are wrong on a subject. It's not nice, or something.
</rant>
I can’t find the link now but it wasn’t too long ago that I read that there are research projects that track the size of the corpus that Google and Bing use. They had detected a significant drop in the number of sites that are actually indexed (I seem to recall that it was only in the tens of thousands of sites but that can’t be right) as they seem to actively get rid of a whole chunk of the database.
There was the incident not that long ago of Techdirt.com, not a small site, just disappearing from Google altogether. Not pushed back to page 37 or summat but removed from the corpus entirely.
It’s almost as if they’ve changed strategy and no longer want to provide the best Search but rather the most profitable Search.
"This particular study looked narrowly at product review content, and it doesn’t reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search for the billions of queries we see every day," a Google spokesperson told The Register post-publication.
Did he really believe that?
Did he even think his collection of words meant anything at all? The only explanation for so many PR utterances is that they don't think that. It makes them easy meat for replacement by LLMs.
Google's response
This particular study looked narrowly at product review content, and it doesn’t reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search for the billions of queries we see every day," a Google spokesperson told The Register post-publication.
Probably means the opposite of what they imply.
Simply because review sites are already trying to flog something, or at least helping us to buy stuff ( theoretically).
But searches for stuff we want to find out about, rather than buy, are probably even less likely to appear.
And indeed my impression of Google now is that it's pretty crap when you want to find out about something, rather than just buy one.
Well not all of it anyway.
When I tap a search term into Google and it returns complete crap, it’s usually got NOTHING to do with SEO or spam. Firstly, Google seems to completely ignore what I have actually type. If I type in “-amazon” (ie, I don’t want any results that include “Amazon”) then guess what results I get. That’s not SEO manipulation, that’s Google completely ignoring what In type. I searched the other day for some git man page or something - I can’t remember now - and the first result was “Buy git man page at wherever”. That’s not because of some spam, that’s because Google are generating some useless advertising with my term echoed back at me.
And I second a comment made above with bells on regarding Google just returning the same half dozen or so usual suspects. Why does EVERY search have to return results from Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, Every, Github, Quora, and Reddit? Are these the only web sites out there??
I’m sure SEO and spam are an issue but I’m more sure that most of the problem is that Google (and all the others) is just plain crap.
" I searched the other day for some git man page or something - I can’t remember now - and the first result was “Buy git man page at wherever”."
It's useless when you need a local service too. If you type in "plumber <my city>" you will get back results from all sorts of non-related and non-local businesses. I really miss the old fashioned Yellow Pages where I could look up a plumber near to me or an industrial hardware store much faster than trying to find them on-line.
I was surprised to find out that they only stopped printing it in 2019. I'm not sure the quality of their online version is though. Have you tried it? https://business.yell.com/yellow-pages/
Worth noting that Yell integrates with Bing. So if you have a Bing search for a business, it's the Yell reviews that show up (unlike the Google reviews that show up when you search on Google).
On a side note... While it's quite useful as a small business to have a Yell profile for this reason (and several others), in my experience with them, Yell really are trying to milk their customers dry. I'm based in the NW of England and they were proposing I spend hundreds of pounds per month, just to appear at the top of their own internal search rankings for terms related to my business, even when they couldn't guarantee that people were actually using Yell to find businesses in the first place. Just like so many other sites out there now, they are trying to monetise search in their own unique way. It was a very hard sell. The salesperson even went onto my website and told me all the things he thought were wrong with it, and what was 'wrong' with my search results, and how Yell was 'the way forward'. Honestly, the selling tactics were really quite aggressive. They even tried calling me back on several occasions. If I hadn't been fairly technically minded, and aware of what it was they were actually trying to sell me, I could have very easily been sucked in. I imagine there are many out there who have wasted a great deal of money on Yell to little or no real benefit.
All the small company "promoting" sites are as bad - e.g. Which? Trusted Trader* is expensive
* The name can also confuse customers - various councils run their own "Trusted Trader" schemes (and the prices to join / be assessed are a lot cheaper than Which? as they are usually non profit & involve local trading standards, e.g. local council one costs less per year to join than Which? charges for 2 months)
Funny how it's google, It's AI, It's SEO's, it's Ads, it's everything you can name, but no one can name the problem. I'll give you the problem. You are being exploited on the internet by a bunch of psychopaths. That's all it's good for; exploiting, manipulating, deceiving, influencing, destruction. We live in a world of people that were raised by 80's greed. Arguably, the worst of humanity, and now their children are self centered psychopathic little snots that don't think about anything but themselves. ME, ME, ME ... all the time. And guess what? guess who's empowering them? Guess who's willing to pay them? The worst of humanity. The creme rises, and when you use it for evil, the evil rises. Beneficial to man my ass. It's a tool for evil at this point. Computers destroyed humanity. The monkeys couldn't help themselves.
After Google started to completely go to shit ("it doesn’t reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search for the billions of queries we see every day" like hell, you lying corporate sack of dung) I went to DDG for a while (which is mostly Bing results with some polish), and while Google has declined to the point where DDG/Bing is actually mostly better than it now, they were still turning up tons of this SEO crap as top results, so I asked around and found some people were using kagi.com.
The downside is it's subscription - cheapest plan is $50/yr, I'm on the $100/yr plan. I know that'll cause a lot of people to instantly blow their tops because search has been 'free' *forever*. I was also 'Whaaaaa? HOW DAR U'. But then I realized just how much I search, like dozens of times a day. This is one of the most important services I use.
It has tons, and tons, and tons of customization. You can set up exactly what you want on your search result pages - theme, summary pane in the upper right, how you want your results to look (site icon? whole url? page title? Page summary - and how big? How many results per page, of course color themes... And then you can go and fine tune the *bleep* out of results. For every website you can give it a graduated priority from 'never show me this site' (expertsexchange.com) to 'only if you must' to 'normal' to 'bump results from this site' to 'I love this site!' Remember when google used to let you block bad websites but took that away because it meant fewer ads? Similarly you can use keywords to 'vote' pages up or down. There are various 'lenses' for searching for certain types of things. So many things you can tweak.
Anyhow, it gives me much better results than Google or DDG - the answer is almost always in the top result, at least in the top 3. There is never any sponsored crap (because I'm paying for it), and anything I want to tweak I can tweak. It seems to do a much better job than Google at filtering out AI Spam too, because unlike Google they actually have an incentive to do so. Most of this SEO crap is so obvious it's ridiculous to think that Google couldn't do at least a little about it if they didn't just want to show more ads for bad results - like oh hey, another website popped up with tens of thousands of pages that look mighty familiar, linking to thousands of other websites we know are bad actors. Kagi proves this is true. Some slips by, but nowhere near as bad, and then you can just block that site from results forever with a hover and one click. And I'm sure they use that as feedback to filter them out overall.
I have had times where Kagi did not give me the result I wanted. So I rolled my eyes, sighed, headed over to Google and DDG and used the exact same query... and also got nothing useful. So there have definitely been times (maybe about a dozen?) where Kagi disappointed me but at least it wasn't ever any worse than Google or DDG - and in most cases it's much better. The one case where Google is still better, I think, is reverse image search (upload a picture, have it search for things that look like the picture), so sometimes I hold my nose and head over there just for that.
I know, I sound like a freaking infomercial. I don't work for the company or know anyone there or get any referrals - I'm just a guy who switched about 3 months ago and so far I am absolutely sold on it as a better experience. There is a pretty generous one month free trial so you can try it yourself, nothing to lose but the hours you can spend configuring up your ideal search results.
Of course the usual caveats apply about do you trust a private company not saving your search data, etc. etc. or not selling your search info - and of course I don't know for sure. But the same applies to Google, DDG, Bing, etc. (Apple is Google), and at least my search results are way better now. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
Kagi user here too. I think there are some graces afforded to Kagi by virtue of being subscription funded. In theory search data should just be a liability for them as there's no advertisers to sell to and if they did have a data leak showing they did as much, I'm sure 99.9% of their customer base would flock somewhere else. Not saying that it's impossible though, as we can't pierce the corporate veil.
For me being able to prioritise/deprioritise/block/pin sites has really been the killer feature, as I've blocked so many stackoverflow clones, github clones and AI generated websites (where it's just one giant article with a bunch of questions and non-answers), and being able to pin resources like my OSes wiki (which I'd often forget to refer to in the heat of the moment otherwise).
Practically everything returned by mainstream websites is now a pile of crap. Its all a logical consequence of trying to monetize everything, its all advertisements, pop-ups, paywalls and content-free web pages. By way of illustrating how sick everything has got I opened up an old tablet that I use for access a local website (that is, one with the server on my house network). I hadn't run it for a bit so Chrome insisted that I watch a Tampax advert, at least until whatever Chrome update was being foisted on the poor thing finally took the system down.
Its a mess. I can't see how its making anyone any money, either.
Everyone is chasing around in circles trying to get Google to pay them for serving the adverts Google charged them for.
And the vast majority of the adverts are blatant scams, or trying to get you to visit a site that serves up a huge pile of adverts for sites that serve up the same pile of adverts.
I don't see how this can continue much longer. The entire advertising industry has disappeared up its own fundament - who's paying for any of this?
I'm not sure if this fully accounts for the problem.
If you search for something relatively obscure, something that there just isn't a bunch of SEO content for, you will often find that there is relevant content you know is there, but which just doesn't show up in a search at all. It's not that it's relegated to the second page of results, it's just not coming up at all.
Searching for an exact phrase using quotation marks seems to be totally borked now as well, garbage results still show up above exact matches. Sometimes stuff that definitely matches the exact phrase, and is definitely indexed by google, doesn't show up.
I don't think these things can be entirely explained by an overabundance of spam and low quality SEO content.
Agreed. More and more search toys are getting smug enough to ignore quotes around phrases and return a hundred partial hits. Even when you open the Advanced Search dialog and type into the "Search for the whole phrase" field, the engine treats the box like the mental dirt it assumes you to be and returns the same old crap.
I wonder if the fact that Google are desperate to sell their artificial non-intelligence products limits their defence against it being used to game search?
Surely machine-generated text is going to be quite easy to detect, in that it's using stats on training data in order to achieve results similar to that training data. So it's output, if statistically analysed, ought to look less random than human-generated text. So use that as part of your site indexing, and then nix the sites with the massive amounts of machine-generated bullshit.
They should probably knock down the rankings any sites that use Outbrain, or similar bullshit-content-generators to scrape the last few micro-pence of ad revenue while they're at it.
"In other words, the more loaded with affiliate links and SEO strategies a page is..."
...the more it exposes Google as a client clickbait search tool and not a user information search tool. Seems Google can no longer maintain the pretence that it is still searching for the user's topic of interest and not for its advertisers' clickbait.
Problem: if your business model is based on searching for your advertisers' clickbait, how can you keep a user base who are looking for something else? I do hope there is no solution and we will soon all be able to move on.
Been increasingly turning to Brave and Mojeek. Maybe give Qwant a try too.
It doesn't have to be in the "right" direction, it only has to be better. A few search terms ONLY I know actually produced results in qwant, since my German university account from 1996/1997 was only active for about a year. And qwant actually shows correct search results on my old username from back then.
Google? Integrating humans into a process? Surely you must be joking.
But seriously, most problems at Google can be tracked down to the fact they eliminate the human element even when they shouldn't.
They also cancel products and projects all the time because they couldn't make enough ad revenue, or more commonly, someone got bored and nobody wanted to take up the work. Kind of makes you wonder why anyone would trust any google-related project. This is why WebP is deprecated.
"most problems at Google can be tracked down to the fact they eliminate the human element"
So maybe the search engine user is next on the list. Just stand up an AI to enter queries and click through the results - so much faster, more reliable and lucrative than humans.
(Was going to add the Joke Alert icon but then I thought, no, it's too plausible).
Youtubers are already angry that Google won't provide them with metric data to show this isn't exactly what's happening. Since they make their money on length of video views, an AI that jumps through various videos to hit them means they get fewer meaningful (i.e. profitable) views.
I've always thought a good operator doesn't need a SEO. Have good information or content that people are interested in, be honest with your keywords and it will come.
Hell, I find myself near the top of the matches in Google searches when I've forgotten I've covered something myself in our forum years ago lol. There's no "SEO" optimization there, it's just google spidering and finding relevant information. Since then, Forum readership is way down (just a few of us left, but we've been there since 2001'ish) but I don't even care who is reading it, I document my travails. Maybe I'll forget again in a few years and find my own fix. It makes me laugh when that happens.
If your goals are right, Google will find you. If you're just doing it for self promotion, clickbait and speculated ad revenue, then gaming the system is all you have.
... of "engineered" Google results I recall was the response to the 9/11 attacks. Numerous web sites went up, claiming that it was an inside job by the US government. Involving cunningly placed demolition charges, Etc, etc. And each web page contained links to other similar pages. Who all linked back and forth to each other. Completely poisoning Google's page ranked response to "Who did 9/11" for a while.
"Bad results getting worse thanks to generative AI"
Of course the 9/11 Google bombing was all done manually. Now we have LLMs that can auto-generate garbage. Based either on random content found on-line and used for training. Or more nefariously inserted content that bad actors wish to propagate.
The claim that the problem is SEO, or low quality content, or affiliate links pages is the root of what ails Google is absurdly false.
I had a website many moons ago (approaching 17 years) - long before search results become horrendously useless. Did it rank well, have lots of visitors? Of course not, how is a new, niche, web site supposed to compete against the millions out there at the time. However, when I signed up for Adsense (why not hope for a little passive income), I was very surprised to discover my visitors jumped 10x the first month and grew after that. It wasn't because of any viral page. Google decided that since I was running ads on my site, it was better for them to promote it.
Of course, Google has changed the was it ranks pages over the years and it seems to favour low-quality, affiliate-friendly site with lots of ads.
Search engines now behave more like the portals/services of yesteryear (AOL, Prodigy, etc) - trying to be your one stop interface to their vision o the Internet. I'm honestly surprised the the don't just open search content inside a frame (although, they are coming close with all their sidebars and stuff)
"Not a bug, but a feature."
This is how they make their money, it's the tiny piecemeal search results that add up in to the huge tons of search 'grain' they sell to people. Except unlike with physical grain, search engines never let you actually see the grain or know anything about it other than general figures so the buyer never learns that it's 90% useless gravel. Some people have realized that you can even make money with the gravel, others just keep buying it for fear of missing out, but only the most unsavvy people would actually be fooled by it.
It's something youtubers have begun complaining about, because when you're that focused on getting your metrics right to make sure you're not getting screwed, it begins to become obvious when you're missing the truly necessary data to do so.
I'm still wondering who the heck actually benefits from these link spamming/farming SEO sites? I've never actually interacted with any of the sites beyond: Maybe this? Nope, this is garbage. *Close tab*.
If it's about shoving ads in my eyeballs it also miserably fails (no-script, u-block and a canvas blocker covers near everything so usually I just see a text page filled with useless text). How are these sites making money? Who benefits from their existance?
My guess is that you underestimate how many people don't have adblockers and how much they can keep you on a site. I've ended up on sites like that that are clearly attempting to look like tech support advice. For example, they can write an article about general troubleshooting and then post it with every possible combination of names so that it looks like it's relevant to your situation. Someone who doesn't immediately notice that the advice will be useless could end up spending some time on the site, restarting their phone, checking for software updates, updating the installed apps and restarting their phone again, trying to take out the battery for thirty seconds even though their phone's battery is glued in, all while the site cycles through advertisements and collects the revenue.
Then again, some of them exist to push a product. For example, the sites that solve a Windows problem via the following steps: 1) Restart computer, 2) use the network troubleshooting assistant that never does anything, 3) consider buying our PC Protect and Clean software license for $49.99 per year* (first year only). That might just be a scam, it might be a real though very dodgy tech support company, or it might be malware. Who knows?
I realize I'm focusing on tech-themed junk sites, but there are probably similar ones for other topics I'm less familiar with. The main other category I've seen are sites that pretend to have reviews of something but mostly just have links to buy stuff, but the profitable part of that is more obvious.
Not only the search results are more and more just noise, the search itself doesn't care what you try to searc and how.
"and"/"+" as a search limiter vanished first: You may not demand that all search terms exist in the document and that alone made searching anything *a lot* more difficult: Now addinf search terms is always an "or" -seach and you get thousands of BS-pages.
Later they removed exact term -search using quotation marks and now, at least partially, excluding terms doesn't work either.
Instead you get a gazillion links to amazon or ebay where *none* of the search terms apply and it's not even related to what you were looking for, pure noise to push ads with zero relevance to your search.
And then we have a moron CEO *lying* about it: He knows very well that the unprofitable part, the user, is just fu***ed here. And lies about it.
