What Happened To Google Search?

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🖖 Hey! I'm Enrico and on this channel I go behind the scenes of the design, psychology and stories behind tech and making stuff on the internet. I'm a tech Product Manager, builder of things made of pixels.

Disclaimer: this video came out a week before ChatGPT, that's why it's not mentioned 😅

The Google Search search engine is dying. The giant that shaped the internet for the last 20 years is being consumed from the inside by SEO, lack of quality information, the emergence of platforms and no more avenues for growth.

[enricotartarotti]

Learn how I ACTUALLY made my most successful videos (such as this one) with hands-on, practical behind the scenes breakdowns:

[sportschad]

Back in the mid 2000s, Google felt like a library to me. Now it feels like a shopping mall.

[zelkuta]

Glad someone has noticed, I thought I was going crazy. Youtube search results are also basically useless. The quality of search results is almost as bad yahoo search used to be back in the day. Google is increasingly becoming more useless by the day. I for one would like to see a user ability to tune and customize the search algorithm.

[PiraticOctopus]

What concerns me the most is how quickly it’s gotten as frustrating to use as it is. Five years ago I was able to google search for a pdf of the manual for a specific piece of equipment, so I could find the ID number for a replacement part, and I found it fairly easily. But trying to search anything that requires such a level of specificity nowadays is a miserable experience. It’s so frustrating knowing that the information you want is (probably) out there and NOT having a good way to find it.

[BengVideo]

Finally someone has the same thought as me. I thought I was the only one who noticed that Google turned into a crap search engine, always ends up in poorly written articles written by AI, its horrifying

[samsibbens]

You haven't mentioned it but a lot of people in the comments have: Google search has thrown specificity completely out the window. It ignores the order of the words you put entirely even when using "quotes". It completely ignores punctuation like periods or commas too. It doesn't matter if you're looking for X, if Y is more popular it'll show you Y

[JimBillyRayBob]

Google used to have a discussion search tab that searched discussion forums. You could use it to search for actual people talking about a subject instead of commercial interests trying to sell something, so...

Google got rid of that tab, of course.

[herodontus]

You're right and they somehow made it worse since you posted this video. Google's decision to use AI for "better" results was the last nail in the coffin for me, someone who used to know all the tricks to google search and works with SEO. Since late 2021, I can't find anything on Google because its search AI shows me what *it* thinks I'm actually searching for, regardless of my actual keywords, markup, or wording. It lowkey feels like gaslighting.

[Ridingrules]

I've been saying this for several years. 10-15 years ago, I could have an answer to pretty much any question in minutes. Now when I search, I see what Google wants me to see instead of what I'm searching for.

[TheToxiss]

There used to be a meme about the 2nd page of Google, that you never have to click that far. For the last year or two, I sometimes have to search on 4-5th page to get some proper results. The first page is usually just ads or some generic AI generated content.

[Chris-Alia]

The bigger problem that Reddit/tiktok et al CANNOT remedy is searching for OLD data, news articles, legal documents, peer reviewed papers, etc. Tools > custom date range (even Scholar) are useless. It’s like all the OLD data has been ripped of “compute” to feed AI? Searching on direct websites for old data is the only solution….and that’s not always simple. Even using the Google to “site: parameter” to search the latter does not work half the time. Meaning, they’re not even crawling MOST sites.

[Parasprites]

the best part is when you notice google censoring and removing sites from their search results when you used to be able to find them through it, searching the same term through bing actually nets you the results you want

[bikesbeersbeats]

Its not just google, youtube search is dreadful and skewed towards specific channels. Its incredibly difficult to escape the echo chamber and uncover independent/individual channels with good content.

[dubesor]

I work in the tech industry and have been using search engines since 1998 (Astalavista), and I am an advanced "googler" who knows pretty much all the technical syntax and search term refinements. In the last 3 or so years I noticed I can no longer find what I am looking for and result quality dropped massively. My advanced searches with exact refined syntax get utterly ignored and Google switched from displaying what the user asked for, to displaying what Google wants you to see - no matter the input. This is EXTREMELY noticeable if you have used search engines for multiple years and observed their functionality. As a result I barely ever use Google anymore, I was already disliking Google for obvious privacy reason but not even getting good results was the nail in the coffin. Nowadays I am using mostly searx, ddg and startpage but even so, the results aren't as good as they could be in prime Google. SEO has a lot to do with this, but it's even more so on the side of greed over functionality.

[nobodyatall]

In the old days when I searched for something on Google I got lots of results from forum threads where people were discussing the topic that I searched for. Now I mostly get tangentially related shopping results and mainstream media articles about it.

[jessicamarsh]

Yes. I really like marine biology (especially deep sea marine creatures), and have been trying to research it. It's a nightmare to research subspecies, or species with similar names. For example, the bigfin squid is very different from the bigfin reef squid, but Google does not care. Whats also annoying is that many sources will try to antagonize deep sea creatures, which is easy to do, seeing how alien they look. and it is a nightmare to find something that doesn't say something like "THIS EVIL [insert creature] WILL HAUNT YOUR DREAMS!".

[oswaldrabbit]

Google definitely has a problem.

I was researching the destruction of medieval era architecture in Athens and on the Acropolis, and despite very specific search terms just kept getting the typical travel sites and stuff.

Makes it way too difficult.

[hexahedron]

A huge problem I've had with Google is being unable to escape shopping-related results. For instance, I'm interested in alternative fashion and would like to see content relating to individuals' creative styling, but so many searches get clogged up with cheap fast fashion sites that spam keywords in the description, trying to get you to buy inauthentic and barely related garbage.

Another thing is that more and more, Google is favoring popular results no matter how much you try to get at what you actually want. If you want "why is X doing Y?" but "why is X doing Z?" is more commonly asked, even putting the search in quotes isn't helping so much anymore.

[margarinesnatcher]

I think by far the worst part about Google search is that the engine itself is EXTREMELY biased, to a point where it makes it difficult to find real numbers when it comes to some controversial topics.

[CS-ucoh]

A search engine with category options for searching would kill right now. Like a search engine that only searches medical journals or blogs or videos only niche topics, etc.