Off topic, I completely agree with most of these except "search engines typically turn up the desired result in the first page, even if it’s a book or scientific paper; one doesn’t need to resort to ‘meta-search engines’ or enormous 20-clause Boolean queries"
I find that search engines used to be much better in giving me relevant useful results 8-9 years ago. There used to be a lot more content on small personal websites or blogs that was really well done and useful.
Now search engines tend to only return results from massive well known websites and the actual relevant and interesting results is buried far far down in the results under all of the seo optimized content farms.
> I find that search engines used to be much better in giving me relevant useful results 8-9 years ago.
I completely agree. And it feels like it's steadily going down too, search results now are way worse than they were 5 years ago which were somewhat worse than 10.
It seems that search engines now are always trying to guess your intent, and always think they know better. And yet more than ever, I struggle to find relevant search results.
For example, I enter a search term, and I'll get many results back that don't even contain the search terms. If I use double quotes, things often improve, but I'll still get results that don't contain my terms.
I really wish there was a "power user" mode, that basically made things work the way they used to work.
> It seems that search engines now are always trying to guess your intent, and always think they know better. And yet more than ever, I struggle to find relevant search results.
The "always think they know better" is the issue IME. I'm fine with search engine trying to be smarter, but the paternalistic "no I think you want <completely unrelated thing>" is what bites.
And not only does it not work when I know what I'm looking for (because it gives me something else entirely), it doesn't work when I'm not quite sure either e.g. from time to time I dimly remember an interesting comment about something but don't quite remember the wording so I look for something similar, and never in my life has the search engine been able to guess it.
Which is fair enough, don't get me wrong, but then why mess with what I know I'm looking for when you're patently unable to guess when I don't?
> For example, I enter a search term, and I'll get many results back that don't even contain the search terms.
That is also my experience. It's also one of the issues I have with duckduckgo, AFAIK it ignores quoting entirely.
This distinction between average user and power users seems to assume that people always stay at their current level and never learn. I feel the same with a lot of dumbed down software these days. Maybe it’s better for beginners but there is no path to learning how to do more advanced things because they don’t exist. So in total something got lost.
> It seems that search engines now are always trying to guess your intent, and always think they know better.
I complained about this from day one, and not once did I get anything but patronizing handwaving in response.
If I want to buy a pizza, I'll enter "buy pizza in $city" or something, but if I just enter "pizza", I want to see what every person on the planet would see if they used the English language version of the search engine (and then on top of that have the option of personal customization that I can undo or suspend anytime). IMO the convenience of "just typing 'pizza' when you want directions to the nearest pizza place" is nothing at all compared to the fracturing of the public space, for lack of a better way to put it.
I wish you could see random 10 items your 8 years ago search history and 10 items from last week and compare them. I am pretty sure picture would be different. My theory on this is then in years peoples expectations grew faster than the technology itself. Search is actually much better than past.
I think the content farms are improving their SEO faster than the search engines are filtering them out. So the search is better and we see more garbage.
If altavista, yahoo etc would've had to use their 90ies tech to fight the level of SEO spam that exists today, they would've been terrible, I have no doubt about that. That said, compared to Google today, it wasn't that terrible.
If you knew the right keyword, they'd typically produce somewhat useful results. That's not my current experience with Google. Google will ignore important, distinguishing keywords in multi-word queries, and seems to have given up on ranking content by anything other than link count, i.e. I get plenty of seo garbage in the top 10 that is published on domains with plenty of links. It's why subdomain/folder leasing has been a massive thing for the past two years. The content is typically shit and even the language is on a level that wouldn't pass in middle school, plenty of spinning and templates with few variations, 99% duplicate content from the same domain ranking on two consecutive spots etc.
The author was talking about 30 years ago. Google did well in 1998 because the state of search was dire and it was a commonplace that it couldn’t get much better. The first decade of google was revolutionary. The last decade as been a slow slide backwards in terms of utility.
Is it a "slide backwards"? It seems more like search is intentionally worse, because they're optimising for profit and not for "people being satisfied by search" -- having to spend 5 times as long on Google means more time seeing adverts.
So it's a reversion, but the company itself appear to be driving it.
I did indeed mean a deliberate worsening — not deliberate in the sense of an evil genius, but deliberate in the fact that value of the search to the user is no longer the prime objective.
I find that search engines used to be much better in giving me relevant useful results 8-9 years ago. There used to be a lot more content on small personal websites or blogs that was really well done and useful.
Now search engines tend to only return results from massive well known websites and the actual relevant and interesting results is buried far far down in the results under all of the seo optimized content farms.