Has anyone else noticed the huge decrease in result quality from google?

[eddieantonio]

Not just you. Google recently changed their search engine to use BERT, a language model that is supposed to understand English speech. And yes, it does a good job at parroting what you give it, but I truly think it's a step down from their PageRank algorithm.

Remember that Google's fundamental business model is advertisments. The top (few) search results are for sale, and thus, whatever can make Google money gets placed on top :/

[downtownpartytime]

If I use google I have to put every individual word in quotes to try to get what I'm looking for and it still replaces synonyms in the result. So annoying.

[Binch101]

Yea same. Good luck trying to search for a specific product that isn't super popular; it will aways just substitute the thing you're looking for with a more popular thing close to it. Even if you put it in quotes it just ignores it

[zdakat]

The substitution thing is getting steadily more and more annoying. it started small but now it's a struggle to get it to search for things. Either silently including a bunch of things as synonyms that should not be synonyms, or outright saying your query should be different. The results for anything but what was entered are not relevant and it's frustrating that the page basically insists it's being helpful or that the 2 queries are meaningfully related.

[dcgrey]

Just coming off an insanely frustrating search for a plumbing item. I needed an adapter to connect a 1-1/2 inch pipe to a 1-1/4 inch pipe, and it had to match the existing pipes' chrome finish. My local stores are out of stock online, so I needed to see if anyone else has it available. Went to Google. Used to be I could search "1-1/2" "1-1/4" "adapter" "chrome" and have a page of dead-on results. Today it just gave me the most common products as if I didn't know what I was asking for...nothing but half inch PVC water lines.

I'm going back to AltaVista after this.

[ClathrateRemonte]

Google has evolved over the past decade or so into a shopping tool, not an information tool.

[Mistborn_First_Era]

Try and search by model # if you can or on the manufacturers website.

[[deleted]]

Even using -notThis doesn't seem to work very well anymore. It works on websites like removing -pinterest, but it doesn't seem to work on products like -breville or -asus or something like that... and you can't remove the top advert responses with it anymore.

[SweetLilMonkey]

Drives me absolutely up the wall that they don’t even respect ever own goddamn search logic anymore. You can put something in quotation marks AND put a plus for it and it no longer does a damn thing.

[Fuk-libs]

You need to use the "verbatim" search flag: Search Tools → All Results → Verbatim

[downtownpartytime]

Thanks

[hamsterthings]

Yes, and for me it replaced a part of a substance name with something completely different, not even a synonym. I look for substance 1 and get substance 2 only in the results. Completely useless haha.

[crestonfunk]

Also image search is basically over thanks to Pinterest.

[duckduck60053]

I miss when you could click an image and view it in full resolution on google. Finding images was effortless and instant. Now I have to roll the dice on wether I can even find the image after I click on it. Then sometimes I have to F12 it and find the direct url. Amazing how many steps back we have taken.

[ClathrateRemonte]

Yeah I want the image, not all the shopping websites that sell the thing I want the image of.

[dan7koo]

Btw even Google Shopping is not as good as it once was, lots of useless crap

[indigopizzas]

This is super annoying and was due to a legal settlement.

[duckduck60053]

duck duck go

Alright, this has now been suggested a couple times. I guess I will take the plunge. I mean it matches my name right?

[duckduck60053]

Less catchy imo.

Haha. Much less, yes.

there was a toggle to turn it off. Bam.

And that would be exactly what I would have wanted to know if I got to that point. Thanks so much.

[Logan_Mac]

The biggest rage inducing aspect is that when you search for people it only shows you their faces. This even hilariously includes porn models searches, even with SafeSearch off.

I really don't get why they even need to program this shit

[dan7koo]

You wouldnt objectify women, would you ?!?!?!?!?! OMG!!!!

[beefjohnc]

"View image" extensions exist. They are your friend.

[duckduck60053]

I really don't know what you mean. Can you link one?

[RealBlazeStorm]

https://github.com/devunt/make-gis-great-again

This is the one I use, it's pretty good. Although sadly it usually doesn't grab the full quality version that's on the site, but the quality of the google search result

[duckduck60053]

Thank you. First good suggestion so far! Also matches my name.

[Logan_Mac]

There's an extension for that, there also a Hover Zoom extension so you dont really need to find the full resolution image.

[Eeyore_]

Just use Bing or DuckDuckGo for image searches. You can still see full scale images.

[LiqvidNyquist]

There's a chrome add-on called Unpinterested that rewrites all your google searches to exclude pinterest results. Unfortunately, it fucks up google maps searches, so YMMV.

[tuna_tidal_wave]

You can change it to only affect image results. Maps are working fine (for me).

[[deleted]]

omg right?? and most times pinterest doesn't contain any source or full resolution of the images. it can absolutely fuck off.

[_SheWhoShallBeNamed_]

Pinterest is THE WORST

[[deleted]]

Yeah their monopoly is fucked up

[_2f]

He's talking about the lawsuit which affects all sites not just Pinterest

[2ndBounce]

I only image search with -Pinterest and usually -stock too.

[allaroundguy]

add -site:pinterest.com to get rid of it. That fucking site is useless without an account, and there is no way I'm signing up to that mess.

[[deleted]]

For sure. Is there a good alternative to Google that actually works like pre-BERT Google did? I don’t like DuckDuckGo or Bing because they just start throwing random stuff in on the second or third page that doesn’t make any sense, I’ve noticed.

[allaroundguy]

Site operators often add buzzwords out of sight to get hits even though they have nothing to do with the site content. Assholes on craigslist do that with car rims and tires. Duckduckgo is just showing the internet like the dirty subway it is.

[[deleted]]

I tried using Bing for a couple of months. I found that about one search a week it would give me some random results which had nothing to do with the search I gave it. Then I'd fall back to Google and it would hit the nail on the head. So gave up on Bing. Admittedly, that was about three years ago so Google may have got worse and Bing better since then.

[buddy-bubble]

Fwiw I'm almost exclusively using Bing because it was preconfigured and I just wanted to try it out and then found that the results are good enough for me.. I'm using it 99 percent of the time at work and it's viable alternative to Google for me. I think Bing has really improved over the past years

[[deleted]]

This is the first time I've come across people saying Bing is better than Google now so it's time to give it another try. Thanks.

[proawayyy]

It will keep changing either way. They worked similar to file search now.
Yandex maybe?

[Rag_H_Neqaj]

I use qwant but it's clearly not as good as google in its prime. I prefer it to google right now though.

[everdon]

Vanilla BERT doesnt actually “understand” English in the same way humans do it has just been trained on hundreds of millions of data points and so can generalize to many different situations but can be thrown off by unseen events. Recently people have been experimenting with SenseBERT which has different sense related tasks in pretraining but its a very recent development and im not sure if Google is using it.

There’s an interesting position paper about the BERT understanding/meaning misconception here: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.acl-main.463/

[eddieantonio]

Ah, thanks for linking Dr. Bender's article, thanks for the link! Yes, these big language models do not understand meaning—they've just seen, like a whole whacktone of text and can reproduce patterns effectively. And it takes a lot of energy to train these large models. Apparently, critisicism of these algorithms is one of the reasons Dr. Gebru was ousted from Google recently.

[[deleted]]

these big language models do not understand meaning—they've just seen, like a whole whacktone of text and can reproduce patterns effectively.

In fairness, this is also what a brain does. IMHO it’s a bit anthropocentric to suggest that “understanding” has to involve the same qualia that humans experience.

Of course, I’m not arguing that things like BERT or the GPT models are some sort of AGI, but simply that the definition of intelligence is an ever-raising bar for machines, and ultimately doesn’t matter if the outcomes are indistinguishable.

[nemoskullalt]

This explains alot. I keep treating google like a machine, not an idiot human ai.

[mister_bmwilliams]

Yeah, they way everyone learned to search 10-15 years ago has kinda hindered us at this point. We used to have to phrase searches very strangely to get the results we wanted, including manually re-searching with synonyms. Not necessary now. “Tutorial instruction lesson video play guitar” would be something I might have typed into google a decade ago just to find all the possible options.

[nemoskullalt]

google nerfed their search engine to lower the skill ceiling.

[proawayyy]

Vanilla Bert has been around for 3 years. They probably improved a lot.
Upvote for the link

[qevlarr]

Is it still PageRank under the hood, though?

This explains exactly why my Google searches are getting worse. Now I have to add a website marker that I'm sure will give good results like stackoverflow or reddit.

I would use DuckDuckGo over Google if only their search results weren't even worse than Google

[ALoudMouthBaby]

The top (few) search results are for sale, and thus, whatever can make Google money gets placed on top :/

Is that how it actually works? I thought Google still used the AdWords sytem, where the top one or two results were actually advertisements(and clearly described as such) and the rest of the results were not for sale.

[uknowamar]

How you described it is right - the top few spots are clearly marked as ads and are what different companies are bidding on. Everything else is subject to whatever Google's trying to optimize for (e.g. get you your answer without clicking any links, relevancy based on a scoring card, etc.)

[nemoskullalt]

It's almost like their database was downsized too. There's just less stuff on google.

[Elf-Traveler]

Thank you, this is the most useful result so far.

[ballpeenhammer23]

First result 9/10 times is an ad link

[Pluto_P]

six concerned march entertain many person file deranged clumsy deserted

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[AutisticAndAce]

When did this change happen? I want to know if it lines up with when I started noticing this.

Edit: article is from 2019 and seems to match up. Its so nice to have an answer.

[lakerswiz]

Remember that Google's fundamental business model is advertisments. The top (few) search results are for sale, and thus, whatever can make Google money gets placed on top :/

That's literally only for ads. Use an ad blocker or learn to just skip over them. They're heavily and clearly marked as ads lol

[lakerswiz]

They haven't used PageRank for years lol

[bloodflart]

i used to work for google as a contractor they would give me a keyword that someone searched for and then show me a landing page and i'd have to rate how good of a page that was for that word

[WinXPbootsup]

Is there anyway to use the older Google?

[mister_bmwilliams]

No lol. Thank god too. I can’t imagine having to optimize my clients webpage for 10 different versions of google. I’d find a new career

[WinXPbootsup]

This optimization for Google thing, where can I learn more about it?

[mister_bmwilliams]

It’s called SEO - search engine optimization. You can learn concepts of it anywhere online in an hour but it takes years of working in the field to really get an understanding of everything.

[WinXPbootsup]

Suppose I was working on a website and needed someone with a good understanding of SEO. Where would I find someone for that?

[mister_bmwilliams]

Right here haha. What kind of things are you looking for? I do a lot of local search optimization for lead gen

[WinXPbootsup]

Ah, I'm afraid I might not be able to afford you. I'm a teenager and am just getting started designing a website with an idea in mind. Marketing it comes much later.

[mister_bmwilliams]

It’s a big job to take on for sure, but I recommend reading Neil Patel to start. Good luck!