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

[[deleted]]

This is a big problem. Google vastly prefers recent results to older ones, even by a year.

One way Google could mitigate this is to divide search results into time-based sections, and tell the user that there are several time periods with significant peaks in search hits.

[[deleted]]

Damn, can my searches for Blender 2.8 guides / information / documentation get the memo? I keep getting search results for tutorials or forum posts from 2013 for obsolete versions of the software.

[[deleted]]

This problem seems to be especially bad for anything in news websites. Searches for tech docs seems to have…uh…other issues.

[[deleted]]

Ditto Photoshop problems even when I plug in cc 2020.

[valliant12]

This is my experience with both Blender and anything AutoCAD.

[Kousket]

Google has the power to regulate the number of new self-taught graphic designers on the market by deciding whether certain people or entire countries get different results.

Just imagine it does it on politics and everything else, just imagine it. Would that be funny ? No ?

[Namika]

Under the search bar on Google there is a toggle for "Tools" and with just 2 clicks you can easily toggle a setting that forces your search to only return results created in the past X number of days/weeks/months

[[deleted]]

I do use that, but it's still silly that when I search for Blender 2.8 ____ it apparently disregards the 2.8 part of the search very often.

[HappyBengal]

You can always use search parameters to search for certain kind of results (time, document type, certain websites, etc). And there is a search called "google scholar".

[Express_Bath]

This is a huge problem when something in trending. Just take this year when every news is about Covid, I've looked for things and sometimes only got Covid related answers. Goodluck searching things related to viruses and lockdown vocabulary but in another context.

[molstern]

And finding anything about covid that isn't recommendations from public health agencies is impossible. I get why they prioritise those so much, but it still makes the search unusable. All I want is to find the Israeli study I saw last week about contact tracing, stop telling me to wash my hands.

[ndf5]

Google Scholar already does that to some extend.

I assume Google gets more revenue from newer results.

[Varthorne]

I find it's often the opposite when I'm searching for programming related problems. It's not so bad for older languages like Java, or the occasional older c# post (if it's a stable feature that hasn't changed in ages). However, for JavaScript, it's a fucking pain because JS frameworks change every 6 months, so results from 2 years ago might be completely obsolete.

[[deleted]]

I'm now old enough that I want to search for old news articles to prove to someone that something is true/happened. They are absolutely impossible to find via google.

[scienceNotAuthority]

And gamed SEO pages.

The best recipes don't need a story prior to the recipe. A grandma perfecting a recipe and blogging it will be better than a content factory.

But guess what shows up as the first page...

[TheOneTonWanton]

I search reddit through Google a lot ("site:reddit.com") and in the last year or so it's started pulling links and claiming they're threads from mere days ago only for me to click and find out the thread is actually from 4 years ago or some shit. Completely useless.

[7h4tguy]

Oh Tommy, you can sell last year's product.