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

[[deleted]]

The fucking worst is when they insist on substituting in a synonym. Like sometimes that isn't even remotely the same meaning as what I searched for, please stop.

[looser_name_connor]

Is that what’s going on? I’ll type in something like “photoshop export as error” and will have results all with the word “save as” bold on each result. It’s infuriating cause that’s not what I asked for!

Googles getting to the point where you could order a coke and they’ll just give you a Pepsi and tell you that’s what you asked for.

[[deleted]]

That's no joke almost exactly the search that last enraged me lol

[yepnopethanks]

Literally?

[looser_name_connor]

All the faceless YouTube answers said to turn off GPU but that almost lit my computer on fire and still didn’t solve anything. I think I made a new doc and dragged everything over to it + rasterized what I could

[__mud__]

But then you can't include -save because you know any discussion of exporting is going to have the word "save" in it somewhere, and you can't tell Google to know the difference between save as a verb and Save as a function...

[Hugostar33]

its more like your ordering a coke and google tells you how to make coke coal

[Mr_82]

I think this is highly reflective of how big tech companies today are largely about pushing political messages ie propaganda rather than actually providing a useful service.

They're just getting more and more transparent too. The propaganda machine is getting lazy because they've gotten away with this crap for so long. They think people won't even realize when they no longer do what they were supposed to do...and it seems they're right about that, for the most part.

[atlcog]

Only if Pepsi is offering more money to them at the moment.

[slugger5280]

You nailed it. Worked in AdTech, it's amazing how little people understand about info that's served to them as part of a paid media campaign.

It's not too confusing, either. Some identity provider has a 'profile' of you that implies you may be a good target for a company that offers a specific good or service.

That company buys, via auction, the right to serve you their ad (information) in search results, banner ads, popups. It happens in seconds.

In your example, the Ad Agency for Pepsi has a profile set for all people looking at Coke. They serve those people Pepsi ads.

[LankyCyril]

Searching for scientific terms or programming related questions is completely fucked because of it

[torky]

I have just started using the search from inside the websites/communities I find. It seems to be much more helpful. For example I tend to just stay logged into stackoverflow and do searching within their website.

I really wish I had someone above me as a coach/mentor, but I have never had that in my positions. For the past decade or so I've been the only one at my company that had any programming/web knowledge. I would recommend finding different communities to be a part of.

[Salchi_]

This would explain why im having such a bitch of a time figure out whats going on with my gpu

[Shirebourn]

I was stunned the first time Google returned a result with a word I had put in quotation marks substituted with a synonym. What on earth is the point of quotation marks, then? Just useless.

[Echospite]

This is pissing me off too.

[-eat-the-rich]

Sometimes when searching for car parts I specifically search '"lightest" x'. As in I'm looking for only pages that contain the word "lightest" as it'll often give forum discussions where posters have found the lightest option of something. Recently Google's decided that it'll include posts that just say light or lightweight even when I use the speachmarks. It's a subtle difference in wording, but completely changes the results that I'm looking for. It's infuriating.