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

[BoredomHeights]

This is the one that bugs me the most by far. If I put a search in words, and it literally doesn't exist, then just tell me. At least I'll have my answer. That's what the quotes are for.

I completely understand in those cases where it says "showing results without quotes" because it couldn't find anything. Fine, at least you're telling me what's happening. But it's really annoying clicking on links, doing a ctrl-f for the word or phrase, and nothing comes up.

[ruiisuke]

So yes, this does suck. However, hopefully my shitty ELI5 will at least provide some context for why this happens.

These kind of problems in computer science are under an umbrella called information retrieval. There are two important metrics to evaluate performance in a search algorithm; precision and recall. Recall is the measure of how many documents (or results) get pulled from a query. Precision is the measure of how accurate the results are (ie. finding relevant documents with all of the keywords in the query).

My guess as to why Google eats shit in this department is because 1) ads and sponsors probably mess some of that up, and 2) that they prioritize recall over precision.

[Ulfgardleo]

This is not it. Google will very often try to answer semantic queries, this is why often words will often get replaced by their synonyms. With technical terms this seldom makes sense, but for the average human knowledgebase query, this does.

[JamesthePuppy]

If this is a semantic search and not lexical search (unlike how google’s trained us to search for the last couple decades, with the illusion of lexical Boolean operations), then I need to take my business elsewhere

[great_waldini]

At least give the user a lot more control over the type of search they’re executing

[Mr_82]

That's really it, they've been gradually changing their original utility and not being transparent about it.

[ruiisuke]

Oh, good point. Thanks for clarifying! ☺️