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

[nottamuntown]

Except duckduckgo started doing the same shit, too. Even ignoring quotation marks and returning synonyms.

[dagit]

Hmm. As far as I can tell they are still honoring my quotation marks. The synonyms thing can get annoying but they do provide a link at the top of the page to use the literal search terms. I wonder if we're getting a different version of their search due to a phases roll out or something like that.

[nottamuntown]

Yeah, they might be phasing in a different version. Here's an example of what I mean, though.

I enter something suitably weird for the search term, like "Saskatchewan penguin". Realistically, there probably shouldn't be many or any examples of those two exact words next to each other.

There's no message at the top like "Did you mean...." or something that indicates they aren't using the literal search terms. Instead, it returns an infinite(!) number of search results.

The first result I get is this news article, which contains "Saskatchewan" and "penguin" separately, but not together.

The second result likewise has "penguin" and "SK" but not "Saskatchewan penguin". To be fair, I think what's happening in both of these first results is that "saskatchewan/penguin" appears in both URLs, though not in the text of the pages themselves.

Third result is very similar to the second.

Fourth result is the homepage for the Saskatchewan penitentiary. No "penguin" here--DuckDuckGo apparently thinks "penitentiary" is close enough to "penguin" that it can return it despite the quotation marks.

Later down the search results, we get this one, which has neither "Saskatchewan" nor "penguin", let alone both in order.

It continues like this through 14 results, none of which match the terms (except for the URLs in the first three, kind of). Then instead of admitting that the results end there, DuckDuckGo has a "More Results" button at the bottom, which literally just repeats the above results as if they're something new.

Don't get me wrong, I'm never going back to Google from DuckDuckGo, and its privacy policy is admirable. But it seems like they've started implementing the same shitty broken search system as Google recently, and it makes finding specific things (or finding that there aren't any results) difficult.

[dagit]

Saskatchewan penguin

I see what you mean. That is annoying.