Stack Overflow has seen a substantial decline in traffic over the last year that appears to be accelerating. https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow
I think this has as much to do with Google being shit at finding stuff lately as it does llms like chatGPT
Don’t forget that Duck Duck Go is even worse at it now. It will literally change your results if you go back after clicking a link.
I think they’re trying to implement a sort of “smart prediction” thing, where it assumes that if you go back the link you clicked wasn’t relevant. And so it tries to remove closely related results. Which works the opposite if you get two results from the same page and you click the wrong one. Which makes looking up technical or programming related issues a nightmare.
You can even see the decline in posts and votes before GPT became mainstream. This definitely look more like search engine failing to get rid of those cheap copycats.
On Google and on Duck Duck Go too. On DDG you can’t get rid of the over-optimized websites anymore even if you use -“website name”. Luckily -site:address still works.
Agreed. For me, making it so that the search engine ignores -string was one of the biggest set backs.
the search engine ignores -string
WHAT? Why would they do that? WTF no wonder…
