It all of a sudden became TERRIBLE and now I can’t find anything? When did this happen? Why did this happen?
Are you accidentally using bing?
Or google without an adblocker when you are used to google with an adblocker?
It’s been progressively getting worse over the past few years as they’ve continued to “optimize” their search engine for more ad placement and sponsored content. I’d say these past few months, it’s become borderline unusable for finding actual information.
This is the thing. It really has become unusable. Trying to find obscure information is insane no matter the keywords. It’s always the same results and, ugh, YouTube videos. You can’t find parts for older stuff easily, simple answers are gone.
Amazon is similar. Change the keywords all you like you still will get the same ‘amazon choice’ products and recommended alternatives for whatever you searched for lead to the same list. But i have to agree it really got worse unreasonably fast last few months.
Someone posted it on here, it works soooo much better and no ad bullshit
Define “sudden”.
This has been a progressively worsening problem for a good while now.
To be fair to Google, it’s not entirely their fault, there’s a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results. But even so, Google has absolutelly lost what made it useful. It’s far too concerned with try to curate for you instead of just doing damn search for the words. That helps them get more bullshit and some ads in there.
Can you explain a little what you mean by “a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results”? I’ve never heard of that before and it sounds alarming to say the least
I’m guessing they meant SEO - Search Engine Optimisation. It’s much more complex than this, but essentially finding high volume search terms and writing website content based around those terms so your page shows up higher organically.
It’s why recipe pages or simple how to guides have paragraphs semi related text that sounds like it was written by committee. The content needs to be human readable, otherwise Google flags it as spammy, but at the same time it only serves to drive up clicks based on those search terms.
The worsening has definitely been progressive over the last 10 years, but I feel there were some sudden changes over the last couple of months that make it a lot less usable than before. For some searches I get the feeling that there’s some kind of whitelist of websites that are included in the search and a huge part of the internet is being excluded. I was looking for a pretty basic diagram some days ago, nothing too obscure, and there were maybe three dozens of results in the image search. I also find more and more pages that are obviously badly translated English content when I search for German terms. I never had that problem in the past. The same goes for product testing. I tried to find a good office chair, but the websites that claim to test different models obviously try to lead you to one specific product. The texts feel like auto-generated content to simulate real articles about the products being tested, but at the end chair X, and only chair X, is the right one to buy.
To be fair to Google, it’s not entirely their fault, there’s a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results
I disagree, Google has encouraged and profited massively off of SEO, they could’ve maintained the integrity of result but instead they bent over backwards to make sure SEO methods worked as long as folks were paying Google
Maybe all the deleted and edited Reddit posts and comments are finally syncing up.
Enshittification