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Thanks for explaining! It's infuriating to craft a search query containing all the keywords/operators needed to return relevant results - a search query that would return relevant results 24 months ago - only to see Google ignore 75% of keywords completely, extract some commonly-used pair of words from the query, and return 5 pages of results based exclusively on said pair.

What was the motive behind this change? Was the previous algorithm really giving people results so bad that Google felt they had to hamstring their flagship product? It seemed to be getting better and better until this...

This is a long going change. Google has been making their search fuzzier for years claiming it gets better results for most people.

For a while I personally experienced better results on the queries I didn't know the exact name of the thing I was searching for. But those days are gone, because nowadays their search is so fuzzy that it can't extract the correct context from those queries.

Because you aren't supposed to Google search by entering in a bunch of keywords you're supposed to ask Google questions.

Not that your workflow is incorrect, I'm a DDG user and I do the same thing, but that's what Google wants people using their product to do.

Wait, are you saying Google is the new 'Ask Jeeves'?!? :)

Kidding. Anyway, DDG has been my default for months now. Absolutely love it.

The only thing I've really had to change, is to remember to type in a city/ state when looking for local businesses.

Other than that, it feels so great to not be the product!

The motivation is always the ability to sell ads against the results.

If you ever want to get a good google result you "have" "to" "enclose" "every" "single" "word" "in" "separate" "quotes".

Very tedious, especially given it's the current year.

That would be a very simple extension. I imagine it already exists. Or even better a greasemonkey script could do it.

This is true. Thank you for saying it. Made my life much better just to know what happened to Google.

I had a serious impression that 24 months ago Google was absurdly good. So good that I thought no DDG would ever be compared to it. It returned exactly what I wanted all the time with just 2 words in the query.

Today it doesn't ever return what I want, because it seems to ignore what I've searched for more and more. It thinks it knows what I meant more than I do and I can't tell it otherwise.

DDG doesn't have the weight of history that is ruining google. When you google something and can't tell if it's wrong until you click through it reinforces the weighting of that wrong result. It will keep referring you to that 10 year old stack-overflow post that is no longer relevant because it's 6 major versions behind.

I think Google is a bit smarter about that? I.e., I'm pretty sure it detects things like "you click on one link, come back after 10 sec, click on another link and then never come back" and correctly attributes the weight to the link you stayed on.

Possible I'm wrong though. Or could be the heuristics for how long you stay on the page are off. E.g., it can take me a while to realize that some GitHub issue page doesn't help me at all, and I click back, then find another page and get the answer immediately. But maybe Google thinks "well they spent a while on that page, they probably got something useful out of it even if it didn't totally answer their question".

I open anything seemingly relevant in a new tab, run uBlock so they can't track me on the destination page and more often than not forget to close the search tab. So they'd be getting more bad information than good to work with. Even this is somewhat self reinforcing as the quality of search drops I'm more likely to open in tabs.

I think this is very common for developers, but then again the amount of shitty SPA sites that don't work with tabs...

Do you have some example queries?

Sure, if the engine has to guess whether you mean A or B, then whenever two engines make different calls, one of them is wrong.

Even being right 99.9% of billions of queries means being wrong many times.

This calls for statistical analysis, not cherry picking examples or asymmetric sample like "given a bad result from X, Y does better."

Well, in my experience, the quality of the search results I get from Google overall has fallen quite a lot over the last few years, to the point where for any given search, DDG is far more likely to surface what I'm looking for.

This isn't just about certain cherry-picked examples.