Search was the biggest feature of the web in the early '00s. Now it's such a mess. I can't imagine Search will ever be amazing again, given all the complexity of providing quality while still avoiding all the crap.
I have a hard time believing an organization like Google doesn't have the resources to provide a search engine that's just as usable as what they had 6 years ago (around the time I feel like the decay really set in). Seems a lot more likely that it's just more profitable to serve up garbage sponsored content.
I’d rather see a world with numerous paid/subscription search engines, that are motivated to do nothing but return search results well. I expect you would see some of the SEO crap getting solved.
On the other hand, they can achieve virtually the same outcome while keeping plausible deniability by just not doing anything that would downrank sites with ads (of which a significant chunk is likely to be Google's).
Spam sites often include ads.
Therefore the safest option is to never openly discuss it or intentionally do it and instead use other means to achieve the objective (don't intentionally rank spam higher, just defund/cancel any projects that would make it rank lower).
Yup, and I think we've seen how careless and thoughtless Google is, as an organization, with internal comms in the Epic case. It would be shocking if it hadn't been discovered in that, or a prior, lawsuit.
But all in all, a very good article
Having said that, I’m usually still able to find what I’m looking for, if I know that it likely exists, and know the keywords to use to find it. But it’s much harder nowadays for sure.
I also wonder if google just stopped existing, would the web heal over time?
I don't buy the signal to noise argument. For example, whenever i get on youtube and get fed some content, i can immediately tell if it's had AI involved anywhere, and thumbs it down. I won't recommend it, i've called people out for linking such tripe to me (or others).
Hear me out - google got bad about 11 years ago when the dorking stopped being effective, right around the time of the spotlight search results and the sponsored junk taking the top results. Around this time, various agencies (news, etc) started gaming the SEO to respond to any remotely related search with whatever the news was currently. Google chose not to "fix" this, because we're not the customer. DDG was better for a few years for real results, too, but that has gone downhill as well.
The current zeitgeist uses stuff like tiktok and facebook for "web searches" - "food trucks near Austin, TX" or so. No one really uses web search like people on this site do, and google couldn't care less if we don't like the search results.
So it's inevitably going to become crap.