Google Search terminal decline?

Prompted by talk of ChatGPT on another thread I have been exploring AI assistants for internet search. Google and other engines have become increasingly less useful for some time for anyone who is seeking information and factual data. The first four items of any GS are adverts then you get a block of images, and then a list of YouTube videos. If you go any deeper you get repetition and song and movie links that have some of your search words in their titles. Add to this a massive bias towards recent entries and Google is no longer “fit for purpose”. Bing and DuckDuckGo are marginally better but have their own problems.

I really miss DogPile which used to give you a page of links culled from various search engines and all different! Google also goes to the other extreme. Search for Keats and you can scroll through page after page with ALL links related to John Keats poet, when actually I wanted Keats Shimmering Dark Chocolate Truffles.

Google search has been less than useful for a while, given the adverts, the irrelevant videos (if I wanted videos I’d be in the video search part), the keyword spamming by various SEO outfits, and the progressively broken booleans.

However…

Of course searching for “Keats” will have lots to do with the poet.
Looking for “Keats Shimmering Dark Chocolate Truffles” gets exactly what you’re looking for.

Of course searching for “Keats” will have lots to do with the poet.

Lots – yes – but 100% no. It would be nice to have a bit of variety in the responses.

Looking for “Keats Shimmering Dark Chocolate Truffles” gets exactly what you’re looking for.

I prefer that the search engine do a bit of work. DogPile used to do just that. It ordered its results into hits that were not related to each other.
So with a search term of “keats” you would get Keats the poet at number one and possibly Keats College at number two but not far down the list of links would be the chocolate truffles.

Bing and DuckDuckGo are marginally better but have their own problems.

Bing? Dear god save the misguided soul…

On a Win10 machine one of the first things I do is remove that from the search engine list.

Google search has been less than useful for a while, given the adverts,

Not seen those quite a while, might turn off the ghostery filter to see if any pop up.

Edit: They do, so Ghostery is doing its job.

I asked Open AI and Google the same question. I use Spanish for searching because it does not attract so many adverts.

Google produced messy page but with a preferred answer at the top. Open AI returned one line.
The curious thing is that they did not agree on what should be a simple matter of fact.

The Question: ¿Cuál es el tanque de batalla más rapido?

Playground Open AI:-

El tanque de batalla más rápido es el tanque ruso T-14 Armata, 

que puede alcanzar velocidades de hasta 70 km/h.

Google:-

M1 Abrams

Relación potencia/peso           21,5 CV/t

Velocidad máxim                  67,72 km/h (en carretera) 48,3 km/h (a campo traviesa)

Capacidad de combustible         1900 l

Autonomía                        465,29 km (sin equipamiento adicional) 

                                 449,19 km (con el sistema NBQ)

Because they’re Americans and they’re biased. Like trying to find anywhere called Palestine on Google Map (or Apple’s one, for that matter).

“¿cual es la velocidad de la t 14 armata?” gets a link to the expected response. But, a useful lesson to learn about the biases of the service you’re using.

Steve – written looking for data sheets of obscure components, you’ll oven come across useful looking snippets that’s actually from a junk domain that tries to redirect you to hotbabes.xxx or somesuch rubbish.
Bing, for all it’s faults, doesn’t have this content, and I’ve actually found more useful information (okay, in Chinese so copy paste into Translate needed) as Google… Google is a ghost of the search that kicked Altavista’s arse into orbit. Google is painfully clearly only in it for the money now, and the selection of search results shows it – especially the number of times I get links to alldatasheet.com that doesn’t have what I’m looking for and instead offers plenty of irrelevant datasheets instead. It is rather astonishing to have searches spammed by a site that isn’t full of embedded adverts.

I prefer that the search engine do a bit of work.

That’s like looking for “dead” and complaining that “Deadpool” isn’t on the first page. ¹
The world is big, there are many things, and that bloke was more famous than an exclusive chocolatier in London. Try, at least, adding the word “chocolate” to help narrow it down?

¹ But The Grateful Dead are, so Google got something right.

looking for data sheets of obscure components, you’ll oven come across useful looking snippets that’s actually from a junk domain that tries to redirect you to hotbabes.xxx or somesuch rubbish.

Hmmm, was it Sprow or Steve R decided to search for nice racks and lost a few hours on a different subject?

The world is big, there are many things

Agreed, and I would like my search engine to reflect this variety in its response.
One way would be to apply a logarithmic algorithm. to rank results.
For example if you search Google for the single word “madonna” it gives a page with 36 out of 36 links to Madonna Louise Ciccone. John Lennon claime to be more famous the Jesus Christ, and Ms Ciccone may be more famous than Holy Mary Mother of God but she probably owes her name to her.
Give a human single word and ask for associations and you will get a range of answers.

Google uses AS to rank its results (Artificial Stupidity).

AM – artificial marketing, with added data slurping thrown in for free

Its google not godgle

I must search for the wrong things ’cos google is still working fine here! pihole takes care of the ads.

pihole takes care of the ads.

Pihole does not stop Google serving up its first four links on behalf of the highest bidder. The highest links are always paid for ads. PiHole in fact is a nuisance in this context. Google serves the ad link and PiHole prevents you accessing it. Click on any link with Ad before the URL usually gives:
An error occurred when connecting to www.googleadservices.com
Couldn’t connect to server
To access the link I have to suspend PiHole for 3 minutes.

Google sucks because it does not disambiguate.

Google serves the ad link and PiHole prevents you accessing it.

Sounds like PiHole is working as intended.

An error occurred when connecting to www.googleadservices.com

You’re not going to the link, you’re going to Google who will track that, and then forward you to the link you thought you were getting.

It’s actually rather amusing looking for some datasheets using Chrome. Google sometimes sets it up so all search links point to Google, and Google then tries to redirect you to the destination. But if it’s an http only link, Chrome won’t auto-download unless you force it (open link in new tab). If it is it’s own popup, it’ll either silently vanish or simply be an empty white screen. An empty white screen with a gibberish Google URL.

To access the link I have to suspend PiHole for 3 minutes.

If you’re really interested – open a new Google search and look for the company that placed the advert. You ought to find a regular non-spammy link.

Google sucks because it does not disambiguate.

What country are you in? What browser?

Here, using my phone in desktop mode, the top of the search says “Ads” and “Shop outdoor flood light” with various options.
Below that, other options with star ratings underneath. And for some reason, manomano.fr is offering floodlights from €3,99 to €1,237.64!
There are other items with ratings. I don’t know if they are paid placements, or if that’s only the ones marked “Ads” and the others use some sort of common API to get ratings.
Below that, images, “People also ask” and so on. Looks like a pretty usual search result for that sort of thing.

Using Netsurf, there are no ads at the top, and various little yellow triangles. I’m guessing these are the ratings, but Netsurf isn’t advanced enough to do it properly.

pen a new Google search and look for the company that placed the advert. You ought to find a regular non-spammy link

Or, in Firefox on Windows – use the Google search link fix add-on and never see an ad-saturated “I came via Google who say I need this set of ads” link ?

Have tried the google test yet?
To do this search for any common product or search maybe ice cream, it will come back with millions of finds.
Then start clicking on the page numbers on the bottom the first couple of pages will still lists millions of hits.
Just keep going back page by page when you get to say page 16 or 17 check out the number at the top it will surprise you.
Report back the number.

Hmmm? Page 25 of about 1,400,000,000

First page has wikipedia link as the top item, later pages start with various ice cream vendor sites, somewhere in the 20s it shifts to news links with ice cream content.

If I turn off the browser add-on elements the adverts get top billing and are discretely marked as adverts, with the add-on enabled those links disappear from the front page, maybe totally for every page.

What number is at the top of the page? Page 1 About 1,470,000,000 results (0.52 seconds) Page 26 of about 253 results (1.53 seconds)
this was mine

Interesting. Doing a similar search in Dutch (roomijs) yields about 3,530,000 results, but at page 17 it suddenly stops: just 169 results.
Admittedly, in my countless google searches over the years I very rarely tried the second page as well, let alone the third or beyond, but nevertheless I feel cheated.

So are they BS us on how good there product is or are they just showing what they can make money out of and dumping the rest in the dustbin

Google.fr, ice cream.

Page 1: About 1,460,000,000 results (0.56 seconds)

And…

Page 15 of about 271 results (1.15 seconds)

I believe there probably are a billion results for something like ice cream, but if what you’re looking for isn’t in the first 15-20 pages, they simply can’t be bothered listing any more.

As for BS, I’ll point you in the direction of Theranos. Any bollocks to entice clueless investors to part with their cash…

This post is an apology for complaining about Google not working the way it used to.
The complaint falls into “the parable of the fig tree” category.
(man rests under shade of fig tree in mid day sun then goes on his way. fig tree dies. man come back and complains to God about missing facility. God asks, did you plant it, water it, make it grow etc, no, you were freeloading, get over it.)

Given how much PII is pilfered and sold, I’d contend that most of us do pay, we just don’t know that we pay…

After all, it takes a huge amount of money to maintain the infrastructure. They don’t do it out of altruism.

They don’t do it out of altruism.

They don’t? That’s very nearly destroyed my faith in my fellow humans, but for one small detail.