And no it's not Just SEO/Marketing/Ad-Targeted shit on the search side, because even DDG is having these problems, and they're quite fucking scrupulous about these things.

Also, that still wouldn't explain the behaviour I'm talking about, even when accounting for SEO embedding on the site side. Again: not returning results that absolutely should come up in the search parameters, but returning those results with different, possibly less-well-related parameters.

@Wolven

Here, let me

No, wait.

Maybe it is a conspiracy so people do not learn things.

@Wolven I'm a librarian & have noticed this for about 5 years. It's like the results are best if you want a basic explanation, "what is Ryan Bergara's age?" It performs worse if you want broad information to research: "Student-Centered Policies" library.

I'm better versed in database searches, & noticed those are also declining in relevant results as they are laying off people. My theory: machine indexing without human oversight. Human intervention is what brings relevancy.

@Wolven I think the best working theory is that the internet itself is full of more and more crap.

Link/clickbait farms are full of human produced but very cheap dreck are optimized to trick search engines and run rampant now. Plus their operators work hard to play a cat-and-mouse game with the search engines over the rankings.

Meanwhile most quality content moved behind paywalls and is either not indexed or downranked.

@Wolven the gist of it is Google and co. got greedy and started showing answers to things instead of the links, going so far as to show full recipes and summaries of wikipedia articles, driving traffic away from those sites (which are largely ad-supported).

In response huge swaths of the web started requiring authentication to see anything.

Then social media platforms realized it was better for their data harvesting to make their stuff not externally searchable, and newer ones made stuff inaccessible by default (discord, insta, etc).

It turned the web into more giant walled gardens.

Then Google seems to have stopped investing in search so the SEO brigade ran wild. And every other search engine tries to be Google in one way or other.

@Wolven
Yeah. I’d been grudgingly tolerating Google’s intrusive profiling because the results were better…until they weren’t.

I’ve been enjoying Kagi, fwiw. Their results are hardly perfect either, but they have a lot less BS — more like Google circa 2012. And no onerous data gathering.

@Wolven AFAICT it's because keyword search failed years ago, and all the search engines have been moving to semantic vector search instead. The same underlying tech as LLMs, actually - training a model to vectorize a document (or fragment), then doing nearest-k neighbor search.

Which means the results are inherently less specific than they should be

@Wolven The first time I noticed google had gotten really bad was a decade ago when they decided that for every search, location data was the most important factor, so a pet shop one mile away that sold supplies for snakes would come up ahead of python the programming language.

They dialed that back a bit, but it never fully recovered.

@Wolven Search on google products seems to be terrible across the board? Youtube will literally give me three results related to a search, then 12 other videos under a "viewers also watched" or "you might also like" tab.

GIVE ME WHAT I SEARCHED FOR, ACTUALLY?

@Wolven

SEO

Plus . . if the search engine returned information that was actually helpful, then they couldn't show you MORE ADS . . as you keep trying (forever) to refine your search query to continue trying to find anything helpful