alt Hacker News> This is a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT's first public release on November 30, 2022.
The problem is that Google's search engine - but, oddly enough, ALL search engines - got worse before that already. I noticed that search engines got worse several years before 2022. So, AI further decreased the quality, but the quality had a downwards trend already, as it was. There are some attempts to analyse this on youtube (also owned by Google - Google ruins our digital world); some explanations made sense to me, but even then I am not 100% certain why Google decided to ruin google search.
One key observation I made was that the youtube search, was copied onto Google's regular search, which makes no sense for google search. If I casually search for a video on youtube, I may be semi-interested in unrelated videos. But if I search on Google search for specific terms, I am not interested in crap such as "others also searched for xyz" - that is just ruining the UI with irrelevant information. This is not the only example, Google made the search results worse here and tries to confuse the user in clicking on things. Plus placement of ads. The quality really worsened.
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There is also the fact that automatically generated content predates ChatGPT by a lot. By around 2020 most Google searches already returned lots of SEO-optimized pages made from scrapped content or keyword soups made by rudimentary language models or markov chains.
> Google made the search results worse here
Did you mean:
worse results near me
are worse results worth it
worse results net worth
best worse results
worse results reddit
ML and AI killed it between 2011-2016 somewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
I think this is about trustworthy content, not about a good search engine per se
> if I search on Google search for specific terms, I am not interested in crap such as "others also searched for xyz" - that is just ruining the UI with irrelevant information
You assume the aim here is for you to find relevant information, not increase user retention time. (I just love the corporate speak for making people's lives worse in various ways.)
Honestly the biggest failing is just SEO spam sites got too good at defeating the algorithm. The amount of bloody listicles or quora nonsense or backlink farming websties that come up in search is crazy.
Significant changes were made to Google and YouTube in 2016 and 2017 in response to the US election. The changes provided more editorial and reputation based filtering, over best content matching.
Goodhart's law applies to links, too. Google monetized them and destroyed their value as a signal.
The problem is that before Nov 30, 2022 we also had plenty of human-generated slop bearing down on the web. SEO content specifically.
the main theory is that with bad results you have to search more and get more engaged in ads so more revenue for google. Its enshitification
Are you aware of Kagi (kagi.com)?
With them, at least the AI stuff can be turned off.
Membership is presently about 61k, and seems to be growing about 2k per month: https://kagi.com/stats