Google search engine spluttering?
 

A few weeks ago I came to realise that the long trusted and much used (100%) Google search engine was no longer what it used to be. Searches were light on both detail and scope, and obvious "hits" were not showing up. I could no longer restrict my search to within Australia or worldwide as in the past. The situation deteriorated to the degree that I've now relegated the Google icon from the main bookmark toolbar to obscurity, and replaced it - initially with Bing (which didn't last long) - and now Duck Duck Go which seems to be filling the gap.

One of the Oz newspapers suggests that Google has given the operation of the Search engine over to AI expecting it to be a radical improvement, but also reporting that the Search facility has become (as I have discovered) almost useless as a consequence.

Has anyone else noticed this, or perhaps have some extra information on the situation as reported?

Regards,
FOR

A very good move going to DuckDuckGo. Their search results are actually provided by Bing, but without the ads and privacy issues that you get using Bing &/or Google.

A great function of DDG are the 'Bangs'. e.g. type !guk 'searchterm' in the search box, and DDG will invoke a Google UK search. !a searches Amazon, !imdb searches IMDB, !w searches Wikipedia, and many more.

Full list of Bangs here - https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

Google and Bing are both feeling their way forward atm, with AI top of their mind. So far it's not working terribly well for the users, with a bit of a mess on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), of AI overviews, ads and, if you're lucky, a relevant website further down the page. It's not working too well for the website publishers either, as the AI overviews lead to an increase in 'zero click' searches, where browsers get their answer on the SERP, so don't click through to anyones website.

There is also the issue that some sites (reddit being one of them) have started to limit the amount of data they expose to google, due to the increase in people using google to search reddit to find useful information (searches such as "best 747 model site:reddit.com") in a way that only adds additional load but doesn't actually benefit the underlying community. So, the available relevant content that google has available to show you is reduced (because less is in their index) AND then you add the AI and advertising layers on top of that....

Google has a commercial arrangement with Reddit that enables it to access and index Reddit’s content.

In early 2024, Google and Reddit struck a licensing agreement reportedly worth $60 million per year. This deal allows Google exclusive access to Reddit’s vast array of user-generated content through Reddit’s Data API, which Google uses to enhance its search results and train its AI models. As part of this arrangement, Reddit has updated its robots.txt file and technical settings to block other major search engines—such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Mojeek—from crawling and indexing new Reddit content, while still permitting Google to do so.

This exclusivity gives Google a unique advantage in surfacing Reddit content in its search results and in training AI, while competitors are now unable to access recent Reddit data. The arrangement has raised concerns about competition and the broader implications for AI development and internet search diversity.

I ran Google searches for two decades, then privacy concerns caused me to go to Startpage, where we remained for five years until they got covered up with advertising. We switched to DuckDuckGo four years ago and have been completely satisfied.

- Ed

Some good advice on alternative search engines here :ok:. FYI there is also Brave, or distributed search systems such as Yacy or elasticsearch.

FP.

Thank you all for your informative input and your own experiences. Much appreciated.

Now to deal with the persistent reminders about MS Copilot ...

Best wishes
FOR

Two things can help take the nonsense out of Google search. The 'udm=14' parameter which stops the 'AI' response (search for how to use...) and the uBlacklist add-in which you can use to supress search results coming from domains with poor information. I supress theverge, quora, pinterest and the like.

At one time my job could not unreasonably be described as searching a particular Tech manufacturers web site, and reading the results. It was a frustrating business. For example, I often found myself with a document fragment in hand and being unable to find the original using either the vendors own search or public search engines.

Then came Google. Total transformation. A decently selected phrase from any document always found it. After the *first* time I tried it I used google for every search. Of course I mostly searched for documents I did not have part of and it worked very well for that too.

Over the last few years I felt that google search was degraded. It is of course hard to pin down but I was pretty sure it was badly broken. My long experience of google search made me somewhat confident of my judgement.

I recently found an explanation. It seems that Google execs were concerned that they were going to miss their ad revenue targets for the quarter and they had a crisis meeting. They realised that if they degraded the search results returned, that people would be forced to search again exposing them to more ads — so they did it. Now of course they can never go back to it working.

Cory Doctorow calls this process of degrading user utility in furtherance of other Corporate goals Ensh1ttification (usually spelled without a digit). I find it worth keeping an eye on his writings.

I had to use TinyURL because the actual URL contains spelling that is too indelicate for the sensibilities of pprune.

(digit "1" substituted to protect pprune)
"The American Dialect Society selected ensh1ttification as its 2023 word of the year. The Macquarie Dictionary named ensh1ttification as its 2024 word of the year, selected by both the committee's and people's choice votes for only the third time since the inaugural event in 2006."


https://tinyurl.com/5n8635uw
The specific process by which Google ensh1ttified its search

https://tinyurl.com/228kxmhr
Google’s ensh1ttification memos

https://x.com/doctorow

DuckDuckGo has now surpassed Google as a search engine, but Google is still useful for things like reddit. I have DDG as my default search engine, and startpage and Google as alternatives if I can't find what I want with DDG, which happens rarely.

Google is still good for things like maps and translate, although for some languages DeepL is better.

That Google search still has so much market share is I think only due to inertia. There are better search engines out there, but people stick with what they are familiar with until it is clearly bust, when it collapses overnight.

Certainly noticed a deterioration in Google searches recently, different search terms still bringing up the same, often completely irrelevant, results.