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What's going on with Google's search engine? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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It all of a sudden became TERRIBLE and now I can't find anything? When did this happen? Why did this happen?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My guess would be that it's increasingly using AI/ML and natural language over search terms to sort the results, which results in much shittier results. Power users are used to specifying the search term precisely and it no longer does anything about it.

It tries way too hard to also return news articles and blog posts instead of forum posts and other types of user-generated content. If it can find a plain "well written" english blog it'll return that over a 10 year old forum post that's super detailed but full of grammar mistakes. It's gone full corporate and strongly favors corporate interests and pushes commercial offerings more.

It used that ads were clearly labeled ads but it wouldn't surprise me now regular results gets quietly prioritized based on some sort of financial incentives.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think you're right (and I recall Google engineers have been open about using AI in past press releases.)

I suspect that Google is on the bleeding edge of what happens when a bunch of AIs try to convince other AIs to pick their schlop over the next schlop over. Very few of the involved parties are still focused on helping people (it's hard to get an AI to focus on anything) and it's starting to show.