Last night I watched a YouTube video that had a song in the background that I hadn't heard but really liked. I pulled up Shazam but it didn't recognize the song, so I took to Google. I entered the lyric and added the search terms "lyrics" and "r&b" at the end. Google returned 4 YouTube videos to songs that didn't contain the lyric, a link to a Boyz II Men song on Genius that didn't contain the lyric (good job Google, you know an R&B band), a link to peterbe.com to find a song by lyrics, and a bunch of other useless links. I clicked on to page 2, which hilariously presented 3 of the 4 YouTube videos that were on page 1.
I was immediately turned off, so I pulled up DuckDuckGo and Bing, entered the same exact query, and both engines returned the song I was looking for in the first result. I laughed out loud.
I then thought to myself, "I wonder how many pages I would have had to flip through in Google to find this result." Eventually, I found it. It was the 68th result on page 7.
I'm still bitter that they've deprioritized results from SongMeanings.net in favor of garbage like Genius. The former is one of the only sources for lyrics from smaller acts, especially from the 90's to early 2010's. Since it's from the pre-Web 2.0 era, it's disappeared from Google's search results.
Google results have for a while stopped having anything to do with the actual search query. In the past they were magical, like Google could almost read your mind and guess exactly what you mean, but nowadays you can type in the exact search string, and still have the first page of results where Google just ommited half of the string to give you sponsored content. Like even for simple "C# <name of class>" why are the first few results for pages that sell programming courses?????
It's gone to absolute shitter and it's just not worth using outside of a very narrow set of circumstances(when you actually do want to buy something I guess?)
I have the opposite experience most of the time. I’ve been trying to use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine but I end up clicking my Google bookmark a lot of the time because the DDG results are so low quality.
I have no doubt there are edge cases where Bing/DDG outperform Google, but most of the time I have better luck with Google.
It's getting bad enough where I'll put in a two word search, and one of them is unique and the obvious main keyword, but not necessarily obscure, and somehow the first several results still don't have the word. It's frustrating to the extreme.
Google results for lyrics used to be filled with hundreds of scummy SEOed sites that stole content from each other. I wonder if some SEO-blocking algo change has had the effect of blocking all song lyrics from google results.
I tried for few months, but unfortunately DDG results are really poor for local searches. Whenever I want to find something in Polish, half of the results are from some autotranslated websites. Also Google is the only one that shows local business in a useful way.
Under Search tools there is a toggle for all results/verbatim. If you switch it to verbatim it will give you something closer to you want. I hate that it is this way, and that most of the old google hacking tricks don't work.
The problem is that Google is no longer a search engine for the world wide web. It is an app that can answer questions, that happens to also have a web front end
I do not hold any love for Google but to be fair when I look up songs by lyrics, or lyrics by the name of the song or the combination it works just fine for me.
But they probably know that I never klick on ads unless specifically searching to buy something
I'm just gonna throw this out there as I'm noticing it more and more at this point since switching languages.
What the actual F has happened to google search results for programming issues?
I used to be able to google a question and get, more or less, a right answer from a forum or stack overflow.
Recently, many coding tutorial websites have clearly figured out how to hack googles pageranks and now instead of one 'right enough answer', its 5 clone 'tutorial' websites, with all the same crappy answer that isn't actually what I was asking. Like I can't use google for coding questions any more. Not like I was able to previously. Also, Stackoverflow with bangs from ddg are broken and it thinks I'm a robot. No answer except to go to SO directly and search.
Yeah I’ve noticed this too. But also the rest of the front page is often either seo spam (like those Pinterest links which catch whatever search term you’ve used) or shopping sites. I’ve found google search to be increasingly hostile to its customers.
I guess we’re not the customers. Use duckduckgo or something else.
Google, even after all its attempts, is still a one trick pony. They have to grow at least 20% year over year to justify the market cap. They weren’t able to create a two pillar company like Amazon (AWS + Retail) so what do uncreative master executives naturally turn to? Of course their only cash cow.
“ Rabban! I place you in charge of Arrakis. It's yours to squeeze, as I promised. I want you to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze!” - Dune
I've been thinking of that Harkonnen line more and more lately. The film reminded me of it. The unfortunate thing is, as in Dune, the squeeze can last for many years. This is why they warned us about monopolies.
Just as I saw this link a notification popped up on my Pixel phone:
> Trending: "Turkey inflation rate"
> See search results
I've already put a lot of effort into purging as many categories of Google spam notifications from my phone as possible, but they just keep adding new categories that I have to track down and opt out of individually. And the only way to silence them from the notification itself is to block all notifications from that app/service.
I paid good money for this phone — just stop with the OS-integrated spam! It's a never ending game of spam whackamole with Google these days. I guess various product owners are incentivised to increase "engagement" or whatever, but right now they're just increasing my engagement with Apple's product pages.
I like my pixel phone. It runs GrapheneOS, and it only took a few hours of futzing to get the camera to perform like stock.
(The wireless charging stand is a different story. It has a fan, and the only way to disable the fan involves running some system extension that requires deep kernel integration with the factory version of Android. Other than that, it's been remarkably trouble free.)
I run /e/ OS ( a de-Googled Android clone) on a Fairphone 3+ device as my daily driver and it's been quite liberating being freed from the yolk of Google exploitative practises.
The problem with profit optimising companies is that they don’t know when to stop. They will keep squeezing every last drop of blood out of their products, and their employees, until the business fail, or a competitor gets competitive enough. Especially when they hire a “General Manager” who’s only expertise is to force a 10% cost reduction on the business every year. Until the business is a dead corpse. But by then of course the CEO has already skipped ship and started the cycle again with another company.
I feel like using search engines has become a "jargon arms race" where you have to be smart enough to figure out the right combination of synonyms for what you want, that advertisers, seo spammers, and regulators haven't figured out how to stimey yet. Jargon is almost like a different language at this point, where if you know how to speak in esoteric jargon you have unfettered access to information, and if you don't, then information rapidly approaches unobtainable.
Even that doesn't help in cases as Google will interpret your jargon filled query to something that's a lower common denominator and return irrelevant results regardless.
To be fair, it depends on the screen. The submission makes it sound like the whole first page is ads, but there’s 4 ads at the top instead of the usual 2-3. It happens to extend to the fold in this Twitter user’s browser.
I scroll past all ads out of habit[0], so honestly this doesn’t impact my Google usage. Wish I didn’t have to train that muscle, but here we are. :(
Firefox + Ublock & Privacy Badger, on desktop and mobile. I also use Blokada on Android. This combination stops most ads, and if a few sneak through it is easy to create a custom rule.
While I still find Google useful, especially Google Scholar, I've primarily moved to DuckDuckGo for most casual searches.
It’s a band-aid. Just let Google slowly die, it’s already time when you should pull the plug – the patient is brain-dead for several years and there is no hope.
Use DuckDuckGo it’s a lot better with relevant search results and privacy friendly.
“The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates.”
-Gabe Newell
When the pain of watching ads becomes greater then the pain of setting up a way to block ads.
Now that I think about it, I don't use search engines very much anymore, at least not in the traditional way. My searches are almost all site:$foo.
Actually, a good majority of my searches are site:reddit.com {product I am looking for}, or site:news.ycombinator.com {some tech thing I want to find again}.
I think there is a comparison here to how inbound telephone calls, or to some extent email, have been made useless by marketers. Google searches for "Phoenix {thing}" tend to be almost all yelp/yelp clone spam.
edit: this made me actually look in my history. It seems that by far the thing I am using google for the most is image search. Second from that is spelling/grammar sanity checks.
The Facebook stock debacle from yesterday makes me think that maybe there is a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line. For a while it seemed like companies like FB had captured enough of the market that they seemed impervious to backlash from their many controversies, too big to fail in a way. It’s too early to tell if this is the beginning of FB’s demise, but it looks like letting resentment towards your product build among your user base can come bite you in a very real way after all.
FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out. Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. When Apple added restrictions that cut off oxygen to FB, FB started a PR campaign to paint it as one grave injustice. It seems like that was met with a collective shrug. Who cheers for the bad guy?
All that is to say, it seems like Google has been in this value extraction mode for a while and I don’t see what the long term plan is. They don’t seem to be innovating much, but are instead intent on squeezing as much money as they can from their existing assets. And while that may work in the short term, FB has shown tech giants are not invincible. I’ve seen a lot of talk online lately about how bad the quality of search results have gotten. If a credible competitor emerges, I think a lot of users would gladly switch. If/when that happens, Google better hope they don’t find themselves in FB’s position where they can’t acquire their way out of their rut.
…a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line…
Reading that line I just realized that google lost me as a YouTube viewer in the past two weeks. I used to follow a bunch of ~100k subscriber channels that produced content every couple of weeks on building things and how to build things. I'd generally watch one or two 10-30 minute videos a day.
They've cranked the ads through the roof to the point that I'd see the same 6 second Liberty Mutual bit three times before the video even got through its introduction along with a couple other ads.
I now realize its been days since I even went to the site. So I guess for this n=1 we've found the limit.
> FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement with their product and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out.
> Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content.
Tiktok does this very well. I usually end up feeling good after using TikTok. On the other hand Twitter makes me stressed, FB is not much used by my friends age group or only used for memes, and Instagram is now showing me two ads every three stories that is really a pain to use.
>Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content.
TikTok has by far the best recommender system I have ever tried. After an hour of use the system had correctly narrowed down my interests of exoplanets, space exploration, technology, and startups.
However that also means TikTok is the most hypertuned echochamber. I hope people don't get their political views from TikTok.
Where do normal people go from Google? I've seen plenty of billboards for DDG, and even radio ads, but how likely is it that a user will switch (& persist) when their browser is controlled by the offending company that isn't afraid of implementing dark patterns to get the users back? Anecdotally, I have a senior citizen neighbor who asked me to look at her computer because of ads (I figured malware/adware) and she was somehow already using Firefox as her browser, so her problem was just resolved by installing uBlock Origin.
Users defecting from FB have a number of options, driven by their in person network, search doesn't. How do new search engines communicate that Google is turning up the (ad/spam) heat and they need to escape the pot? Search results are subjective (that's why Google uses human raters), so what does it take for users, en masse, to start questioning their search results quality and/or excessive number of ads?
You're misreading the situation. It's not user hostility that's inherently the issue, it's that the demographics are aggressive and Facebook is failing to capture the younger, more captive audiences.
In principle making a some-of-the-web search engine is a tractable problem. Start by indexing known high quality, preferably moderated sites. Allow trusted users to upload their bookmarks for indexing. And so on...
My guess is the reason there are so few competitors is economics. You can't get investment as long as Google stock is a sure bet. Few will pay for your service as long as Google is answering their questions. Advertisers aren't interested as their money is more effectively spent on Google. Therefore you can't build an audience sure to lack of revenue/capital.
it s really a mess. Searching for 'viper' brings up 'Viber' as the first result, the rest is cars except for a link to 'viperidae'. It's a goddamn snake, google
Most people are fairly resistant to changing their behaviour because of annoyances. Take broadcast TV for example. From the 50's to the early aughts, TV's only competition was theatres, and its in-home convenience let it win that competition handily in terms of the hours people spent watching TV versus going to the theatre. Television providers took full advantage and the percentage of ads by airtime steadily increased. Shows that were designed around commercial breaks in one era had to be cut down in length and have additional breaks added when rerun in later eras.
There was no meaningful competition, either from alternative media distributors or between broadcasters to see who could offer more actual content per hour. It wasn't until streaming came along that cable TV finally started dying. This isn't a huge issue for cable companies, since most have pivoted into operating as ISP's and streaming itself. It's only a matter of time before cable TV is no longer offered as a service by the companies created to offer it.
Google's search engine has few competitors. Even the search function on many websites is inferior to a google search restricted to that site. The ads in google search results can be scrolled through in seconds, although Google constantly plays games to make it harder to tell where the ads stop. Their search algorithm is now suspicious in how it sorts the non-ad results of many searches. All of this is annoying to users, but is it annoying enough to force users onto other search engines? Google appears to be determined to find out just how much spam is too much.
Will DuckDuckGo or other alternatives to google gain traction as a result of this? Probably some, but probably not much. They likely won't make much of a dent in Google's bottom line until they offer something compellingly superior to Google, just as streaming is superior to broadcast TV.
I wonder if there would be a good way to monetize a search engine such that returning great results gets them paid.
Like a check in if you found what you were looking for, give a penny. Or potentially not what you were looking for, but something that you are happy you found. Thus giving back good info to the search engine and only pay a nominal amount when you get what you want.
The not so happy thing about this is that at this point the entire web is somewhat flawed. Too many sites have produced too much junk content just to game Google. A fundamentally new approach is needed to identify and surface “organic” (whatever that may mean) results. So I suspect (albeit with no data to show for it) that even if we just switched all ads off we still wouldn't be happy with the results that we see.
Google’s revenue model has been at odds for far too long with identifying and weeding out SEO spam. I don't mean 'spam' here in a derogatory way, but rather everyone who has a legitimate and interesting product and has had their back against the wall and was forced to play the SEO game and become a 'search spammer'
As a result 'spammers' (again, pretty much every site these days) 'won' because it was and still is the only way to survive.
I work in medical education related tech and I make content. I spend a lot of time searching for information related to medicine online - knowledge aimed more at the actual medical practitioners. One of the big irritants in this research is how much the ad model has warped everything to be centered on the patient. I'm not totally blocked but I do feel hindered. For example if I'm looking for a procedure it's far more likely for the results to be from sources which dilute and simplify because they're intended on selling patients on something.
If I were presented with an information search product capable of being aware of my specific needs and adapting itself for these needs, I could probably convince my higher-ups to actually pay for something like this. I really wish I could get the same experience doing medical research as the one I get when searching programming related questions, which often return detailed explanations on stackoverflow, actual documentation and other valuable content.
On another and somewhat different note I'm from a specific European country and I've noticed searching in my language in topics related to my country is even worse. If I'm searching for important information regarding something specific for my country, like taxes/institutional affairs, the google search is basically unusable because the results are infested with obnoxious endless clickbait/GDPRconsent/cookies/garbage/websites. I vividly remember how search results in my country used to return forums and conversations, but from what I understand everyone is on FB groups which aren't displayed. There is so much out there being talked about that doesn't seem to 'exist' in the eyes of a search algo.
I think they've already done that–only since they are a software company they decided that it would be better to write an OS for portrait mode monitors, and make it free, off-loading those pesky manufacturing steps. Ideally the OS would be attached to a device that the consumer would bring with them everywhere and have fancy geo-locating tools that tell Google where they go, you know for better ad attr-err search relevance!
[+] [-] tomatofrank|4 years ago|reply
I was immediately turned off, so I pulled up DuckDuckGo and Bing, entered the same exact query, and both engines returned the song I was looking for in the first result. I laughed out loud.
I then thought to myself, "I wonder how many pages I would have had to flip through in Google to find this result." Eventually, I found it. It was the 68th result on page 7.
[+] [-] heavyset_go|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gambiting|4 years ago|reply
It's gone to absolute shitter and it's just not worth using outside of a very narrow set of circumstances(when you actually do want to buy something I guess?)
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
I have no doubt there are edge cases where Bing/DDG outperform Google, but most of the time I have better luck with Google.
[+] [-] Tenoke|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colordrops|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbierwagen|4 years ago|reply
Google results for lyrics used to be filled with hundreds of scummy SEOed sites that stole content from each other. I wonder if some SEO-blocking algo change has had the effect of blocking all song lyrics from google results.
[+] [-] pps|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|4 years ago|reply
The problem is that Google is no longer a search engine for the world wide web. It is an app that can answer questions, that happens to also have a web front end
[+] [-] mv4|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] FpUser|4 years ago|reply
But they probably know that I never klick on ads unless specifically searching to buy something
[+] [-] gundmc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RosanaAnaDana|4 years ago|reply
What the actual F has happened to google search results for programming issues?
I used to be able to google a question and get, more or less, a right answer from a forum or stack overflow.
Recently, many coding tutorial websites have clearly figured out how to hack googles pageranks and now instead of one 'right enough answer', its 5 clone 'tutorial' websites, with all the same crappy answer that isn't actually what I was asking. Like I can't use google for coding questions any more. Not like I was able to previously. Also, Stackoverflow with bangs from ddg are broken and it thinks I'm a robot. No answer except to go to SO directly and search.
[+] [-] ssss11|4 years ago|reply
I guess we’re not the customers. Use duckduckgo or something else.
[+] [-] omot|4 years ago|reply
Google, even after all its attempts, is still a one trick pony. They have to grow at least 20% year over year to justify the market cap. They weren’t able to create a two pillar company like Amazon (AWS + Retail) so what do uncreative master executives naturally turn to? Of course their only cash cow.
“ Rabban! I place you in charge of Arrakis. It's yours to squeeze, as I promised. I want you to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze!” - Dune
[+] [-] fshbbdssbbgdd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] globular-toast|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] octoberfranklin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majani|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffparsons|4 years ago|reply
> Trending: "Turkey inflation rate" > See search results
I've already put a lot of effort into purging as many categories of Google spam notifications from my phone as possible, but they just keep adding new categories that I have to track down and opt out of individually. And the only way to silence them from the notification itself is to block all notifications from that app/service.
I paid good money for this phone — just stop with the OS-integrated spam! It's a never ending game of spam whackamole with Google these days. I guess various product owners are incentivised to increase "engagement" or whatever, but right now they're just increasing my engagement with Apple's product pages.
[+] [-] hedora|4 years ago|reply
(The wireless charging stand is a different story. It has a fan, and the only way to disable the fan involves running some system extension that requires deep kernel integration with the factory version of Android. Other than that, it's been remarkably trouble free.)
[+] [-] 6LLvveMx2koXfwn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbrodersen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jart|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjcoles|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmckn|4 years ago|reply
I scroll past all ads out of habit[0], so honestly this doesn’t impact my Google usage. Wish I didn’t have to train that muscle, but here we are. :(
[0] my pihole breaks the links anyway
[+] [-] vlark|4 years ago|reply
While I still find Google useful, especially Google Scholar, I've primarily moved to DuckDuckGo for most casual searches.
[+] [-] lukestateson|4 years ago|reply
Use DuckDuckGo it’s a lot better with relevant search results and privacy friendly.
[+] [-] collsni|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LoveMortuus|4 years ago|reply
When the pain of watching ads becomes greater then the pain of setting up a way to block ads.
Blocking ads will become the norm.
They're doing this to themselves.
[+] [-] blhack|4 years ago|reply
Actually, a good majority of my searches are site:reddit.com {product I am looking for}, or site:news.ycombinator.com {some tech thing I want to find again}.
I think there is a comparison here to how inbound telephone calls, or to some extent email, have been made useless by marketers. Google searches for "Phoenix {thing}" tend to be almost all yelp/yelp clone spam.
edit: this made me actually look in my history. It seems that by far the thing I am using google for the most is image search. Second from that is spelling/grammar sanity checks.
[+] [-] enumjorge|4 years ago|reply
FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out. Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. When Apple added restrictions that cut off oxygen to FB, FB started a PR campaign to paint it as one grave injustice. It seems like that was met with a collective shrug. Who cheers for the bad guy?
All that is to say, it seems like Google has been in this value extraction mode for a while and I don’t see what the long term plan is. They don’t seem to be innovating much, but are instead intent on squeezing as much money as they can from their existing assets. And while that may work in the short term, FB has shown tech giants are not invincible. I’ve seen a lot of talk online lately about how bad the quality of search results have gotten. If a credible competitor emerges, I think a lot of users would gladly switch. If/when that happens, Google better hope they don’t find themselves in FB’s position where they can’t acquire their way out of their rut.
[+] [-] jws|4 years ago|reply
Reading that line I just realized that google lost me as a YouTube viewer in the past two weeks. I used to follow a bunch of ~100k subscriber channels that produced content every couple of weeks on building things and how to build things. I'd generally watch one or two 10-30 minute videos a day.
They've cranked the ads through the roof to the point that I'd see the same 6 second Liberty Mutual bit three times before the video even got through its introduction along with a couple other ads.
I now realize its been days since I even went to the site. So I guess for this n=1 we've found the limit.
[+] [-] el-salvador|4 years ago|reply
> Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content.
Tiktok does this very well. I usually end up feeling good after using TikTok. On the other hand Twitter makes me stressed, FB is not much used by my friends age group or only used for memes, and Instagram is now showing me two ads every three stories that is really a pain to use.
[+] [-] keewee7|4 years ago|reply
TikTok has by far the best recommender system I have ever tried. After an hour of use the system had correctly narrowed down my interests of exoplanets, space exploration, technology, and startups.
However that also means TikTok is the most hypertuned echochamber. I hope people don't get their political views from TikTok.
[+] [-] vgeek|4 years ago|reply
Users defecting from FB have a number of options, driven by their in person network, search doesn't. How do new search engines communicate that Google is turning up the (ad/spam) heat and they need to escape the pot? Search results are subjective (that's why Google uses human raters), so what does it take for users, en masse, to start questioning their search results quality and/or excessive number of ads?
[+] [-] endisneigh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soheil|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elliekelly|4 years ago|reply
> further evidence to long $GOOG tbh
[+] [-] alangibson|4 years ago|reply
My guess is the reason there are so few competitors is economics. You can't get investment as long as Google stock is a sure bet. Few will pay for your service as long as Google is answering their questions. Advertisers aren't interested as their money is more effectively spent on Google. Therefore you can't build an audience sure to lack of revenue/capital.
[+] [-] jdrc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beloch|4 years ago|reply
There was no meaningful competition, either from alternative media distributors or between broadcasters to see who could offer more actual content per hour. It wasn't until streaming came along that cable TV finally started dying. This isn't a huge issue for cable companies, since most have pivoted into operating as ISP's and streaming itself. It's only a matter of time before cable TV is no longer offered as a service by the companies created to offer it.
Google's search engine has few competitors. Even the search function on many websites is inferior to a google search restricted to that site. The ads in google search results can be scrolled through in seconds, although Google constantly plays games to make it harder to tell where the ads stop. Their search algorithm is now suspicious in how it sorts the non-ad results of many searches. All of this is annoying to users, but is it annoying enough to force users onto other search engines? Google appears to be determined to find out just how much spam is too much.
Will DuckDuckGo or other alternatives to google gain traction as a result of this? Probably some, but probably not much. They likely won't make much of a dent in Google's bottom line until they offer something compellingly superior to Google, just as streaming is superior to broadcast TV.
[+] [-] gamerDude|4 years ago|reply
Like a check in if you found what you were looking for, give a penny. Or potentially not what you were looking for, but something that you are happy you found. Thus giving back good info to the search engine and only pay a nominal amount when you get what you want.
[+] [-] hartem_|4 years ago|reply
Google’s revenue model has been at odds for far too long with identifying and weeding out SEO spam. I don't mean 'spam' here in a derogatory way, but rather everyone who has a legitimate and interesting product and has had their back against the wall and was forced to play the SEO game and become a 'search spammer' As a result 'spammers' (again, pretty much every site these days) 'won' because it was and still is the only way to survive.
[+] [-] scyzoryk_xyz|4 years ago|reply
If I were presented with an information search product capable of being aware of my specific needs and adapting itself for these needs, I could probably convince my higher-ups to actually pay for something like this. I really wish I could get the same experience doing medical research as the one I get when searching programming related questions, which often return detailed explanations on stackoverflow, actual documentation and other valuable content.
On another and somewhat different note I'm from a specific European country and I've noticed searching in my language in topics related to my country is even worse. If I'm searching for important information regarding something specific for my country, like taxes/institutional affairs, the google search is basically unusable because the results are infested with obnoxious endless clickbait/GDPRconsent/cookies/garbage/websites. I vividly remember how search results in my country used to return forums and conversations, but from what I understand everyone is on FB groups which aren't displayed. There is so much out there being talked about that doesn't seem to 'exist' in the eyes of a search algo.
Weird times.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riversflow|4 years ago|reply
(perhaps that's what you were going for?)
[+] [-] heartbeats|4 years ago|reply