[pastamania]

I'm largely mystified at a lot of the 'Google is rubbish now' takes, but dev documentation is one of the areas that I genuinely find Google was better at a few years ago. I actually do tend to get answers to my questions, but a lot of them are desperately outdated and no longer relevant.

My take on what happened is that Google has a metric in their algorithms called 'Query deserves freshness' - basically, identifying a search where the user isn't going to want old information, and artifically promoting more recent pages over better linked to but older documents. If someone wants to see the weather, they probably aren't looking for the weather on an extremely weird day 4 years ago just because a lot of people linked to it back then.

They seem to have reduced that down, I suspect to reduce search being flooded with misinformation during the pandemic when all information was recent and the more controversial takes sometimes got more coverage. As an unexpected result, if I'm searching a dev query, it ends up surfacing a ton of results from years ago. Yeah, those pages may have more links and history and probably seem to an algorithm to be more trustworthy, but if it's for a library 20 versions old that long since stopped working the way the stackoverflow answer from 2011 says it did, that's pretty useless.

Still, as a trade off, probably better me having to use the time filter dropdown to limit results to recent one's than someone necking bleach and horse de-wormer when they get Covid. And while I'm not quite as onboard with GPT being the death of search as some, dev documentation is one of those areas where generative AI is genuinely a better tool than web search ever was.