why do search engines suck now wait before we get ahead of ourselves do
search engines suck now are they actually getting worse or have they just
changed in a way that I personally hate just by glancing at the first page of a
Google or being search it's easy to find a long list of potential complaints paid
sponsors crowd out the first few search results there's annoying little widgets
everywhere and it keeps giving you barely related suggestions for what to
search next like a lame Choose Your Own Adventure book but why does this search
page have so many ads isn't an interesting question it's because money
the more interesting question is why it feels like it's gotten harder to find
the information you want despite all those supposedly helpful
widgets the answer is also because money
but it's worth unpacking why it's
difficult to get a lot of rigorous data on this subject but at least a few researchers have tried to answer whether
or not search engines are in fact getting worse one recent German study
did a survey of over 7,000 product review Searchers on being Google and
duck Dogo over the course of a year and concluded that you could still find
useful information but it was being drowned out by a torent of lowquality
content especially SEO spam top rank
Pages typically were heavily optimized and littered with affiliate marketing
links and they also showed clear markers of lower content quality there's not a
ton of academic papers on this issue but there's plenty of data on the web
showing how users have changed their behavior to sidestep lowquality highly
optimized results one possible indicator that search engines suck now is the
growing use of Reddit as a def facto search engine sadly redit own internal
search function has long been considered what the experts call absolute trash but
that hasn't stopped Savvy users from just sticking the word Reddit on
otherwise unrelated Google search queries it's a well-known tactic for
cutting out SEO ified garbage and vapid listicles because it effectively
bypasses the weaknesses of both search engines and Reddit itself
Reddit isn't perfect just ask any redditor but on the modern internet it
does a rare and special thing it allows users to direct their question to a
bunch of big old nerds who care more about being right than they care about
making money off the interaction if you search site colon reddit.com search
engine bad you'll find plenty of posts complaining about the decaying state of
modern search engines going back over a decade there has however been a pretty
major uptic in such posts over the last 2 years separately Google Trends data
shows that Reddit has been steadily gaining popularity as a search term
since 2010 when news aggregator dig shot themselves in the foot with a
controversial redesign and started bleeding users that growth remained
steady until December 2021 when users started appending Reddit to their
searches at an increased rate over 40% of reddit's growth as a Google search
term since 2010 is from the end of 2021
onward a bit over 2 years now there are
a lot of potential confounding factors here but this could be at least in part
a consequence of widespread dissatisfaction with search engines an
interesting contrast to reddit's Upward Trend as a search term is Wikipedia
which long predated Reddit as the kind of word you add to the end of a search
query in order to cut through the noise Wikipedia is a far more popular website
currently ranked seventh for Global traffic to reddits 16th but it's been on
the decline as a search term since 2010 in part because Google heavily prioriti
IES Wikipedia already both in search results and as part of its knowledge
panel widget but this might also indicate that the decline in quality for
search engine results isn't hitting every search subject equally there's not
a ton of money writing on a search query like when was the War of 1812 so the top
results are mostly authoritative reliable history sources but if the most
important goal of search engines is to find useful results why haven't they
fixed the problem we'll tell you right after after we thank delete me here's
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use code Techquickie for a sweet 20% off it's not that search engine
companies don't care that spam is cluttering up the first few pages of
results they've been in an arms race with spam since the very beginning it's
just that the spam is now apparently winning according to the authors of the
German study that we mentioned earlier search engine companies Banning spam
sites and readjusting their parameters had a positive but ultimately temporary
impact there was still a general downward Trend in terms of text quality
and relevance for all three search engines studied which could imply that
this isn't a problem with search engines but a problem with the internet itself
appearing on the first page of Google can be life or death for a company so
there's massive Financial incentive to game that system the same as how there's
a massive Financial incentive to gain ratings on sites like Amazon where fake
reviews are notoriously rampant companies both big and small have
realized that word of mouth personal recommendations from a financially
disinterested human being are far more effective than traditional advertising
which means that the shadier among them put a lot of effort and resources into
infiltrating so-called organic user generated systems of validation drowning
out authentic user reviews not to get too metaphorical but the only way to be
heard in a room where everybody's already yelling is to scream even louder
everyone's incentive is to make more and better
garbage large vertically integrated companies like Google don't really help
this hyper competitive low effort environment when they leverage their
platform to prioritize their own products over competitors Google has had
long-standing beef with Yelp since at least 2011 when the FTC investigated
allegations that Google search algorithm consistently favored Google Places over
Yelp that allegation was serious enough that Google actually agreed to allow
online services to opt out of data scraping Yelp further contributed data
to a 2015 academic paper claiming that Google manipulate search results to
favor itself small companies perceive often accurately that the platform they
essentially have to use is a potential competitor that can and will replace
them with a storebrand version at any time those fancy widgets and Rich
Snippets exist so that the engine that can take you anywhere you want to go is
now a place that you never have to leave so what are you going to do build a
better product pay for your position at the top or find a louder way to scream
that's why even though we said earlier that it's not necessarily search engine
company fault that they've gotten worse it also kind of is you know how captas
have gotten harder and harder over time well that's in part because they were
used to train machine learning which then led to the Bots becoming more
sophisticated which then led to the need for stronger and stronger captas and so
on what we're seeing here is likely something similar Only Internet wide
where search engines are struggling to distinguish between quality content and
spam from AI systems trained on traditionally trusted sources like
Wikipedia The increasing cheapness of relatively sophisticated spam tools has
resulted in numerous odd Trends some funny like when Oodles of products on
Amazon wound up being named I'm sorry I cannot fulfill that request it goes
against open AI use policy and others
disturbing like the rise of procedurally generated clickbait obituaries often for
private citizens many of whom aren't even dead you used to have to be at
least a deess celebrity in order to get that kind of treatment search engines
have not lost the fight against spam at least not yet but as machine generation
continues to progress and proliferate your search experience probably isn't
going to get any better thanks for watching guys if you like this video maybe you like another video I have
about how streaming is basically becoming cable you can click on it it's
somewhere