Google search has been getting worse for years

Let’s face it: Google search is awful. If you’re searching for something simple or popular, then the search results are always useful. As soon as your search gets a little more complex, however, then things get really bad. Google will often decide to completely ignore entire words from your search query, bringing up results that are totally useless. It often feels like Google is searching for what it thinks you should have searched for, rather than what you actually did.

It didn’t use to be this way. Google search used to actually search for the exact thing you asked it for and would bring up results that matched every part of your query, not just the parts it chose. It feels like Google has been getting steadily worse for years on end.

Google has recently announced that it’s adding new AI features to Google search, to “dramatically expand how Google can help you.” These include allowing you to search with your camera, or to find music just by humming a tune. All of these features are nice to have, but they don’t solve the fundamental problem. At its heart, Google search just sucks.

Google search today is much worse than it was in the past

There are fundamental differences to how Google search works

It’s easy to look back on things from the past with rose-tinted glasses and see them as being better than they actually were. I swear that GoldenEye 007 had awesome graphics when I played it back in 1998, but playing it now on my Switch, it appears that I may have misremembered. Could it be the case that Google search was just as bad in the past as it is now, and I’m misremembering again?

Well, no. I can be sure of that because Google search doesn’t work the way it used to. At all. Back in the day, there used to be a thing known as a Googlewhack. This was a two-word search, without quotes, that would bring up one single search result, meaning that there was only one website in the whole world where that two-word phrase existed. Finding Googlewhacks was a fun challenge.

Now, however, it is impossible. That’s because Google search has changed. It no longer searches solely for the exact words that you enter. It also searches for words that are similar to those words. This means that if you search without quotes, you will get results that may not contain either of the words you searched for but contain other similar words.

This is my biggest problem with Google search today. If you want to find something generic, such as “news about Google search”, you’ll get useful results. If you want to find something specific, however, then Google will often totally ignore what you’re actually searching for, and instead serve you results for what it thinks you should have been searching for.

Far too often, you’ll see search results on Google which have a “missing” tag underneath them. For these results, Google has happily stripped entire words from your search query and given you results that miss out those words entirely. You might search for “dolphins dancing the foxtrot” and be given results with “foxtrot” missing, or even worse, with “dolphins” missing, meaning the results are totally useless. Google will deliberately change your search query to things it can find rather than searching for what you want.

Studies show this isn’t simply anecdotal

Google search has been proven to be worse by science

Maybe Google was always this bad? Well, thankfully, science has proved that it definitely wasn’t. In Germany, some scientists wanted to find out if search getting worse was simply anecdotal, or if there was genuine evidence to back it up. Their research paper entitled “Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines” focused on product reviews and found that despite only a small fraction of product reviews on the web using affiliate marketing links, the vast majority of product reviews found in search results do.

Affiliate links are links to websites such as Amazon that earn the host site a fraction of any sales that come from clicking the links. Review sites can make money by including affiliate links in their reviews. According to the research, Google’s search results were disproportionately favoring sites with affiliate links, meaning that rather than giving you the best results, it was giving you the ones that were most monetizable.

This is just one example, but the implications are fairly obvious. When Google search shows you results that omit parts of your query and make the results mostly useless, this isn’t purely because it’s not very good. It doesn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility that the results that you might actually want to see may not make as much money for Google as the results that it shows you instead. In other words, Google search may be designed to bring up the results that are most useful to Google, and not to you.

Google isn’t wholly to blame

Everyone is gaming the system, although it’s ultimately Google’s system

It’s been a long time since Google removed “Don’t be evil” as its motto, which is about as clear a message of intent to maybe do some evil as you could want. Google has become a money-making machine, and poor user experience doesn’t really matter as long as the cash keeps rolling in.

Google isn’t entirely to blame here, however. The internet is bursting at the seams with content, and up until now, Google search has always been the predominant way of finding that content. Understandably, businesses have done everything in their power to find their way to the top of the search results, because if you end up on page two of Google, you may as well not exist.

This has created an entire industry: Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. This is the practice of creating web content that is mostly likely to appeal to Google’s algorithms and be picked for the top spots in the search results. Unfortunately, these attempts to game the system have caused a proliferation of junk all over the internet, from horrific keyword-stuffed blog content, to review sites that promote products that they don’t even like, in order to earn more from affiliate links.

The more companies use SEO to try to make it to the top of the pack, the more Google has to change its algorithms to avoid its search results being full of mostly useless content. It seems we’re locked in a vicious circle with no obvious way out.

People are finding their information in other ways

AI chatbots offer entirely new ways to find information

OpenAI / Pocket-lint

Google adding new AI features to Google search is a sign that it is aware that the winds are changing. Google search is no longer always the best way to find the information you want. The rise of AI chatbots has made it possible to search for, and find, information that simply isn’t possible using traditional Google search.

For example, type “what’s that show starring the woman out of that other show with all the couples and tom hanks son is one of them” into Google, and the results are mostly about Tom Hanks, with some relating to Chet Hanks, who isn’t the right son at all. None of the first page of results is of any use.

Type the same thing into ChatGPT and you get a response about Colin Hanks starring in Life in Pieces alongside actress Zoe-Lister Jones, who stars in the show Slip that she also produced, wrote, and directed. ChatGPT is able to find exactly what you want in a way that Google search simply can’t.

OpenAI is already testing a prototype of SearchGPT, a search engine built on AI, so Google is going to have to adapt quickly if it’s going to stay relevant. Since Google search still earns huge amounts of money for the company, you can bet that it will try everything in its power to keep Google search at the top of the pile. Hopefully, this means that Google will have to focus at least some of its attention on making Google search actually good again, because if it doesn’t, there are plenty of rivals who will.