I was searching about something to do with fiberglass today. Every article was garbage that seemed like bot spam. Was nuts. Direct quotes stolen from forums etc..
I’ve been searching for a lot of info on a game recently (Eldenring). There’s actually a good wiki with well organized entries, but the results on bing/google are all stolen blog spam. I have to manually specify the wiki in the search to find anything reasonable.
The search on Elden rings wiki is extremely good. Often I don't know what an enemy is called but you type a rough description and it will find it.
I'm imagining the site deals with fairly significant load- the game is incredibly well selling and most players need to look things up. Would make a great article on infrastructure for a group that doesn't have a visible funding model.
It’s become noticeably horrible lately. Half my search results these days are bot sites, just entire sites of copied material or material generated by neural nets that is completely worthless.
I don’t know what’s going on at Google but the search engine quality has dropped off a cliff in the past 6 months.
They just haven't sufficiently escalated the arms race. The "link juice" signals that g search has traditionally dealt with, and it's relevence measurements, etc., have been thoroughly gamed.
What they need to improve search quality is the intelligence to identify things as spammy and low value and then drop the rank of all the SEO optimized crap that people hate.
I can only imagine that google sees this as politically impossible ("you destroyed my business, Google! I'm gonna sue!") or they have decided the return on investment simply isn't there. They do not need to give you better results to keep getting search queries that help them to show you ads.
Google's key problem is that it seems to prioritize "freshness" above all else.
Experts on a given topic have no need to continuously spam their sites full of minutely modified "best of x in April 2022" listicles. They were authoritative when they published their views ten years ago, and they're still authoritative today. Google doesn't care. Ten year old information isn't relevant or useful.
