Back in the day I used to do Mechanical Turk like 
work assessing search engine quality. There were very detailed guidelines about what made a search engine good, compiled into a like 250 page document Google had been curating and updating over the course of years.
One of the key concepts was the idea of a "vital" result for a user request. If a user had a specific request, the search engine had to deliver that content first. For example, simpson.com at the time was a malicious website. With this in mind, if the user searched for "simpson.com", the first result had to be simpson.com, even if the search engine is returning a malicious page. It's specifically what the user requested. We aren't supposed to question what the user wants. The results that followed after could provide suggestions of what else the user may be looking for, like the official Simpsons website.
I would love to see whatever shreds of this document is left at this point, and I'd love to know at what point the entire thing was thrown into the trash and rewritten. I assume somewhere around the year 2016 or 2020. I know this is nothing shocking to a lot of people, but it really does amaze me just how bad things have gotten. I've stuck to the major search engines because despite peoples bitching, for a long time they consistently outperformed the smaller competitors, but they are genuinely without hyperbole almost unusable now.
Example: I wanted to find the recent Tucker Carlson - Vladimir Putin interview. It's a newsworthy interview with a world leader and a current event. There is a very specific video I'm looking for, the published, official video of 
sitting down and asking 
questions.
Here is what google returns in a private window:
The very first piece of content - the "vital result" - is clickbait youtube cute twinkry from Time 
What are the keeraZIEST moments from the interview?!? 
The rest of the results are a cascade of editorialized garbage, opinionated news articles reporting on the requested content. God forbid a careless user actually be exposed to a primary source.
The closest result to what I'm looking for is about over 10 pieces of content deep - the transcript of the interview from Russia's state website. Likely this is an oversight.
Here is Bing:
There's been some meme going around that "no really guys, Bing is actually kinda good now believe it or not".
This is even more nonsense than Google. The most prominently featured content is, of course, more editorialized bullshit with the interview itself nowhere to be found. But also half of the content is just completely irrelevant crap I didn't ask for. Why is the entire right half of the page a massive infobox about Tucker and his books and quotes? Why am I seeing something about Game of Thrones?
Brave:
You get the point. More useless crap. It gets half a point for its AI accidentally revealing that tuckercarlson.com is where the interview is located, but this doesn't count. The actual search results are all garbage. Thanks Brave for showing me all the latest reddit discussions 
Yandex:
Was that really so fricking hard? Result #1 - the interview from Tucker Carlson. Past the interview are news articles and images - things of waning utility that other users may be interested in. But the vital result is at the top of the page. That's fricking it. This would have been the required order for the page on Google ten years ago.
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Shitty search engine results have been busting my bussy for years and it's just getting worse and worse. The worst is when I'll put something in quotes so it will search for that exact phrase and it still serves me whatever the frick it wants
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Does that even do anything anymore? I don't think it's worked for me a single time in the last several years.
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You have to enable verbatim mode.
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Wtf is verbatim mode?
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It forces Google to actually search for the words you entered.
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Osht thx bb
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are you FRICKING KIDDING ME when the FRICK did this happen
!followers let's see if this makes google slightly more fricking usable
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Nice of them to tell me.
Back in the 1980s it was a big deal when software was changed to give different results than you expected. Because that meant users needed to be retrained and that would cost money. Now Google changes all their shit constantly without warning you and the changes aren't even intuitive.
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I doubt you experienced 80s software.
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Sometimes it works for me
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A few years ago an old phone broke down and filled my screen with dozens of horizontal white lines so I tried to search on google what my problem was. Google insisted to show me results where a single vertical line would appear on the side of the screen (and ads for phones), completely different than what I needed. After multiple combinations of - signs and quotes I managed to convince Google to stop showing that stupid vertical line bug, only for it to give a total of 5 results, 2 in chinese 1 in indonesian and 2 in indian
Shutting the phone down and restarting it solved my problem but I really don't think I was the only person in the western hemisphere to encounter that bug. It's like search engines are spitefully trying to keep you from finding useful results
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I could barely even find info about a problem my car was having when i googled it. Just endless machine generated pages of listicles
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I was learning some slightly niche programmer shit and having such a bad time in 2023 I bought some fricking physical books
I got tired of the bullshit that was searching stack exchange manually, and even searching groomercord channels
sometimes stack exchange had kind of what I was looking for but I couldn't use a search engine to get to it
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Word embeddings in search are the fricking worst for programmer shit. It drives me up the wall when I search specific terms like "extend" and the results include "expand". And they even got automatic autocorrect on google now instead of suggesting you correct your supposedly misspelled word, so I'll be halfway down the page before I realize it's results for a completely different term that I didn't type and I have to click "no I actually meant to spell it that way you fricking r-slur" (paraphrasing).
My dying wish would be to curb stomp a Google engineer or product owner if I weren't too old for Make a Wish.
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sammmmme
I was looking up a specific algorithm term for a common algorithm, and I was getting CLOTHING listings because it was taking a word and making it a word that was three letters different
so I put quotes around the term once I realized, and the listing shit itself so bad that some of the listings were msnbc articles about current thing
I'm convinced google has a bunch of office drones hand picking "good" results, perhaps with AI assistance, and they're doing an awful job
sites that sell shit or are robo-listicles covered with google ads seem to get whitelisted easier
informative sites that might be found on https://wiby.me (Web 1.0 only search engine), for example, seem to be downgraded big time in google results
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If things still work the same way at all that they used to, this isn't entirely wrong. My job years ago was giving ratings to the top pages returned in the SERP. I don't remember exactly how it worked, I don't think we were always exactly selecting the pages and more often it was just confirming the quality of the algo when something was tweaked. But we would get a query and the pages returned, they had to be rated based on very specific guidelines and it would be cross-referenced with other crowdsourced workers.
If they do still work the same way either the guidelines have completely changed or the algorithms are just fricked beyond repair now
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Probably because none of those sites have been updated in 20 or 30 years. Search engines favor recent content, which makes sense in most cases.
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what's the one where the preview is like "yeah it has this paragraph, our preview will end one word before what you need, but this phrase won't appear on the page"
whatever happened to viewing the cached version so i can see what google saw
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They recently got rid of the cache link in the ui. But you can still access it.
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How? It's been driving me crazy
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Google it, r-slur.
But seriously, I'm too lazy to find the right domain and path format, it's something stupid like cache.google.com/<url>
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I've never picked up a text book in my first two years of college and did everything that wasn't in the lecture notes with the internet.
Afterwards I was genuinely amazed how convenient textbooks are with all the important information neatly and coherently compiled together
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Not even these are safe from spam anymore. Have an LLM write a nonsense book and self publish.
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You specify a 2016 Camry, so all top results are forum posts about a 1997 Corolla
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Not long ago google's selling point versus rivals was how you could search for that kind of incredibly specific problem and get good results. Inshallah the bottom will fall out soon as everyone realises how shit it is.
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The golden era was when reverse image search worked, pinterest wasnt in the image search and you could search academic docs by hitting the scholar tab or w/e it was called
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Google scholar still works okayish
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i just don't get why. it doesn't benefit the users, it doesn't benefit the company reputation, it doesn't earn them any more money.... why?
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I think some of the changes are meant to appeal to mobile users. Like it assumes you didn't spell properly because that's impossible on a phone and if you're on a phone you're probably too r-slurred to spell properly anyway.
But that only explains part of it.
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It generates revenue because getting listed in the top is now pay to win. It has created an entire SEO industry because jewgle keeps moving the goalposts
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Ads, i assume. Google makes money from ads, so it pushes the most money-making content to the top. If its not what you wanted, even better because it means you continue clicking on google-ad filled pages! What are you gonna do, search with the 3 alternatives that are just as bad about it?
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Lmbo, you r-slurred?
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more money compared to just showing relevant results.
if I'm searching for [a], show me ads relevant to [a] and I'll probably click them. If I'm getting annoyed searching through a dozen [b] results, showing me ads for [b] accomplishes nothing.
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It just assumes that the people using it are the lowest of the low r-slurs, you don't know what you want, you actually want a bunch of articles telling your what to think.
It assumes you can't spell and when you dare put quotes around something it simply ignores it.
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Bing's Copilot at least will have enough shame to confess it didn't return what I asked for. "I didn't ask for that. I wanted X." And then it will give it to me, even if reluctantly.
EDIT I just searched for OP's request using Bing Copilot. It gave me the pozzed stuff, but right at the bottom (and you type at the bottom so this right in your field of vision) is "if you missed it you can find the interview on Tucker Carlson's website for paying subscribers"
Paywalled things are never going to rank as high.
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You mentioned Copilot and immediately after loading another page I got a prompt to try my new AI Copilot. They are watching me
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Why isn't this the first thing you tried? Instead you googled on a broken phone?
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I googled on my laptop since my phone screen was unresponsive. Also I was just curious about what happened
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The worst part is getting one of those obviously AI written pages that doesn't say anything but is optimized for google search to get ad revenue,
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It drives me BANANAS
Was looking for any info about my very old timey garage door, literally everything was ads
Garage doors in 2024
Garage door experts near you
Thankfully google omitted the key adjectives I had included
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We understand how frustrating it can be when your Toro Recycler 24 Walk-Behind Mower stops working. Mowers are a vital tool for homeowners to keep their lawns looking nice and mowed. If a Toro Recycler 24 Walk-Behind Mower's drive belt is missing or damaged, it can be harder to push compared to how the manufacturer intended. With a few simple steps, you can identify the root cause of your Toro Recycler 24 Walk Behind Mower's issues and find a certified repair shop near you
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this shit giving me a fricking flashback
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Every time I search a tech support or DIY type question about xyz product the entire first page of results is "TOP TEN XYZ IN 2024"
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I remember googling home repair stuff in 2012 or so and finding LOTS of really good content. Blogs about historical framing, different techniques, personal DIY pages and wikihows, lots of stuff from This Old House...
Now I cant find SHIT
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That's similar to my main issue (as described here). I used to be able to find super super specific technical data from professional journals as well as hobbyist communities around ten years ago. Now it's as if they no longer index 90% of the internet.
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This is probably a good thing but also that 10% they do index should be part of the 90%.
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I just want to go back 20 years to when the internet was not shit.
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Frick I HATE THAT
Search for TQ-DZ-351CA
Results for
TA-DI-435F
missing:
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Literally google fricking with your search to show you more ads
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Get down here in my comments and fite me
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