Dramatically worse... if that's true, then I wonder how good they were a decade ago. Because every search I've done today produced the result I wanted on the first page of the results, above the fold.
I can't say I've really counted how many days that's true. I can't even say that I really remember what searches I did yesterday or the day before. But if I'm not totally weird and google searches were dramatically better in the past, then they must have produced the desired results every time on almost every day.
Default search might have gotten better, but it also became virtually impossible to do any complex queries. Google is being too smart and it's extremely hard to find old results, foreign results, other meanings of a popular keyword. It's always trying to force you to the same results, whatever you try. Oh, and if it's anything you can buy you get loads of ads followed by spam.
> every search I've done today produced the result I wanted on the first page of the results, above the fold.
Same for me, but that's because I just stopped searching for things that I know will not give me good quality results as they used to be circa pre-2010 back when search tools like +, -, and "" still worked and the results weren't filled with generated SEO texts.
> Dramatically worse... if that's true, then I wonder how good they were a decade ago.
Oh, I forget some people doesn't know why Google enjoy their current position:
Back before 2007 they completely blew competition out of the water:
If something was accessible on the Internet and wasn't behind a noindex spell, Google would find it.
Compared to other search engines that both then and now work more like Google does today it was totally amazing.
Then things started to go sideways:
- first there was: did you mean <something else with similar spelling>? (this was actually user friendly)
- then there was: we didn't find many results for <search term> so we included <related but different search term>, use double quotes to search for "<search term>"
- then there was fuzzing: expnding all my search terms into the unrecognizable unless I double quoted them
- and the latest few years they have also ignored my double quotes
somewhere in between there they messed up the + operator that used to mean "make sure this term is included" as well as ~ that used to mean I wanted Google to fuzz that term.
Sometimes I can get better results by trying to think how my wife would phrase the question, i.e. instead of searching for
- <search terms including a weird mispeling from a dialog box>
I search for
- <why does my computer show search terms including a weird mispeling from a dialog box>
somewhere in between there they messed up the + operator that used to mean "make sure this term is included"
IIRC this one was driven by Google Plus marketing wanting "+" to mean "Go to this page on Google Plus" so they could do some co-marketing thing with +Pepsi.
You can't even compare it anymore, as the web is dramatically different now than it was a decade or so. Just the amount of blogspam that has accumulated in those ten years, all caused by Google's ad-meddling is enough to drown out the minuscule amount of "unique" or "good" content that existed back then or is being currently created.
I can't say I've really counted how many days that's true. I can't even say that I really remember what searches I did yesterday or the day before. But if I'm not totally weird and google searches were dramatically better in the past, then they must have produced the desired results every time on almost every day.