I recently searched "best chair posture" and was saddened to see almost the entire first page as affiliate blog top-10 garbage.

I could have worded the query more clearly, absolutely, but it's a shame that our world's greatest knowledge search tech is currently plagued by these kinds of results.

My personal anecdote is that nobody outside of the tech bubble actually thinks Google Search is dying. People mostly use it to find restaurants, events, basic information, and to navigate to specific webpages, and it works just fine for those purposes.

That sounds like wikipedia, some vertical directory/review sites and a browser address bar, rather than near-magical exploratory "full text search of millions of websites a.k.a. The World Wide Web".

Previously (1500+ comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719

For now it does. It’s entirely possible that this is the begging of a slow decline that will become noticed with time. 5 years ago I’d probably say it was crazy to say this, but the google/FB ad duopoly is showing (small) signs of cracking

We're just more sensitive to these things, if the decline continues more people will notice.

Searches which plainly worked just a few years ago now return nothing. Specific and exact searches, even ones in quotes, return nothing or return bull, even when Google has had those results before.

It's as if their disks filled up, so they flushed most of their data but kept everything that generates ad revenue.

Or maybe SEO has gotten more adversarial.

SEO has been around since the birth of Google, which nevertheless provided stellar results for years.

If SEO didn't exist, it would have to be invented for air cover.

I did SEO for my employer not long after the birth of Google (someone even posted the story to HN, I think). What I did was staggeringly primitive compared to what I saw at another company in 2015.

It's not really surprising to me that the search engines have problems with SEO nowadays. The things that consultant told us to do in 2015… >50% of it was helpful for the users, as far as I can read users' minds from their searches and clicks, and 100% of it was intended to make it more difficult for Google to sort the better pages from the worse by making them all seem better.

I noticed several months ago a sharp decrease the quality of the results for technical questions and product reviews.

For the technical questions, Google went from returning stack overflow, Reddit posts or the occasional blog post to return websites that manifestly just parse stack overflow.

For product reviews, it was already difficult to find reviews made by real persons and not companies, but it seems now that almost all webpages returned by Google are computer generated

I cant tell if Google Search Engine's quality decreased or if those pale copies of SO became very good at SEO

That’s the same thing. The quality decreases when the automated trash can beat the system.

I have to doubt that this is lack of technical ability. It must be a lack of will.

If Google cared, it would be easy for them to spot the discontent that has been voiced in places like this, and they could easily build workarounds.

Much of the spam results that users here are complaining about are easy to recognize for a human. Google could manually annotate their dataset to punish such sites.

Also, don’t they have the data of how long searchers spend on each of those sites they visit? With that data, it should be easy to weed out the SEO spam.

So I have to guess that the majority of users actually doesn’t care. For them, perhaps, what we call SEO spam is some kind of value added service that gives them the answer they were looking for. That it is a rip off of another, much more authoritative site seems to be something they either don’t recognize or don’t care about.

I would really like to be able to filter search results to exclude pages that contain affiliate links. I have a suspicion that this would greatly improve search result quality.