Google Search Is Dying
Ah, young whipper snappers, everything old is new again, and clearly the world is always getting worse.<p>Well, some things are (reverse image search, ease of accessing &#x27;Cached&#x27; pages -- now I have to go to archive.org Wayback, etc), but forum search has always been bad.<p>Long before Reddit was big, USENET&#x2F;DejaNews and forum software like PHPbb&#x2F;UBB ruled supreme (and before Markdown there was UBB Code). Google, despite owning DejaNews, did not often surface links into USENET content, and a lot of forums, for whatever reason, were not indexed by Google. For example, I used to spend a lot of time reading the latest on PC&#x2F;3D Hardware stuff on Beyond3D, Overclockers, Rage3D, etc and I almost always had either use site specific search (dejanews.com or say, PHP BB&#x27;s built in local search), or I had to add site:beyond3d.com for example.<p>And is a large amount of confirmation bias going on in these Google threads that appear. Some people make assumptions that their search patterns are representative of the billions of searchers (&quot;argh, I searched for pytorch k-means and a GitHub wrapper site appeared!&quot;) and that their experience is a representative sample, while others focus only on what has gotten worse, and not what has gotten better.<p>What&#x27;s clearly gotten worse is webspam. But while it has degraded the Googlee experience, it&#x27;s not clear any of the other search engines are any better at filtering it out, except by luck because perhaps they don&#x27;t crawl as many sites as often.