Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical or obscure queries. Forced synonyms and "people also searched for" are typically useless and almost infuriating. Once you get off the first or second page, the results get <i>even</i> worse-- with pages entirely unrelated to the query (e.g. not even containing the searched phrases). They are probably testing/already implemented some sort of multi armed bandit type optimization like on Youtube's search results where they just show <i>any</i> popular pages (ignoring relevancy) to see if they yield a click.<p>I've used DDG for the past ~5 years, and it is typically worse without using a hashbang like !so for technical queries. I guess that is what the web has evolved to-- knowing which mega-site you want to search against rather than discover new sites?