Yeah - I think that "commercialization and commodification" is kind of what I've attributed this to. I think the webring concept is probably the best way to get away from this, but it's not trivial to find those hidden gems. The good ones become/became less hidden. The bad ones get/got buried.

But if these are the complaints about Google - "I only see sites that are so good that they constitute the mainstream" - I'm... ok with that? That seems like a good outcome to me. I don't mind using that tool.

From what I understand of your complaint, sometime in the last 20 years, the Google stopped finding outsider art. I would guess that's due to SEO. And with anything that's known to drive revenue to a business, that sort of thing becomes a target. So people target the Google algorithm to place better. I don't know that there's a solution to that. But I don't think it's because of a change inside Google - more like a change in society.

Before I pick at this, I'll clarify that I don't think Google is useless. It's still perfectly fine for many uses.

> Now it's seven pages of nearly identical listicles, some of which are on bizarre domains like "DougsAutoBodyAndFlowerShop.com", and all of which are festooned with ads, also provided by Google.

> From what I understand of your complaint, sometime in the last 20 years, the Google stopped finding outsider art. I would guess that's due to SEO. And with anything that's known to drive revenue to a business, that sort of thing becomes a target. So people target the Google algorithm to place better. I don't know that there's a solution to that. But I don't think it's because of a change inside Google - more like a change in society.

There has been SEO for all of these years, and the search engines have historically been in an arms race with these efforts to minimize how readily ranking can be gamed. "some of which are on bizarre domains" is the more important part of the complaint. It implies that Google has either stopped playing this game or has started losing the arms race.

I have (for years now) been regularly finding search results where pages that are obviously scraped from a stackexchange network site (and more recently from github or reddit and such) and stuffed full of ads are ranking above the original threads on their canonical sites.

Scammy/bizarre/non-canonical domains outranking canonical sources in search results is putting Google-search users at elevated risk of being phished or infected with malware, so it's not like the stakes are low.

As we've watched this drag on long enough to ~metastasize into the kinds of sentiment you're pushing back against, it's grown hard to imagine explanations that boil down to anything ~better than indifference or negligence (and leaving a lot of oxygen for explanations that involve incompetence, malice, etc.).

> "I only see sites that are so good that they constitute the mainstream"

The problem as I see it is that the mainstream websites are not good. Search results that gave a broader range of hits than just that sort of thing would be much, much more useful.

If I want, for example, to find what laptops people consider the best, none of those sites help me.

The other problem is that for every "good" non-mainstream website there are like 4000 that are so much worse than the mainstream. It is a problem with scale. If everyone has a voice, without some metric to say who has authority, how do you pick the gem from the masses?

Because the "mainstream" sites pay people pennies a word to crank out content like "best gaming laptops."

There are sites that do some good gear reviews for relatively specialized equipment--especially not gadget/electronics. But this isn't the 1990s when PC Magazine would have a 600-page issue with a big chunk devoted to the best printers as evaluated by their on-payroll staff.

I'll occasionally put a review of something up on my site but I have neither the money or interest in doing multi-product comparisons. That's pretty much impractical outside of something like Wirecutter (which I generally think does a pretty good job).

Help me out here - could you give me examples of "what laptops people consider the best" pages that <i>aren't</i> in the top of Google? I still don't understand, and I want to.

Sometimes you can get an answer that's better and filtered through actual experience by adding reddit to the search query, but if you're explicitly buying consumer goods, idk why he would be surprised that that result would be a bunch of hyper commercial listicles.

You make me sound like Grumpy Old Man Yells At Clouds, and that's accurate, but I'm not wrong, I don't like the look of them clouds.

It is possible that this is a problem that will solve itself. I think a lot (most?) mainstream media outlets are hemorrhaging money, and the gravy train can't go on forever. We'll reach some maximum of Terrible Crap, and it will peter out, and then maybe Google can get back to finding honest content and playing merry hell with Internet standards.

if people link to Tom's hardware for new laptops (i dont, but maybe it's popular), is that bad? and a sign of googles demise? what would you like to see instead of those results that made you so unhappy? what else should have been unearthed? switching topics from your own initial example is not helpful.

People are focusing on the one example I gave off the top of my head. I have never actually searched for "best gaming laptop," because I don't really play games. It is an example of a type of query that, at one time, gave different sorts of answers when compared to today.

If you can't extrapolate the larger point from that, I don't know what to tell you.

But you are suggesting with "if people link to Tom's hardware" that PageRank is still in play. As far as I know, it isn't anymore. There may be something similar or related to PageRank in the black box Google unhelpfully calls "the algorithm," but it's not counting up the number of links and showing that. Google dropped and/or altered that fairly quickly after people learned to game it.

Perhaps you have never had to alter, tweak, or otherwise fold, spindle and mutilate your search queries in order to get Google to find what you're looking for instead of what seems to be clickfarming nonsense. If so, I'm impressed. I would also say that you are pretty unique, as bashing Google to get it to spit out something useful seems to be more and more difficult these days.

I believe Google is aware of this problem. It's why they're jumping into AI like everybody else. They have reached the end of what they can contort the algorithm into doing, so they are going to replace at least some of their search with AI generated answers.

I have no idea why people are so eager to defend Google either. They are a privacy nightmare, they run roughshod over Internet standards, and they throw their considerable weight around like a bully. It's very weird.

thank you for a thorough reply, but extrapolating from anecdotal hypothetical search that wasn't even tried seems pretty comical. My counter-anecdote (which I've actually tried) is that Google works for most of my searches. I have no love or affiliation with them, so without anything more than anecdotes there's is not much to pontificate about, so I'm pretty amazed these walls of text about googles demise (purely based on "feelings") pop up every time.

Replying to an old reply, but reminded of this by the more current thread regarding StackOverflow.

Lots of comments in there about how SO doesn't show up as more (or at all) in Google results, and instead we get geek4geek or whatever other clickfarm sites there are out there for technical questions. It's a great example of exactly the problem I was talking about. Is it still comical to you?

Sure, yeah, anecdata and all that, but until I'm hired to dig through all of the internals of Google, anecdotes are about all we've got. Other than Google's reassurances that Everything Is Going Just Splendidly.