The deterioration of Google

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Perceived decline in Google Search quality

  • Many describe current results as cluttered: AI summaries, YouTube, “related searches,” shopping boxes, and only a few useful organic links far down the page.
  • Product reviews, travel info, and commercial queries are said to be dominated by SEO spam and low‑quality “content farms,” including LLM‑generated pages.
  • Exact and verbatim search is reported as unreliable: Google rewrites queries to “nearby” concepts and silently drops many matching results (e.g., UN document IDs, niche OS names, file names).
  • Some users also see search in Gmail and Maps degrading in similar ways.

Advertising, incentives, and “enshittification”

  • A recurring view: once advertising and engagement KPIs won over “search quality,” incentives shifted to maximizing time on page and ad clicks, not accurate answers.
  • Tactics cited: stuffing more ads at the top, privileging large “trusted” publishers, query “stupidification,” and limiting long‑tail visibility.
  • Others counter that ads don’t directly control organic ranking and that spammy, hostile web content is a big part of the problem.

Machine learning, LLMs, and black‑box behavior

  • Several comments claim layers of ML optimization and personalization have made the ranking system effectively non‑debuggable, even for Google’s own teams.
  • LLMs are blamed both for polluting the web with synthetic content and for unsafe or plainly wrong AI answers, while sometimes surfacing information that the link list doesn’t.

Alternatives and changing search behavior

  • Kagi gets strong praise as a paid, high‑signal search with user controls; Marginalia and Yandex are cited as “2006‑style” engines.
  • Some now use ChatGPT/Perplexity or site‑restricted Reddit queries instead of web search.
  • Others say Google still works well for most of their everyday queries and note its overwhelming market share.

Google’s broader trajectory and culture

  • Many see a cultural shift from “Montessori‑style” autonomy to bureaucracy, fear, and PM bloat, with leadership accused of lacking vision.
  • There’s debate over whether Google’s research achievements (e.g., transformers, Waymo, Go, Kubernetes, Meet/Lens/Photos improvements) offset perceived stagnation in consumer-facing products and the mishandling of the LLM wave.

Impact on publishers and the web

  • Small and niche sites, once highly visible, report being crowded out by big media and corporate content, making search‑driven businesses fragile.
  • Some argue it’s inherently dangerous to depend entirely on a single, opaque platform for traffic, but others reply that realistic alternatives are limited given Google’s dominance.