> I find that search engines used to be much better in giving me relevant useful results 8-9 years ago.
I completely agree. And it feels like it's steadily going down too, search results now are way worse than they were 5 years ago which were somewhat worse than 10.
It seems that search engines now are always trying to guess your intent, and always think they know better. And yet more than ever, I struggle to find relevant search results.
For example, I enter a search term, and I'll get many results back that don't even contain the search terms. If I use double quotes, things often improve, but I'll still get results that don't contain my terms.
I really wish there was a "power user" mode, that basically made things work the way they used to work.
> It seems that search engines now are always trying to guess your intent, and always think they know better. And yet more than ever, I struggle to find relevant search results.
The "always think they know better" is the issue IME. I'm fine with search engine trying to be smarter, but the paternalistic "no I think you want <completely unrelated thing>" is what bites.
And not only does it not work when I know what I'm looking for (because it gives me something else entirely), it doesn't work when I'm not quite sure either e.g. from time to time I dimly remember an interesting comment about something but don't quite remember the wording so I look for something similar, and never in my life has the search engine been able to guess it.
Which is fair enough, don't get me wrong, but then why mess with what I know I'm looking for when you're patently unable to guess when I don't?
> For example, I enter a search term, and I'll get many results back that don't even contain the search terms.
That is also my experience. It's also one of the issues I have with duckduckgo, AFAIK it ignores quoting entirely.
This distinction between average user and power users seems to assume that people always stay at their current level and never learn. I feel the same with a lot of dumbed down software these days. Maybe it’s better for beginners but there is no path to learning how to do more advanced things because they don’t exist. So in total something got lost.
> It seems that search engines now are always trying to guess your intent, and always think they know better.
I complained about this from day one, and not once did I get anything but patronizing handwaving in response.
If I want to buy a pizza, I'll enter "buy pizza in $city" or something, but if I just enter "pizza", I want to see what every person on the planet would see if they used the English language version of the search engine (and then on top of that have the option of personal customization that I can undo or suspend anytime). IMO the convenience of "just typing 'pizza' when you want directions to the nearest pizza place" is nothing at all compared to the fracturing of the public space, for lack of a better way to put it.
I completely agree. And it feels like it's steadily going down too, search results now are way worse than they were 5 years ago which were somewhat worse than 10.