You're Not Imagining It - Internet Search Results ARE Getting Worse

We all use search. Getting decent answers to simple questions isn't easy. The search results are full of ads, and a fair number of the ads are for scams. The actual results are sometime hidden below the ads, and they aren't much better. Links to scams, links to malware download sites, etc.

We'll start with the overview from Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony. Daily News Stuff 32 December 2023: Drunken Revelry Edition

How bad are search results? Bad. (Dan Luu)

In running six tests on each of five search engines plus ChatGPT - thirty-six tests in all - eight results earned scores in the range of OK to Great.

The other twenty-eight results ranked anywhere from Bad to Terrible.

In fact, Google, which built its entire business on providing a better search engine than anyone else, rated Bad or worse on every test.

Bing was even worse on average, but was acceptable on one test, and better than acceptable on another.

The details can be found at the following post from Dan Luu. How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

In which he notes that some people are getting tired of having to work around the bad search results, and others are saying these complaints are overblown. So he did an experiement.

Since it's fairly easy to try out straightforward, naive, queries, let's try some queries. We'll look at three kinds of queries with five search engines plus ChatGPT and we'll turn off our ad blocker to get the non-expert browsing experience. I once had a computer get owned from browsing to a website with a shady ad, so I hope that doesn't happen here (in that case, I was lucky that I could tell that it happened because the malware was doing so much stuff to my computer that it was impossible to not notice).

One kind of query is a selected set of representative queries a friend of mine used to set up her new computer. My friend is a highly competent engineer outside of tech and wanted help learning "how to use computers", so I watched her try to set up a computer and pointed out holes in her mental model of how to interact with websites and software.

The second kind of query is queries for the kinds of things I wanted to know in high school where I couldn't find the answer because everyone I asked (teachers, etc.) gave me obviously incorrect answers and I didn't know how to find the right answer. I was able to get the right answer from various textbooks once I got to college and had access to university libraries, but the questions are simple enough that there's no particular reason a high school student shouldn't be able to understand the answers; it's just an issue of finding the answer, so we'll take a look at how easy these answers are to find. The third kind of query is a local query for information I happened to want to get as I was writing this post.

The details are available at that 2nd link. Click thru.