I do a lot of product research on Google, and in the past few months I have noticed a significant and worrying reduction in quality of search results for detailed queries, for two reasons.
Firstly, Google seems to be far more aggressive about using synonyms, and it's almost always done in a way that broadens a query. So, for example, if you search for a particular brand of some kind of product, the results that come up are often about such products in general (you can see which word got substituted, because they highlight the found keywords in bold).
Worse yet, it's also aggressively dropping specific words from the query (they show up stricken through under the result links). It used to be that it would do that when your search wouldn't even get a pageful of results - but now it gets to a ridiculous point where I make a two-word query, and the top result has one of those two dropped! And yet if you quote the word, forcing it to be there, there's no shortage of results for the more detailed query.
In practice, this means that most of my detailed Google queries end up quoting all or almost all words in them, because that's the only way I get results that I actually want, rather than a bunch of random vaguely related links. Even that doesn't seem to be 100% reliable, because it seems to sometimes ignore even the quoted words...
While I have no idea why this is going on, it's clearly not to improve search result quality. Which leaves only one hypothesis - that this is somehow related to advertising. I don't know if it's about paid search results, or preferentially treating websites that have Google ads on them, or just generally steering me towards online stores rather than e.g. forums (where the quote-forced detailed queries usually lead). But either way, this is worrying, because search has always been so fundamental to what Google is - and if that is being twisted so badly now, what can I expect from other products?
> Which leaves only one hypothesis - that this is somehow related to advertising.
Of course it is, they'll earn more if it takes you longer to search and you are more likely to click on one of the ads. I think it's as simple as that.
Firstly, Google seems to be far more aggressive about using synonyms, and it's almost always done in a way that broadens a query. So, for example, if you search for a particular brand of some kind of product, the results that come up are often about such products in general (you can see which word got substituted, because they highlight the found keywords in bold).
Worse yet, it's also aggressively dropping specific words from the query (they show up stricken through under the result links). It used to be that it would do that when your search wouldn't even get a pageful of results - but now it gets to a ridiculous point where I make a two-word query, and the top result has one of those two dropped! And yet if you quote the word, forcing it to be there, there's no shortage of results for the more detailed query.
In practice, this means that most of my detailed Google queries end up quoting all or almost all words in them, because that's the only way I get results that I actually want, rather than a bunch of random vaguely related links. Even that doesn't seem to be 100% reliable, because it seems to sometimes ignore even the quoted words...
While I have no idea why this is going on, it's clearly not to improve search result quality. Which leaves only one hypothesis - that this is somehow related to advertising. I don't know if it's about paid search results, or preferentially treating websites that have Google ads on them, or just generally steering me towards online stores rather than e.g. forums (where the quote-forced detailed queries usually lead). But either way, this is worrying, because search has always been so fundamental to what Google is - and if that is being twisted so badly now, what can I expect from other products?