Rishi Dhanaraj

is google getting worse?

Rishi Dhanaraj -

I've been hearing that Google results are a lot worse these days.

One study suggests that Google returns a lot of spam, particularly in the category of product reviews. This article points to their head of search and some tactical changes to blame.

Of course, it's hard to assess the decline of results across all queries unless you're a researcher.

That said, I tried some other search engines in the last week (Qwant, Startpage, DuckDuckGo) and I was able to notice some key points:

  • Google heavily prioritizes Reddit results
  • Google uses screen real estate for its AI overview
  • Google uses screen real estate for its "People also ask" feature

The cumulative effect is that you often don't read blogs to get your answers.

Compare these results for "solo travel Korea":

Also compare these results for "gosiwon":

I like getting results from blogs, so I've been using Qwant for now. If I want an answer from AI, I'll use ChatGPT or Claude.