From his blog:

Most tech folks I’m connected to seem to think that Google search results are significantly worse than they were ten years ago . . . However, there’s a sizable group of vocal folks who claim that search results are still great . . .

I [Luu] suspect what’s going on here is that some people have gotten so used working around bad software that they don’t even know they’re doing it, reflexively doing the modern equivalent of hitting ctrl+s all the time in editors, or ctrl+a; ctrl+c when composing anything in a text box. Every adept user of the modern web has a bag of tricks they use to get decent results from queries. From having watched quite a few users interact with computers, that doesn’t appear to be normal, even among people who are quite competent in various technical fields, e.g., mechanical engineering. However, it could be that people who are complaining about bad search result quality are just hopping on the “everything sucks” bandwagon and making totally unsubstantiated comments about search quality. . . .

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 . . .

Luu follows up with the results for six different search sites, applying the following six queries:
– download youtube videos
– ad blocker
– download firefox
– Why do wider tires have better grip?
– Why do they keep making cpu transistors smaller?
– vancouver snow forecast winter 2023 . . .
He gives lots and lots of details and analyses. You really have to read the whole thing—it will take a couple hours because he links to various other posts. But it will be an entertaining couple of hours. [Say what you want about Google, when I searched *the norm of entertainment*, it came up with my blog post as its first link. — ed.]

It’s kind of impossible for me to summarize Luu’a results, mostly because I don’t understand a lot of the technical details. But I’m a big user of search! My take-home message is that it makes sense to use different search engines for different goals, rather than just running everything through Google. As Luu puts it:

On the question of whether or not a collection of small search engines can provide better results than Google for a lot of users, I don’t think this is much of a question because the answer has been a resounding “yes” for years.

The only trouble is, he doesn’t provide direct guidance on what collection we should be using. He does give us this teaser:

On how to get good results for other queries, since this post is already 17000 words, I’ll leave that for a future post on how expert vs. non-expert computer users interact with computers.

OK, the clock is ticking!

Regarding Google specifically, Luu agrees with the statement that “straightforward search queries are inundated with crap” and writes:

Although Google doesn’t publicly provide the ability to see what was historically returned for queries, many people remember when straightforward queries generally returned good results. One of the reasons Google took off so quickly in the 90s, even among expert users of AltaVista, who’d become very adept at adding all sorts of qualifiers to queries to get good results, was that you didn’t have to do that with Google. But we’ve now come full circle and we need to add qualifiers, restrict our search to specific sites, etc., to get good results from Google on what used to be simple queries. If anything, we’ve gone well past full circle since the contortions we need to get good results are a lot more involved than they were in the AltaVista days.