Article about google... deleted from google
October 27, 2023 4:14 PM   Subscribe

I'm looking for a blog post/medium/substack sort of piece from the late 2010s about the decline in google search quality, but it seems to have been completely nuked off the face of the internet. I remember this starting to happen almost immediately after it went up, but it was findable for a while. Other people wrote about it even!

I'm back, after a very long hiatus! With something that's been bugging me for ages.

Some time in the late 2010s, someone wrote a HUGE blog post/medium/substack sort of piece on the decline of google search quality. This was really in depth, and had something like 10 years of data gathered to demonstrate their point with citations throughout. It was basically research paper quality, and had tons and tons of graphs, a/b screenshot examples, etc. Not long after it got delisted from googles own results and written about by a few people on various popular sites(and posted on reddit etc), with short form summaries.

Now i've found a lot of articles that are basically SEO snot or opinion pieces about how "google sucks now", and i think i even found one or two that clearly vaguely reference/rip off this piece without linking to it. But i can't even find anything that links to it. I'm assuming if it's even still up, anything that did link to it gets deranked.

I've tried every alternative search engine, looking through my and friends old posts, chat/im/whatsapp/groupchat logs, everything i could think of and i can basically only find vaguely similar things or opinion pieces. I'm genuinely starting to wonder if legal action was involved to kill this piece, but i don't remember enough to try and find it on archive.org/is or something like that.

It's really been bugging me because it seems more relevant than ever, especially with the recent killed wired piece but even that in and of itself is basically an editorial. I want real examples and evidence to show people! This is such a super common topic in my circles that i've really been itching to find it.
posted by emptythought to Computers & Internet (8 answers total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
Now I'm curious too. It's entirely possible it was on a personal blog or site that has since gone offline - that happens now and then. Do you recall anything more specific about it, like was it on a big news site, or maybe something smaller? If a lot of people referenced it, at least one link ought to have survived somewhere that you could put into the Wayback Machine. If there's any specific phrase you can remember that can help too.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 4:56 PM on October 27, 2023


Hmm, the thing I remember is a Washington Post article from 2020 - gift link to article.
posted by gudrun at 6:00 PM on October 27, 2023


feel like it has to be in the Hacker News search somewhere though I can't see anything obvious in the first few pages sorted by popularity
posted by BungaDunga at 6:54 PM on October 27, 2023


Response by poster: > Do you recall anything more specific about it, like was it on a big news site, or maybe something smaller?

That's just the frustrating thing here, it had a really generic title like "It's not just you, google search sucks now" and the first big intro line was something like "Google search keeps getting worse and worse, i knew i wasn't imagining it so i started tracking its decline"

It was absolutely on a(possibly .edu? Personal blog of a professor?) blog, possibly even blogspot or something like that. It was absolutely, definitely not any major publication or news site, and the latest possibly date for this coming out was maybe 2018. i think it could have been in the 2016-19 range actually. I'm gauging this by what place i lived when we all started talking about it, which has to cap out around then.

Important detail was that this piece wasn't about commercialization or advertising primarily at all, its number one focus actually was how hard it was to find old things that are still online, but google has just developed amnesia about. I remember there being some jokey phrase about google dementia/alzheimers. One of the main metrics they were testing was "this old source from the 90s/early 2000s is the only relevant result, and google just stopped showing it" and in researching that, they kinda pulled a thread and realized the entire quality of the results were going to crap too. It had a whole section on how some not even all that niche queries just returned less and less results every single year, and almost no useful ones.
posted by emptythought at 7:42 PM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]


I think I remember this article… I’ll see if I can jog my memory enough to remember anything useful.
posted by mekily at 10:32 PM on October 27, 2023


I thought I remembered this article but I looked around for a bit and I think I've just read SO many articles along these lines over the years that I've sort of merged them in my head.
posted by potrzebie at 11:01 PM on October 27, 2023




I think the post by Tim Bray to which BungaDunga linked might be what you're thinking of.

If not, this post by Dmitri Brereton probably isn't what you're recalling, but perhaps he links to it?
posted by brianogilvie at 12:25 PM on October 30, 2023


« Older Atomic Breath vs Birthday Candles: A Godzilla...   |   How do I pressure Blue Cross Blue Shield to cover... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.


Tags

Share