I've been noticing it for a while, the search quality gets worse and worse every year. For me, the red line was the Panda update in 2011. That update completely destroyed the search quality by bringing dubious quality news articles and ecommerce websites on the top of search, it never really recovered since then.
That's exactly what I've been doing almost unconsciously, I'm adding "wiki" or "reddit" at the end of every query except for programming ones.
The only time I'm using the search as intended is for programming error queries where it's way too niche for Google to append low quality news farms / ecommerce websites. That's the only type of query I still get good results.
Even programming questions. If it's something considered popular, you get awful results. Take javascript, I always append "mdn" when I'm trying to look up a language/api detail. Otherwise I'd be sifting through the top ten garbage Q&A or tutorial sites. In the glory days, Page Rank would return reference material first since it was so heavily referenced. But clearly that no longer works in the real world of SEO optimization.
Finding good Angular content is damn near impossible on Google, with the immense amount of regurgitated blog spam trying to sell templates via blog posts disguised as guides/tutorials.
I loved how Google used to find high quality discussions on all sorts of niche topics (tech, gardening, science, diy...) on sites like MetaFilter and Reddit.
Now those queries seem to lead to mostly videos, low quality sites, and shopping sites.
I love how people totally ignore the million of daily users based on their personal experience. If it was essentialy unusable, there wouldn’t be millions of people on it.
True. But you can still use old.reddit.com. The content is still there, it's just not accessible. So my process has been to search for 'keyword + reddit', click the best search result, then manually type in 'old' in place of 'www' in the url.
That sounds tedious. You should at least be able to skip that last step with one of the various browser extensions to redirect to old.reddit.com automatically, e.g. this thing for Chrome:
It is kind of tedious. Thanks for the link to the extension. I have used that extension at times, but in my case there are gaps where I'm either at work, on a different browser or device, where this has sometimes come up. But I agree, an extension is best.
Pinterest is a horror, there are Google searches where half the results visible at first are Pinterest links with various TLDs (pinterest.com, .fr, .de etc.)
