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What the heck has happened to Google search?

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Carol Haynes:
Is it just me or is the new Google search simply broken?

It has been increasingly frustrating for a long time that it is difficult to find anything relevant because of SEO kiddies bunging up the top spots (yes I know there is another thread) but since the "new" google started appearing search results have become totally useless.

Almost everything now seems to be pretty much irrelevant to the search items.

What is going on?

Josh:
Every one of my search results has had the result I am looking for in the top 3 depending on search terms used, usually the first is what I require. No change noticed here.

Paul Keith:
Sorry if this sounds impolite (not trying to act like an unnoficial mod but this recent topic seems too similar to not refer to):

Has SEO ruined the Web?

Edit: Sorry missed this section of the post: (yes I know there is another thread)

zridling:
Fine for me, but they did change their results page format recently to include photos, video, maps, and as many Google services as needed on one page. The FIFA info alone is invaluable this month.

http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=england+world+cup+schedule&aq=8&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=england+worl&gs_rfai=&prmdo=1

iphigenie:
My personal interpretation - which I built when I was involved for 18 months with a semantic search project and spent time thinking about how to achieve results that are a)relevant b)diverse c)of the right granularity (i.e. not too general or too specific for the precision of the query) - is that Google results were actually pretty bad on a lot of these measures but rescued by familiarity

i.e. they were mostly perceived as good because people "knew" that Google was the best there is, were familiar with its result sets, and had acquired habits to "correct" for bad results. In a way almost everyone has acquired forms of Google auto-correction...

If you asked people what they wanted of a search engine, and asked them to rate result sets on paper lists, what you would find is that google is pretty poor at what people say they want. But they are used to it, and their way of searching has been moulded by it. Put them in front of a better engine and these habits backfire, as people search in a google way

All these habits don't transfer to another engine if it improves on Google too much and takes it out of "familiarity" and all of which means any new search engine will be perceived as worse compared to Google, even if it is better on paper (clustering,  relevance etc.) if it changes the experience enough.

For one, if you showed results of one search engine in the "look" of another, it affected the reported quality of the results :)

But this problem also applies to google themselves, as soon as they change too much, the familiarity auto-correction disappears and you notice that the results are noise.

For me, the only way I got good results out of google was the country filtering, but that has been removed. Well, it is still there somewhere but it doesnt work anymore. And I get LOTS of crap especially when searching for a UK source of a product, most of the links are US nonetheless :( That really has gotten measurably worse with the changes

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