Sometimes I wonder if it’s just me being worse at using keywords to search for what I need but I’ve noticed that it’s so much harder to find things that are actually helpful via google on stackoverflow etc.
Most annoying thing is when I restrict keywords and they still show up on the search results.
Now when I can’t find something on Google, instead of refining keywords, I give DDG or Bing a go first (both not always successful but half the time I find more useful links).
Amit Singhal, who was Head of Search at Google until 2016, has always emphasized that Google will not use artificial intelligence for ranking search results. The reason he gave was that AI algorithms work like a black box and that it is infeasible to improve them incrementally.
Then in 2016, John Giannandrea, an AI expert, took over. Since then, Google has increasingly relied on AI algorithms, which seem to work well enough for main-stream search queries. For highly specific search queries made by power users, however, these algorithms often fail to deliver useful results. My guess is that it is technically very difficult to adapt these new AI algorithms so that they also work well for that type of search queries.
Most annoying thing is when I restrict keywords and they still show up on the search results.
Now when I can’t find something on Google, instead of refining keywords, I give DDG or Bing a go first (both not always successful but half the time I find more useful links).