Google Search Results Have Gotten Worse

People have been complaining about Google search results for years. Some would even say that the search results delivered by Google have steadily declined from what they were years ago. Whether the quality of Google search results have truly declined over the years is a matter for debate, but from where I stand it seems that they have dramatically gotten worse in the past week.

Last week I did a Google search on singer Steve Lawrence as part of my research for the tribute I was writing about him. Since Mr. Lawrence had recently died, I fully expected obituaries from major news outlets to dominate the search results. That having been said, I did not expect those obituaries to rank above the official website of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé. Worse yet, Steve Lawrence's IMDB page was nowhere to be seen. A search I performed on French actor Alain Delon was even worse. The first two results were Wikipedia and IMDB, which I fully expected, but the other results were nothing but news stories with only a little information on his career. Out of curiosity, I did a search on my beloved Vanessa Marquez. Like Alain Delon, IMDB and Wikipedia topped the results for the search for her, followed by several news stories (most of them rather old). I then performed a search for myself. Now I am not famous, so there really aren't any news stories about me out there. Even so, the search results were a surprise, The top result in the search for "Terence Towles Canote" is my LinkedIn profile, which I  have pretty much abandoned and have not updated in some time. It ranked above my Amazon author profile, my GoodReads author profile, and even the "About Me" page on this blog (which, given it was written by me, should top the results).

Now I don't know if Google realizes it or not, but when I perform a search on an actor, singer, author, or other artist, I want pages that contain substantial information on them, not news articles on only one part of their life. I would rather see an in-depth article on Alain Delon's career by a fan on a blog than a news story on how police discovered a lot of guns at Alain Delon's house. When I do a search for actress Vanessa Marquez, I want to see sites with substantial information on her career, not news articles on the settlement her mother made with the the City That Shall Not Be Named, much less her death. When I search for Steve Lawrence, his IMDB profile should be towards the top of the search results and his official web site should be up there as well.

As to what caused search results on Google to go south over the past week, I have read that Google did a core update this month that was meant to address spam and low-quality content. While I will give Google the benefit of the doubt and assume that the update was successful in dealing with spam, I think it utterly failed with regards to delivering quality results. According to Google Search's blog, The Keyword, the update was meant to "...ensure we surface the most helpful information on the web and reduce unoriginal content in search results." In my searches for Steve Lawrence, Alain Delon, my dearest Vanessa Marquez, and even myself, instead Google surfaced what I considered the most unhelpful information on the web, much of it unoriginal. After all, those news stories often regurgitate the same information over and over again. Quite simply to me a well-written blog post by a fan with substantial information on an artist is not only of higher quality and more original than a news story reported by dozens of sources, but it is also much less spammy as well.

My suggestion to Google is that they go back to the way the algorithm was a couple of years go, when it was still delivering quality results. Oh, they should try to take care of spam and content written by AI, but they should be delivering quality content on the subject for which any individual is searching. Quite frankly, news stories are not quality content. When searching for an actor, I do not want to see news stories from NBC News, Deadline, People, or the Picayune Post. I want to see results from IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, The Movie Database, and blogs with in-depth articles on that actor. Google really needs to re-think what they consider quality content so it is more in line with what users think of as quality content. As it is, they are failing miserably.