this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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curious if there is any way to know for sure if this is the case? is there documentation of vague google searches over time to track their results? sort of seems like a "don't know what you got til it's gone" sort of thing for the average user. but maybe there is some academic work or industry publications to this effect?
We do have a good 10-20 years of every news story intro containing a line like "a google search for 'spatula' returns 2.5million results". remember when journalists and other writers thought that just putting a single search term into a search engine was the way to conduct online research?
otherwise it is really just your recollection how it felt then vs now. i can't comment on @merc@sh.itjust.works's programing skills but the point about changing expectations is a good one. not to mention that the amount of available data has exploded.
I doubt there's any way to tell. Google probably has "search quality" phrases that they plug into it to track their quality over time, but those are probably secret, and most of them are probably not vague searches that you wouldn't expect to work.
I really doubt Google was able to do this 6+ years ago. From what I remember, 6+ years ago, we were still trying to use specific words or phrases we expected to see on the page we wanted to find, or at least phrases we expected to see on pages that linked to the page we wanted to see.