Respected American Journalists Ask If Google Search Is Degrading & Significantly Worse

A few respected American Journalists the other day asked on Twitter if you are noticing Google Search get “significantly worse” than it was previous years. Journalists such as Jesse Eisinger, Chris Hayes and Herb Greenberg all chimed in about this topic and Danny Sullivan, a former journalist who now works at Google, took notice.

Who are these journalists?

• Jesse Eisinger is an American journalist and author. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2011, he currently works as a senior reporter for ProPublica. (Wikipedia link)
• Chris Hayes an American commentator and TV news anchor on MSNBC. (Wikipedia link)
• Herb Greenberg a very highlight respected American journalist. (Wikipedia link)

Jesse Eisinger asked on Twitter “Saw something about this on Twitter and then just experienced it myself: Have others noticed that Google search has gotten significantly worse?” Chris Hayes responded “Without a doubt. The recency bias is killer.” Herb Greenberg dug into the issues with searching for recent news.

Here are those tweets with Danny Sullivan’s responses:

If you’re willing to share, I’d love to know what you were seeking and how the results didn’t help. Same for anyone else in the thread. Specific examples really help us look at how to improve.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 25, 2021

I find this gets raised especially a lot by journalists who are trying to research older stories unlike most users who tend to want the freshest ones. But there’s a solution you can try: our before: and after: commands might be useful. More here: https://t.co/Xcu4GPvKeG

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 25, 2021

It sounds like you might want to try our before: and after: commands. More here: https://t.co/Xcu4GPvKeG

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 25, 2021

I’ve been hearing rumblings from big media about how Google Search may be slipping in terms of quality. It sounds like Danny Sullivan of Google is aware and thinks it is about searching for more recent news. I remember the pre-Google Panda days where Google was getting a ton of bad PR around search quality. Panda came out and really fixed a lot of that. But now we are a decade after that and it seems some respected individuals feel Google Search is degrading.

What do you all think?

Forum discussion at Twitter.