I am going to boast a bit and say when it comes to getting the information I want, I can find it. Whether in physical copy, verbal confirmation or stretching out the fingers for some google-fu, I have hardly ever came up empty handed. Until recently.

Over the past... let's say six months, I have noticed a sharp rise in "parrot" sites. That is, sites that all say the same thing. It doesn't matter what the topic is. Could be linux media server configs or the current Ebola situation. It is the same information, almost copy/pasted from site to site. This makes looking for what you want much harder. If you want information on Apache/PHP configuration on CentOS and all google gives you is the same regurgitated article about making an Ubuntu server the amount of time wasted searching goes up fast. And the crazy thing is that in some cases it's the same factually incorrect information that is being parroted from site to site. It is frustrating to say the least. There has always been misinformation on the internet but to this extent? I don't know.

Has anyone else experienced this? Has it always been like this or am I just becoming more sensitive to it?

I have also noticed this on DuckDuckGo, that's what I mostly use, but I tried the same searches on Startpage (Google) with the same results.

I think it's just a rise in spam/parrot sites. Try using the '-' operator to eliminate them based on a common term, it usually works.

When it comes to Linux, for the last few years there is a decreased signal to noise ratio in general - so it's not just about web searches. Much of what you find is copypasta blog crap, which serves as padding for those trying to make a fast buck from ads. The distro's own wiki pages, online manuals, man pages and forums like this one are probably your best bet rather than web searches in general.

As to news/politics: meh...

I've noticed that there seem to be a lot of dead links, fake sites, and useless sites in general making it hard to find what I'm looking for amidst all of the clutter.

I didn't vote. Also,the last two selections are almost identical in meaning.

I don't always find what I want 100% of the time, but I do find what I want most of the time. For me, it's a hit and miss situation. Sometimes I dig deeper in my searches with boolean operators, plus, minus and other symbols.

I can usually find what I'm looking for on the first page of results (I use Startpage, which does not "personalize" the results), but I have gotten pretty good at composing my search strings.

I think "personalized results" are the worst thing search engines have come up with since "portals."

I recently switched back to google as my primary search engine (not signed up|in) for one reason only, so that Newbies, and n00bs learn how and where to acquire the same information that seasoned veterans do.

Hell, I still have google bookmarks from 15 years ago.

I'd agree with the comments about the "parrot sites". Another thing that annoys me is when a result turns out to be a search site which says "sorry we couldn't find that".

A lot of success in searching is down to using correct search settings (do you know how to sort results by date or prioritise a region?) and sensible search terms (reference librarians have an advantage here!)

Yes, there is too much spam and too many blogs to sift through. But you can remove most of them by appending -"com" to your search term. This will sometimes reduce the amount of hits by orders of magnitude, and the amazing thing is that it doesn't seem to exclude any real results.

I also find it more effective to search for very specific terms, which must be a part of the result.

Bad:

Better:

Google (Startpage) has much more spam than DuckDuckGo. I always try DuckDuckGo first because you might actually find a real result among the first 3 pages. On Google it's just seemingly endless spam farms.

If I can't find what I want in 3 pages or less on google, I change search terms.

Thanks, I didn't know -"com" could do that.

I too have noticed that Startpage has more spam than DuckDuckGo, so I prefer DuckDuckGo. It is actually one of the best search engines now.

yeah, its harder, (for me atleast) i use custom searches and searches from ghdb (google hacking database) to find online webcams. (i make time-lapse videos). 10-5 years ago searches were alot better than these days, there are alot nonsense pages these days.

Surely it's harder. Too fake and dead sites.

It is a search engine and has nothing to do with factual info.
A search engine does a few things but none of them have the ability to search factual information.
Search engines seek money from their advertisers in order pay server costs and then some.

How well I understand having to look through all the manushia but again people belive in History books written buy
people with an agenda. It would be like saying Time magazine is absolute in it's history. The worst thing thrown at the people
was the encyclopedia Britannica . Pick up a 1960's edition and look at the lies.

It is only you with the humane brain that can come to a conclusion. The thread should read what search engine has less bull shit added for advertisers.

To my opinion searching became more accurate, at least with Google. But...

1. Even though Google gets more and more accurate, this accuracy is spoiled by personalization of search, so one who cares has to fight it, otherwise good searching algorithm will be detracted by user-fitting.
2. The content created by people on the Web gets more and more low-quality, so even though Google can search good, there is less and less good to find.

People don't write and post good stuff anymore. Instead they generate garbage for making money and palm it off to users in a way like it's some actual information. If you're somewhat with brain, you can easily see it's not. It's like you come up to somebody to talk to, to have a conversation, and that person sees your coming and thinks “Hmm, there's one more, might be dummy, gotta make usage out of him”. And tries to reply to you something to make you buy, when you think he actually has a real conversation with you. Web uses you these days instead of providing you with real information.

That's the mechanism of a problem as it seems to me.

Oh, and Google watches what to allow you to find, and what not to (in a mind manipulation way). Noticed by people multiple times.