This is neither a "Google is evil" rant nor a conspiracy theory, but a simple reminder of why searching the web is no longer what you thought it was. My aim is to improve the general understanding of the reasons for the increase in false, bad or missing search results in recent years.
Most people today believe that search results are more or less meaningful and cover all available results. This may well be the case as long as the search (and the possible results) meet certain parameters. Failure to meet what is considered "relevant" (and it is not up to you to decide) will inevitably result in either meaningless nonsense or no results at all. People do not usually realise that they are being gamed until they start searching for specific items that are not in the main focus of the search engines.
For now, let's look at an example that may seem completely unrelated to the search for china, porcelain or trademarks: imagine you want to find the original release year of a certain song on 78rpm vinyl by a popular World War II-era singer. Whatever search engines give you is often far off the mark, and redirects you to music sites like Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music and the like, which are not interested in accurate historical data, but either want to sell CDs or get you to sign up for a music streaming service.
And so you get results for stuff released on compilations, reissues and so on, but no hard information like the year you are actually looking for, even if you include "release" or similar keywords. You also get results for artists from the same country and/or the same genre. This is like searching for a Porsche car and getting results for everything between BMW and Volkswagen. Not quite what you wanted, is it?
From around 2005 onwards, the big players on the Internet (not just Google, eBay, Bing, etc., but also companies such as United Internet, etc.) realised that the amount of data that needed to be stored, indexed and then made available had reached a level that, even with the development of new technologies, would soon be impossible to handle efficiently. Just to give you an idea, Google adds about ten PetaByte (1 PB = 1024 TB) of raw data (just information, no images, audio or clips) to its structures every day and has to index and synchronise this data with about 17 of its own server farms (source: ©2020 Google). What seems "not much" at first glance becomes more significant when viewed from the point of view of exponential growth, so beautifully described in the fable of rice and the chessboard. Bear in mind that Google is not alone, and that each additional data source must also be indexed, cross-referenced and secured worldwide and in real time.
So the big companies decided to cut back on data collection, agreeing plans to reduce data procurement, overheads, indexing and, of course, storage. What could go wrong, right? Well, the process was made dependent on "relevance". And not, as you might think, the "oh, this might be interesting information" kind of relevance, but the plain "money, more money, MORE money!" kind of relevance. This means that search engines these days ignore regular simple or historical data in favour of all kinds of (money-making) shop/store data, giving you useless and inappropriate shop/store nonsense instead of true information as provided by fan or collector sites. Even results from Wikipedia sometimes end up on result pages 3+ nowadays.
Before some naysayers jump in and claim that I was probably too lazy or stupid to use appropriate keywords, bear in mind that sites that present song lyrics are not excluded from the search if you simply exclude the term "lyrics", because there are tons of non-English sites that do not use that term. Not to mention the fact that sites like Apple Music, Spotify and others will appear even if you have excluded those specific sites. It is no secret that keyword handling has got worse in recent years. Another flaw is that you cannot create white/blacklists for your searches - search engines want to force-feed you whatever nonsense they come up with simply because they are paid to do so; disabling their money-makers would seriously damage their business model.
Just to drive the point home, some self-proclaimed experts think the following search string is perfectly fine and "easy to use":
"ARTIST NAME" 78 -anghami -apple -deezer -gaana -jiosaavn -muziekweb -shazam -spotify -amazon -ebay -youtube -lyrics -songtext -reddit -issuu
Sure ... as if we all wanted to write a bestseller every time we searched for something, right? As mentioned above, no search engine allows the user to have a personal black/white list. I therefore use a self-coded search phrase generator that offers a list of presets depending on article group or context, because I am just sick and tired of all the commercial crap I get shoved down my throat when looking for something specific, like a particular manufacturer or historical background.
Years ago, it was widely expected that closed, ten-year-old eBay auctions would be available in searches. Google indexed and shared the links, eBay stored the auction data and images. This process is long history, as the amount of data generated by sites like eBay has long since exceeded what can be easily handled on a global scale. Based on complex algorithms, the core data of the individual parties (in this example: Google & eBay) as well as the data shared between the different parties are continuously monitored and stripped of any data packets that are not deemed "relevant" enough according to the rules agreed upon by these parties.
As a result, all finished/expired/closed auctions that are older than the agreed time period will simply disappear. For example, they will be deleted from eBay's servers and will no longer appear in search engine results. Observant users will find borderline auction data where the template is still there but all eBay-hosted images are blank. Another great example is the data mining pest Pinterest, which appears to present data even though it is simply no longer there when you try to click through. Their "service" requires you to sign up (which fuels their real business: getting your data), but once you are hooked, they tell you that the data/image you were trying to access is no longer available - go figure.
It all boils down to this: search results today are nowhere near as meaningful or reliable as they were a few years ago. If you are looking for a price to put on your item, a rough estimate of how many other people have tried to buy/sell it in the past, or even if you are just looking to see if there is another image of your item on the web: the last thing you can rely on is a search engine, which contradicts its very reason for existence.
The number of people who end up on sites like mine, genuinely convinced that their item must be rare or unique, is growing all the time because they have been played like a fiddle by Google, Bing or whatever. Sadly, the typical user is also becoming increasingly arrogant and ignorant. One group of heirs had tried to find out more about an inherited dinner set, claiming they had searched the internet to no avail. Now they wanted to know if I could shed some light on the value of their set, as they wanted to either insure it (or sell it off, depending on possible value).
People may remember the time around 2005 when eBay was literally flooded with cheap Winterling porcelain, forcing prices to crash. By 2021, the general desirability had dropped off and prices were abysmal, with 144-piece sets not even selling for 20 (twenty!) US$ because absolutely nobody wanted this stuff. By 2022, all previous auctions and discussions were long gone, leading the family to believe that their set must be rare and therefore valuable.
When confronted with the truth, two family members accused me of lying and said that I was probably just trying to trick them into selling for a fraction of its potential value. A few months later, one of the other family members told me that this couple had contacted two auctioneers with inflated expectations, only to make complete fools of themselves.
Please, whatever you are looking for, do not take the usual search results for the absolute truth. Users are being taken for a ride and the only thing of interest to sites like Google or Bing are personalised search profiles. Try to support search sites like DuckDuckGo.com or Qwant.com, which do not track users and provide far less injected commercial stuff. Their results may seem basic at times, but their search algorithms, combined with a little user input, can produce far better results than Google.
P.S.: And no, tools like Google Lens or any form of AI support do not make it easier, they are just the next generation of toying with your expectations.
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