Comment by nvm0n2

> has it really? How could you tell?

Yes it has and for a certain class of queries it's not even open for debate, because Google themselves have stated they deliberately made it worse. And they really did, it's very noticeable.

This class of queries is for anything related to any perspective deemed "non authoritative". Try to find information that contradicts the US Government on medical questions, for example, and even when you know what page you're looking for you won't be able to find it except via the most specific forcing e.g. exact quoted substrings.

Likewise, try finding stories that are mostly covered by Breitbart on Google and you won't be able to. They suppress conservative news sites to stop them ranking.

15 years ago Google wasn't doing that. It would usually return what you were looking for regardless of topic. There are now many topics - which specifically is a secret - on which the result quality is deliberately trashed because they'd prefer to show you the wrong results in an attempt to change your mind about something, than the results you actually asked for.