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Google something that does have results (usually they says x million), and go like 20 pages in. There's nothing. Hell, results repeat over and over throughout those pages.
And another experience I had the other day, I googled something and it told me there were like 5 pages of results. Clicked to the last page and suddenly it millions of results and pages after pages.
Anyways, I think there are multiple reasons this is happening. First, Google is constantly trying to keep spammy results out of the search (they've gotten pretty bad lately, imo). It is relatively easy to get a website to the top of the results for most searches. Google is constantly adjusting their algorithm to deal with shit like that, but people learn pretty quick how to overcome that.
The side effect of this is that you're only ever going to get results from large websites that have a dedicated team who are working to get their results on Google, and spammy websites that are literally solely dedicated to getting a high rank. Basically 99% of the internet from even a year ago will be penalized in the results, because they aren't following whatever 'best practices' Google has decided on today. You won't find the internet of the 90s or 00s on Google anymore.
Another thing is that Google wants to control what you see. The concern over 'misinformation' means that most websites are going to be penalized, while the mainstream media and some social media sites get prioritized.
I also personally believe that Google is beginning to create a walled garden. 95% of people are searching for the same 5% of content. From a business standpoint, Google can prune 95% of their results and most people won't be impacted (or at least most searches won't be impacted). This would save them a lot of money, and make them profitable as all hell. This is even more true for YouTube, which has an even WORSE search than Google. I'm simply amazed at how many repeated videos I see when I search something, how many videos completely unrelated to my search, unrelated to my search terms, and they are all from 'big' accounts. I pop on over to Google and search for YouTube videos, and suddenly there's an unimaginable amount of content that I am actually looking for. And I can only imagine that if this were the old Google search, that I'd get an even better experience.
Honestly, I prefer Yandex these days. DDG, Bing, Google, they are useless.
Yeah, there's a reason the search tier containing that stuff used to be called (and may still be) "landfill".
Same idea; if there are good results in the higher search tiers, it doesn't search the lower ones. Presumably clicking to the last page signals you didn't like what was found higher up, so it searches deeper.
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