Pointing out the obvious: Google is an advertising company. If the cost of producing an accurate result outweighs the advertising income on a given term, there is no incentive for Google to produce better results.
Having a search engine that people go to whenever they want to search for things is incredibly valuable, because they will come to you when they want to buy things and you can sell ads. But unless you consistently give the best results for all queries, people will go whenever does. It's worth investing strongly in all queries, not just highly monetizable ones.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
I was about to say there are no such queries but then I remembered having to type a captcha for seemingly automated queries. The captcha page has no results on it obviously. This is because automated queries do not produce advertising revenue. You have to buy them.
I've typed an insane number of queries since the beginning. A decade ago I use to be able to find truly exotic articles, I could find every obscure blog posting on every blog with 3 readers and I was pretty sure google delivered all of it. The tiny communities that came with the supper niche topics rarely produced a link I didn't already find. If they did it was new and I didn't google for a while.
Today google feels like it is a pre-ordered list from which it removes the least matching articles. Only if the match is truly shit will it be moved slightly down the page. The most convincing in this is typing first name + last name queries in imagines and getting celeberties who only have the first or the last name.
People wont go, it has to get much worse before they do.
edit:
With humans an pets a good slap over the head or a firm NO! will usually do the trick.
There are very clearly many queries with no advertising revenue, because there are many queries that show no ads. Trying some searches off the top of my head that I expected wouldn't have ads, I don't get any ads on [cabbage], [who is the president], [3+5], or [why is the sky blue]. On the other hand, if I search for a highly commercial query like [mesothelioma] the first four results are ads.
> A decade ago I use to be able to find truly exotic articles, I could find every obscure blog posting on every blog with 3 readers
My model of what happened is that SEO got a lot better. When Google first came out it was amazing because Page Rank was able to identify implicit ranking information in pages. Once it's valuable to have lots of backlinks, though, this gets heavily gamed. Staying ahead of efforts to game the algorithm is really hard, and I think a lot of times people's experience of a better search engine comes from a time when SEO was much less sophisticated.
> The most convincing in this is typing first name + last name queries in imagines and getting celebrities who only have the first or the last name.
This hasn't been my experience, so I tried an image search for [tom cruise], curious if I would get other Toms. The first 45 responses were all of the celebrity, and image 46 was of Glen Powell in https://helenair.com/people/tom-cruise-helps-glen-powell-lea... which is a different kind of mistake. Do you remember what query you were seeing this on?
No, it would predict that a query that has no advertising income will poor results. You can determine on your own whether that is the case.
