I was one of Google's earliest supporters (in the sense of using it and recommending it to friends and colleagues), have it set as the home page in all my browsers, and use it all day every day. I'm far from ready to give it up. However, for the past four or five months, I've been publicly grumbling about the declining quality of its search results, and I'm now seeing a growing level of complaints. For example, Brian Livingston recently devoted an eWeek column to Google Grumbles, and yesterday he followed up with readers responses in his Brian's Buzz newsletter.
The obvious solution is to improve your search techniques -- for example, try some of the Google tips included in my article, Delivering the goods. But there is a negative side to this. If you remember using AltaVista, you will know that a skilled searcher could get vastly better results than an unskilled searcher. What was tremendously liberating and democratizing about Google was that hopeless searchers could generally get excellent results, just as good as or better than skilled searchers. If we are losing that, then we are losing something valuable.
