I for one appreciate all of the high profile blog posts about Google's recent search quality. Google basically did with search what Microsoft did with IE6. Once they had dominated the market, they figured "Well, that's that, let's make some other cool stuff", and have gone on to enter into all kinds of unrelated markets instead of improving search at all. If you look at improvements to Google's search from say 2004-2010 there is almost nothing new.

Finally once they got a little bit of competition from Bing, we are seeing some new things like instant search, and they are addressing search quality, adding new features etc...

So the point of the blog posting is that instead of deeming the search quality to suck, one might, by having lower standards, not conclude that they suck. In fact much of the article is actually about how blogs shouldn't be filled with fluff, or with bullshit.

Yes.

This is not about lowering standards, Sam. This is about expectations (and indeed, bullshit on blogs - hence the article title). The one problem search has right now are content farms - like the guys who were scrapping off sites like Stackoverflow, which certainly bit many of us here by bringing actually good results down -, but that isn't to say that "search sucks". There absolutely needs to be a solution to spam and gaming search results.

That being said, the article is indeed not more about search than it is about crap supposed-high-profile blogging. Mike doesn't highlight the problems with search, doesn't mention possible solutions. He talks about Google being in shaky ground because people are paying attention to bing and other competitors. I think that's crap.

The thing is, it is fair to say that search sucks. Many times it's impossible to find what you're looking for. Even the desperate tricks like including the word "forums" in the search don't always work any more. And the post does highlight the problem with search (which is that it sucks). As for possible solutions, that's a hard problem. You can't say that Arrington needs to mention possible solutions, is he going to suggest that they invent some kind of algorithm? It is fair to point out that specialized tools are more useful (and maybe that future search engines will need to be built around these).

You can extend that argument to "x sucks", then, where x can be virtually anything we know - since it is valid to say something sucks without mentioning why, or how it could be better (because he doesn't need to publish an algorithm indeed, but what good is saying something is bad if you don't even know how it could improve?)

Absolutely.

Which is fine. For example, in this case, I hadn't thought about the quality of Google's search results and how they are doing. This has brought the matter to my attention and now I have a different perspective on the future of search engines.

Google does support searching only discussions, you can find this on the left column (sometimes hidden under "more").

The contention isn't that search quality sucks - it is that search quality has declined visibly over the past few months. Personally, I find most of the articles maligning Google to be little more than linkbait trying to capitalise on a meme, but let's at least discuss the real issue rather than simply saying "Search is amazing. Now shut up."

"Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine. The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. all were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged." - The Machine Stops.