What's galling is that they've actively gone out of their way to make it worse, instead of just letting it regress through neglect.
For example, a few weeks ago, I image searched for a meme that I created years ago on 4chan. A dozen or so results were returned, none of them relevant. But if you tack on the name of a 4chan archive, for example "4plebs" (not even "site:4plebs..."), all of the sudden it turns up.
Google in general seems to penalize 4chan and its archives, which is ironic since it's one of the few places where actual humans post OC. Meanwhile Pinterest spam, AI-generated blog posts, and reddit threads full of bots and shills abound in its results.
Speaking of 4chan and google's declining result relevancy, a particular instance of the latter was discussed there (one of the few places it could be discussed, given the amount of censorship that prevails everywhere else these days):
This is still the case today, at least in the US (I just checked). Instead of emphasizing the painting of Beethoven we all know, the one that was actually done during his lifetime, the one featured in the infobox of his Wikipedia page (which is also the top link result), it instead emphasizes a much more obscure painting that was done posthumously, for no obvious reason other than it giving him a noticeably darker skin tone. I'm not even offended by it, I just find it ridiculous that Google actually went out of its way (probably for pc reasons) to train their algorithm to return less relevant results.
For example, a few weeks ago, I image searched for a meme that I created years ago on 4chan. A dozen or so results were returned, none of them relevant. But if you tack on the name of a 4chan archive, for example "4plebs" (not even "site:4plebs..."), all of the sudden it turns up.
Google in general seems to penalize 4chan and its archives, which is ironic since it's one of the few places where actual humans post OC. Meanwhile Pinterest spam, AI-generated blog posts, and reddit threads full of bots and shills abound in its results.