"We've been diligently working to improve the results" was the response to the question of "Are the employees at Google working on Search aware of how bad search results have become in the past year or two?" I thought that was a clear response.
To be more explicit, yes, we're aware that there are complaints about the quality of search results. That's why we've been working in a variety of ways, as I indicated, to improve those.
We have continued to build our spam fighting systems, our core ranking systems, our systems to reward helpful content. We expanded our product reviews system to cover all types of reviews, as this explains: https://status.search.google.com/incidents/5XRfC46rorevFt8yN...
I am of the opinion that its just internet becoming more spammy and unhelpful rather than google searching becoming bad. Every Tom and his mom seems to have a blog/website which they don't even write themselves. Most of the content on the internet is now for entertainment rather than purpose or knowledge. So, I do wonder if its just the state of the internet these days. As a layman, these days I just go directly to Wikipedia/reddit/youtube rather than searching on google.
The Internet is becoming spammy and bad because of Google's rules for ranking. The fact that Google favors newer content and longer pages with filler text is why people are making the content lower quality.
To be more explicit, yes, we're aware that there are complaints about the quality of search results. That's why we've been working in a variety of ways, as I indicated, to improve those.
We have continued to build our spam fighting systems, our core ranking systems, our systems to reward helpful content. We expanded our product reviews system to cover all types of reviews, as this explains: https://status.search.google.com/incidents/5XRfC46rorevFt8yN...
We regularly improve these systems, which we share about on this page: https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2Gw...
The work isn't stopping. You'll continue to see us revise these systems to address some of the concerns people have raised.