I am just shocked at how different our experiences are. I wonder what leads to the vast gulf? Could your results be better due to what you are searching or is the algorithm producing different results for each of us, based on other Google cues?
A general one: Whenever I search for something that was relevant in the past, but the keywords are now hijacked by some current events. Note that setting an upper date limit does not help: My problem is the content itself, not when the content was created. Somebody could still create content today about a historic event.
A concrete example that you guys can try for yourself is that I tried to find a certain Greek fable, because it became important to me because I deeply understood yet another layer of it only recently, decades after hearing the story and the usual interpretations:
Three philosophers discussing... stuff got tired and took a nap under a tree. Some mischievous boy put a black paint mark on their head while they slept. When they woke up, they all only saw the black mark on the other philosophers' heads and laughed at each other. It took a while for one of them to realize that he too must have such a mark.
I tried many questions and keywords and many search engines. The only one that found the fable was - ChatGPT!. All the search eng8ines only showed completely irrelevant stuff. I even tried avoiding the word "philosophers" because there are three well-known ancient Greek philosophers and plenty of results with that exact wording for those guys.
Because generalized Internet search encompasses any and all human interests. The vast gulf could easily be explained by bias in what 2 ppl are interested in and search for.
For example, if Alice is very interested in Sports News, coding, and movie reviews, they might get great results.
And then Bob runs searches on cooking recipes, interior design, and music, and gets terrible results.
Most likely you care about something that the other person doesn’t, biasing your search results greatly.
