10th August 2026, 4 min read

Google Search Getting Way Worse

1. Google Search is the most prominent search engine. There have been multiple and repeating complaints about Google Search getting worse. For example,

1. The End of Google Search—and the Internet—as We Know It
2. Google isn’t the best search engine anymore
3. Google Search May Be Deindexing URLs At Higher Rates

We have to separate two things.

1. Appearance: over the years they have added sponsored links, then there was a time when they heavily favored YouTube videos, now they are favoring Reddit and AI overviews
2. Quality: the links shown as result are accurate and solid

This post will mostly concentrate on the latter.

2. Clearly, search results will become worse if Google is de-indexing on a large scale.

And this is what I can confirm.

I got an e-mail from the Google Search Console Team stating that many URLs were not indexed (“Crawled — not indexed”). From my ca. 750 blog posts, 325 posts were crawled but not indexed. That's almost 50%.

Here is an excerpt of the 325 URLs, which are no longer indexed but had been indexed previously:

1. From 2021: Performance comparison Ryzen vs. Intel vs. Bulldozer vs. ARM
2. From 2021: Lesser Known Static Site Generators
3. From 2023: J-Pilot Usage Statistics
4. From 2024: Das Fehlerverhalten zusammengesetzer linearer Mehrschrittformeln
5. From 2025: TENDLER: 4. Die Korrektoriteration
6. From 2026: Tendler-like Formulas for Stiff ODEs

3. So the problem is across multiple years, across multiple topics, across different languages, across multiple lengths of the articles. Also:

• None of the articles cover any sensitive political topics, see, e.g., woke AI.
• None is AI-generated ("AI slop").

If there is anything on the web regarding Tendler-like formulas or the TENDLER computer code, my blog is the authoritative source. We can therefore easily see when a search produces good or bad results on those topics.

Now if Google no longer has all those articles in its index, it won't find them. I checked for this with the following queries in Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yep:

Tendler Korrektoriteration

Google didn't find the relevant article. That is no wonder, as it has de-indexed the article. Bing found it. Yandex found it. Yep didn't find it.

Read that again. Bing is better than Google. Yandex is better than Google.

Google didn't find the result because id didn't have the information. It chose to be worse!

A few years ago everyone would have told you that Google is way better than Bing. Now Google is voluntarily destroying its own index.

4. This is particularly surprising as my blog is visited by search bots like so, as of 10-Aug-2026 and using data since 17-Sep-2023:

These numbers have to taken with a grain of salt. Any bot can pretend to be a Google bot. “On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog.” However, it can be seen that Google is crawling the internet more intensively than Bing. So it either sees more or sees changes earlier, hence it should be "better".

5. Maybe Google thinks that those URLs, which are marked as “Crawled — not indexed,” are generated by AI. Well, they are not. I know that because I am the author of all of them.

It has been reported that AI detection is still in its infancy. For example, the classic novel "Moby-Dick", written by Herman Melville, when AI tested, shows that it was AI-generated. That is obviously silly.

@theslowai

This is the AI detection result for the book Moby-Dick written by Herman Melville in 1851. Now apparently 7% of this was written by AI and 37% of it was AI-assisted which meant that, according to this detector, Herman Melville got assistance in 1851, bearing in mind that the typewriter wasn't commercially available until the 1870s. AI detectors do not work.

Luckily, my traffic sources to eklausmeier.goip.de are mostly direct, according to Ahrefs. Below is the traffic source breakdown for 11-Jul to 09-Aug-2026. The numbers are pretty similar for other months.

So, if Google de-indexes my blog, that doesn't affect my overall visitor count too much. However, it feels wrong.