I don’t disagree with your conclusion, but I think part of why it sucks now is all the Search Engine Optimization, of people trying to game Google into showing you their website, and only necessarily the one most pertinent to your search
Comment on Google hits back after Apple exec says AI is hurting search
PunkRockSportsFan@fanaticus.social 3 weeks ago
Google search was good 20 years ago. It sucks now.
They over capitalized it.
Plus they’re evil af
AndrasKrigare@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
That’s part of it. The other part is that Google, and other search engines, assume you’re clueless and try to “fix” your query for you, and you can’t stop it because they’ve been removing support for searching exact words or using boolean expressions or excluding words.
jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
There have been former Google employees saying they had solutions to deal with SEO, but they were vetoed by the ads side of business, since better results reduce “engagement”.
sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 3 weeks ago
The thing is though, despite Google not being my primary search, shout-out SearXNG, it doesn’t suck now for me.
If I’m looking for information, Google is great and the AI summaries provide everything I want.
If I’m looking for a song or artist discography, Google again is great.
It’s only when I’m looking for sites that I tend to not even bother with Google.
Scary_le_Poo@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
I’ve been running my own searxng instance for a while now. It is very good 99% of the time. Miles better than the garbage that google generally returns.
verstra@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
sus of them to drop the slogan “don’t be evil”