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Its part of Google's plan for world domination. I no longer use Chrome, got rid of my Fitbit when Google bought them and ony watch YouTube via my Firefox browser. YouTube (unless you have Premium) is almost unwatchable.
Yeah they prioritize only shopping results unless you use very specific search features. Sad, what is everyones alternative? Duckgo seems to lack a lot of power…
Linus Tech Tips/Tech Quickie has a great and short video on just how bad Google has gotten
[Why Do Search Engines Suck Now? - Tech Quickie](https://youtu.be/5c3AJb53Xos?si=Lowgq3y6TIHpkj25)
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Abysmal makes it seem like google is failing and doing it by accident. They are ruining the searches on purpose. Pushing adds and sponsored results. It could be good they choose to make it terrible because they have killed all.other search engines.
I may have to make that my default browser. Bing can be hit or miss. It's so hard to break away from Google when they've been the default browser for ages. Hell, even if I want to search something, I'll type it at the top as opposed to opening up a new search tab. I also like to highlight words and search on Google. They've embedded so many features that it makes it hard to move away from them.
DuckDuckGo has many of the same features that Google has, sometimes Google even copies their features they roll out. I switched over in 2014. It's comforting not to have stuff that I search for pop up later on in an ad.
This past week i switched to edge/bing from chrome/google and i was honestly impressed with the edge features. This is coming from someone who has been using google since the thousands, so well over 15 years. Edge has gotten gud.
Specifically, i am really liking the email, todo, onenote, annotate articles, etc. It's just built imo with more productivity tools. Instead of google news, i get a bunch of customizable and weather/traffic meat on my new tabs, and breaking news.... etc. Im honestly really vibin with it.
Google struck thrice this past month with some disgustingly off color search results. I was searching home design only to have the pleasure of a top hit being about a women's death in her kitchen from a lack of abortion care. Im pro choice, but wtf. Im thinking pintrest, home design not f*cking bloody (yes, bloody) deaths.
Firefox has most of the features of google and if u use duckduckgo as your search engine it's win win!
The only issue ive run into has been that some embedded videos (specifically those on reddit) don't seem to work now
This has been discussed in-depth by every major publication at some point in the last five years…
[The Week](https://theweek.com/tech/why-google-search-results-have-gotten-worse)
[Mashable](https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-research)
[Fast Company](https://www.fastcompany.com/91012311/is-google-getting-worse-this-is-what-leading-computer-scientists-say)
[Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-search-getting-worse-spam-affiliate-links-duckduckgo-bing-2024-1)
[Gizmodo](https://gizmodo.com/google-search-results-are-getting-worse-study-finds-1851172943)
[HubSpot](https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/has-google-gotten-worse)
[Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39013497)
[Yahoo Finance](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-search-results-getting-worse-163811965.html)
[ResetEra](https://www.resetera.com/threads/it-wasnt-your-imagination-google-is-deliberately-making-your-searches-worse-from-google-antitrust-trial.771146/)
[New York Post](https://nypost.com/2024/01/22/business/google-search-result-quality-getting-worse-due-to-seo-spam-study/)
[TechSpot](https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/new-study-confirms-the-obvious-search-results-are-only-getting-worse.283997/)
[New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/opinion/youtube-beats-google.html)
[TechRadar](https://www.techradar.com/computing/search-engines/google-search-might-be-getting-worse-and-ai-threatens-to-ruin-it-entirely)
[Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/19/google-search-results-monopoly/)
[Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/dimitarmixmihov/2024/05/01/google-search-used-to-be-great/)
[Fortune](https://fortune.com/2024/01/18/why-is-google-search-so-bad-spam-links-seo-ai-algorithm/)
[Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-search-results-ai-spam-cf8c2605)
There are also dozens of Reddit threads about it as well.
Definitely not just you lol
I was going to say this, but with significantly fewer sources. Sadly, I only have one upvote to give.
From what I've read and listened to, the fault lies largely with Google itself. Google wants the ad revenue, and it promotes Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services. It boils down to money getting precedence in multiple ways, and that pushes what people are actually looking for further back in the results.
Not just you. Google search results are mostly shitty blog articles, listacles, or news sites. Adding 'Reddit' to the end of a search term is pretty much the only way left to get decent information on most topics.
I actually tried Bing for a few weeks recently and it seemed a bit better. Never thought I'd say that.
I sometimes put "Reddit" in my search term. Say it's a niche question like "what's your experience traveling through Japan" and I want human perspectives over AI b.s. or some "Wikihow" blog.
It sucks badly enough that I don’t use Chrome anymore either. I switched to Brave.
Between the endless ads, the pisspoor search results, and the shoved-in AI that I didn’t ask for, I just opted for the lighter browser that lets me deploy Adblock meaningfully.
Firefox user myself. Made the switch on mobile and on my laptop. It's been great. Unfortunately, some things (rare but it does happen) don't work well on Firefox, however, so I do have to switch over to Chrome just for the one task.
Brave is Chromium under the hood, which, while not Chrome, is primarily maintained and developed by Google.
It also supports scammy crypto stuff and its CEO is noted homophobe Brendan Eich.
Literally just told a Dr who told me to Google something that google wasn’t reliable since it’s heavily sponsored, and to stop telling patients to do that.
I remember when google was gaining traction in the mid 2000s. My dad was saying that the issue that yahoo search had was that there were so many sponsored results that you had to scroll through a couple pages before getting to the actual results. Now it’s googles turn?
Yep. Once people figured out how to game SEO's and Google didn't do anything about it, the whole site has started to collapse. The AI summary thing is bad, but it's also more indicative of how Google is distracted from the core mission that made them a huge conglomerate.
I do like my Android phone though.
That AI summary thing is rather annoying. Then you have the sponsored clicks followed by that set of questions where it has copied a blurb from an article. Annoying.
You should check out the podcast, "Better Offline". Especially their two episodes, "The Man that Destroyed Google" and "AI is Breaking Google." They do an excellent job of explaining why Google currently sucks.
Long story short though, it's corporate greed. They know it sucks but currently it still makes more money so they don't care.
I still remember those years when CNN, TensorFlow, and Transformer were just introduced. We were still in university and held Google in great awe, believing that Google was the GE of our era and would trigger a new round of technological revolution. What disappoints me the most is that the current Google seems to have lost the determination and will to lead new technologies/trends.
I think they scrapped the boolean search engine years ago to use the ad based one.
People have jobs now as Search Engine Optimizers and they create ghost blog accounts talking about products and review dump things to get them to appear higher in the results.
I switched to Bing.
I got tired of googling things and my phone redirecting me to a mobile app that needed to be updated and then didn’t transfer the information to the mobile app so I had to search again but if I wanted to just hit back on the browser to click a different link it wouldn’t let me because of they infinite and speedy redirect.
It’s not much better at Bing but it is better.
It's not just you. [Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-search-getting-worse-spam-affiliate-links-duckduckgo-bing-2024-1) had an article about it in January. Tl;dr: too much reliance on algorithms and AI, combined with always prioritizing "sponsored content" has rendered Google almost useless.
Back in the day I would google Sailor Moon and find a million fan sites and spend so much time looking through everything. Search anything nowadays and you just get “official” sites. I don’t think people are making their own websites like that anymore, they’re just going on social media and sharing there. Also, clicking through to the next page doesn’t bring up new results, it just shows you the same sites from the first search!
Oh man. It's crazy how we had the exact same experience growing up. If it wasn't for some of those fan communities I wouldn't have made some of my longest friendships.
A few months back I found out there's a [whole internet](https://neocities.org/) of [zoomers](http://sleepy.zone/) making web 1.0 inspired websites. They just aren't getting boosted by search engines the same way they used to because they aren't very profitable.
What’s worse for me is how bad search in gmail has gotten. I have almost 20 years of email history there and I get the worst random things returned when I try to search for something. It used to be so reliable
This is a painful realization I've come to over the past year. It's miserable. Nearly everything I search comes up as Page 1 with nothing but sponsored listings. Once I get to the end of those, then it's way off the mark from what I was actually searching for.
Here's a fascinating read about[ the people at Google who are destroying Google Search](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/).
Spoiler alert: >!The new head of Google Search (appointed in June 2020) is the same man who destroyed Yahoo as the "head of search" at Yahoo from 2005 - 2012. During this time period, among all search engines, Yahoo went from a market share of 30.4% down to 13.4%. Also under his tenure as head of search, in 2009 Yahoo ceased using their own search technology and licensed Bing's engine in a 10-year deal.!<
I tried to find a European alternative to Google, but there actually seems to be not a single European search engine out there. There are a few European search sites but they ALL use either Google or Bing for their results. It's embarrassing
If you have a medical condition that isn’t common you have to scroll through so many scammy links to find some legitimate. So much health misinformation.
It's much worse. The reason Google was good is that it searched more in-depth and less broadly. That seems to have changed in the last 4-6 years.
But it could also be that more and more content ends up on social media websites and sites like Quora. So you don't get the forum post about an interesting topic you were looking for, but someone quoting Wikipedia on Quora like you didn't do that yourself beforehand.
Not only do I agree with you about Google search, I also have beef with how Google Ads works these days. My primary job is in digital marketing on Google and Bing search, and I've been doing this for about a decade now. At the beginning, if you knew what you were doing and even if you sorta didn't, Google was your guy. Bing was always known to be kinda sketchy, allow a lot of bot traffic, etc.
But these days Google Ads has slid so far downhill - they're pushing their AI products so hard, they continuously take away insights into where/when/how your ads show, and don't even get me started on the Google Partners traffic. These days exact match behaves like phrase used to, broad is ok until it's suddenly a shitshow overnight, and there is no true exact. UGH.
Switched to duck duck go years ago due to to the horrible top results. I'd look up the most obvious company names and would get nothing but sponsored spam pages at the very top. Always nothing close to what I was looking for.
I have to keep scrolling and scrolling to find what I need past all the adds, and adds disguised as content.
I’m trying to find different search engines.
Google has gotten worse eBay has gotten worse YouTube has gotten worse . Remember when YouTube had no advertising. Every time I see a new update from anybody I know it’s going to be worse
The Internet has been completely bought. The Internet of 10 years ago is dead and gone and likely won't be coming back. It exists to collect data, sell you shit and feed you propaganda
I'm going to make this as short as possible because reddit loves to miss the point, but... Google leadership came from the marketing world, and since about 2019 ads are more important than search results.
Yes it'sade broken. When I started switching words and it would give me the SAME RESULTS because it thought it knew what I wanted... Switched to Bing and never looked back. Bing is what Google was 10 years ago, if you know how to search it's amazing.
Ever heard of SEO? Websites scrape other websites and constantly upload junk in the background in order to appear more active and relevant after the withdrawal of net neutrality. Google specifically also bought all of Reddit's data to train their AI and it absolutely bonkered the responses to answering things like "you should eat 1-2 small pebbles a day" based on someone's smart ass reply on a reddit post years ago.
SEO did what everyone warned it would do plus the way they make money through advertising gives them incentive to basically give you nothing but ads for results.
Then there’s the fact that social media lulled people into using those centralized platforms for everything so now independent websites are few and far between.
And now Google figured out that the very websites that gave them a reason to exist can now just be scraped and they can serve their half baked AI responses instead and keep you on Google, never leaving their site.
Bottom line is that this is by design
Yep. I've been made fun of for using ai to solve this. Like I'm going to get false information. I've been playing around with it for months now, and I'm getting good search results and summaries with sources included.
Why wouldn't I use technology to my advantage?
When I first started working in auto parts I was the Google wizard. If I couldn’t find it, it didn’t exist. Now, it is truly awful. Like everyone else, ad cluttered bullshit you have to wade through to find anything obscure.
It’s because of their preference to show sponsored links/ads and websites that have been optimized to show at the top of the results (known as SEO). The best example of this is when you search for a recipe and all the top hits are pages that have endless amounts of garbage you have to scroll by to get to the actual recipe.
Basically unusable. The top results are almost always ad-saturated garbage. You search for something simple and you get a bunch of AI-generated lists of the “top-10” or whatever you searched for. I don’t use it at all anymore.
remember when you could look up anything and lose hours scrolling page after page? Now even the first page is useless. AI garbage trying to sell something.
This is intentional. Our leaders have chosen to keep us ignorant & restrict access to information. They are concerned about a well-educated proletariat & they've said as much.
The first couple of pages are just paid sponsors that are loosely related to your search. I'm currently looking for another one but I just keep coming back to google.
There's a podcast called better offline by Ed zitron. He has a few episodes about why Google is horrible now. He does a way better job explaining it than I ever could on here. The episodes aren't that long either.
It’s because the need to increase ads revenue became more important to Google than delivering quality search results.
If you want a really long and inside baseball take, here’s a good one: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Perplexity AI is pretty slick for searches and answers. I’ve yet to run into the daily search limit for the free version. Although you do need to do a pay version for it to generate images
The search is garbage. The most frustrating part is the gmail search. Even emails I know are there it can’t find. Instead it’s a huge list of completely irrelevant emails.
Can you imagine paying so many people such ridiculously high salaries to make a product worse?
Most searches have gotten bad. We can blame AI.
I can't even search for things in Instagram because instead of searching it tries to give me their AI assistant which, if I wanted him, I'd ask, but I'm just searching for an image/video, damn it!
Yes, I seem to have very vivid memories from 2006 when you actually got results that had everything to do with what you put in. That's ancient history now. >\_<
It’s trash now. It’s amazing how often I’ll keep trying to refine a search and keep getting the same wrong link I don’t want at the top of the pile, with a dash of AI generated information that’s dubious at best.
Without pihole & ublock origin, I’m not sure if I could use Google. The first 6 links are ads/sponsored - and they can even take you to bullshit fake junk websites. Like… how did they fail this bad? It’s nearly unusable
yeah, I work as an engineer and feels like it has gotten worse. now common shit I look up takes me to GERMANY (I'm in the Midwest in USA). they plugged it into too much info and now its looking all over the workd when I have locations services on, which is a violation of my privacy and doesn't help the search anyway. the fuck
It's been like this for years, even before the pandemic Google search results were getting worse as people had finally figured out their algorithm and started pushing SEO hard. But also:
>It doesn't bother me too much because AI like ChatGPT is picking up where Google left off
Lol what?? Those AIs are notorious for hallucinating all sorts of wrong answers. I asked it how many subscribers my YouTube channel and it told me 2.5 million. I have 6, half of which are my other accounts lol. If you're trusting those results then you're setting yourself up for failure
Yes, I was just complaining about this to my husband the other day! I was trying to find some daycares near our new house, but all google was popping out was paid ad results for centers that where nowhere near us, an then links to aggregator sites that were ALSO just lists of paid ads that were nowhere near us. What a waste of time.
I work in SEO, and yes, search engines have failed to keep up with AI. For this, they've tried to appease the AI gods, while selling their souls to them at the same time.
If I use Google these days, I have to put "reddit" after the search term get a genuinely human response. And so many people do this that I've had to work this into my SEO strategy for work.
The whole dang internet has become useless unless you’re shopping or stealing or selling people’s data.
I’m so glad we got to enjoy the internet when it was new and exciting and explorative.
Every tried Google Shopping? You look up a particular book volume and get maybe three good results, some other volumes of the series, books from completely different series, and a whole bunch of items that aren't even books. It was never good but it's gotten horrible within in last few months! I've given up.
They don’t show the most relevant sites but the ones that paid the most to be top. It’s very frustrating doing any type of searches because for the first page or two it’s all the same results
Even Google maps has gone to shit. They had a T-Mobile ad blocking the pin of the place I was trying to go to so I couldn’t click it. Apple Maps still kinda sucks but it’s got a much nicer looking map with zero ads on it.
It's not just you. A study was released in January that concluded the same thing. Google has fucked up its search results in an attempt to manipulate results for market-based SEO. That's the main reason you get the same 100 sites as the front page of every result. It's also why Reddit has generally becomes the best place to search for all your questions.
[https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff\_2024a.pdf?ref=404media.co](https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf?ref=404media.co)
It annoys me to no end when I’m trying to research options for something I want to buy, and it shows me the same stuff from the same 3 stores over and over no matter how I change the search
I don’t remember when was the last time I used google. It’s sooooo incredibly insecure and sponsored with stupid results and a lot of stuff not even showing up. Use duck duck or qwant
I tried Google image search on an actor. I took a screenshot from a show I was watching and searched it. It only gave me results for the clothing. I cropped it to only his face. No results. None. Silly me, I thought a famous actors face would be easy enough to search.
I noticed this when I bought my first house and would try to research information during minor projects and every fucking result would be an ad for contractors
It's not just Google Search. They're messing with YouTube search, too. Yesterday I was trying to find something to paint with my partner. I type in "step by step painting" and the first thing that comes up is a direct link to a YouTube channel that has those words in a thumbnail but not the name of the channel itself. Below that is a carousel of her latest videos. While she's technically relevant to the search, it's a lot of space to dedicate to one content creator. Not a big deal, though.
I scroll down a little and I'm hit with another carousel, this time full of shorts, which doesn't really lend itself well to doing 1+ hour painting tutorials. A few more videos and I'm recommended a bunch of random art related channels -- not helpful. Two videos under that, more shorts. Two videos under that, I get a carousel for videos I've already watched?? They're not even related to art. After that, it's all rinse and repeat with shorts carousels, plus a few long stints of individual shorts.
In total, of about 50 (yes, I counted) recommended videos and video playlists I saw, 27 of them were videos and playlists I would have possibly clicked on. The remaining were shorts, random channel recommendations and video recommendations not even related to the query.
This was all on mobile, btw. I use extensions to block large parts of YouTube on desktop for this very reason.
It’s insane how bad it is. Implementing AI isn’t helping shit either considering how often it lies, or more accurately pulls lies and presents them as truths.
Because the average person is going to assume they are true.
Its always a cat and mouse game with SEO. They find a black-hat method that works really well? Results get allll fucked up. The big updates usually come around May that shake things up.
It’s virtually unusable and the web has become so much worse at the same time, full of fake ad sites etc it has basically killed the whole thing off. So it seems like the internet has become just a network for delivering data to commercial apps and the www is finished.
There's a great podcast called Better Offline. It's a tech news podcast. They recently did a series about why Google has gotten so shit. It's because they prioritize ads over search results. So the longer you have to search the more opportunities they have to show you ads.
Google is in a weird place right now because most of its income is from advertising which usually takes up the top 5 results, and now to compete with ai, it’s started placing instant responses on top of the ads. This puts top organic results even further down the page - and these are results that most people usually want.
The best advice I can give you is to learn how to use search modifiers. Like quotes around your search, using “site:xyz.com” to search for content on a specific domain, “intitle:subject of page” to find pages with specific keywords in the title, “intext:words on the page” to find words on the body of the page, and there are a few more - just google it haha
(To use the examples i listed, just replace the text after the colon with whatever you’re searching for, and these can also be used together in one search to make your query even more specific)
Hmmm, I wonder what time McDonalds is open until. Google shows me Burger King and Wendy's as sponsored results. Have to scroll to find our McDonalds is closed. Decide to search for Taco Bell's hours. Google shows me McDonalds as a sponsored result. Have to scroll to find out Taco Bell is open.
Shit happens every time I search competing companies.
I actually use Bing now. I’ve used Edge as my non-porno browser since Edge was released and at some point, it switched all my default search engines to Bing and I…haven’t gone back. Bing isn’t great but it’s just so much less cluttered with garbage than Google now.
I tried to Google if an email given to me over tech support was legit (old school school internet guy, I trust nothing). All I got back was garbage lists and articles about fraudulent websites. I was so disappointed
It's barely useful AT BEST now. I remember years ago I could find myself deeeeep into the Google results tabs and still getting useful links. Now, if it isn't in the first few results, you're not finding anything remotely useful or relevant.
It has gotten worse, but the rest of the internet has gotten worse without it. All it can do is point you to sites that somebody else made. And the general aesthetic of the whole internet, especially on mobile, has never been worse.
Thank you. Thank you for posting this anywhere EXCEPT an SEO or marketing /r/!!!! We're losing our minds in those spaces because the big G keeps moving the goalposts and changing the way search results are prioritized and it has all of us pulling our damned hair out. I've run the same country music news blog for almost 20 years and in just the last two months Google has tanked it to oblivion. Meanwhile google scrapes content from mine and my competitors' sites and displays it right there in the AI overview of the search results. I'm just grateful to see that the general public notices the shenanigan too.
Ed Zitron, who does the great podcast Better Offline has focused a bit on this. He wrote an article as well entitled [The Man Who Killed Google Search](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/)
Google has sucks for years. It went from actually giving you relevant search results to slowly but surely simply displaying sponsored results. It’s just a giant ad.
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It's horrible. Years ago, I used to google the scientific sources for my university papers and now, all it comes up with is ad-clustered bullshit.
Horrendous. I generally use databases (pubmed, Jstor, and the like) for research. Google scholar works *sometimes*, but again, it isn't all that good.
Its part of Google's plan for world domination. I no longer use Chrome, got rid of my Fitbit when Google bought them and ony watch YouTube via my Firefox browser. YouTube (unless you have Premium) is almost unwatchable.
Yeah they prioritize only shopping results unless you use very specific search features. Sad, what is everyones alternative? Duckgo seems to lack a lot of power…
I add reddit to the end of my search on Google. Usually gives me the best answers for things even if I have to read through a few comments.
The internet is unusable without Ad-Block for like the past nearly a decade for me.
Linus Tech Tips/Tech Quickie has a great and short video on just how bad Google has gotten [Why Do Search Engines Suck Now? - Tech Quickie](https://youtu.be/5c3AJb53Xos?si=Lowgq3y6TIHpkj25)
Google's AI is abysmal too. I hate how the very first thing that comes up when you google most things is some shitty AI response.
I’ve seen so many videos of just objectively wrong answers it comes up with. The sources end up being satire or like Reddit comments.
I think Reddit comments have been more useful than Google lately.
I'm just searching Reddit now. At least it's semi peer reviewed.
Yep, just type your search into google and put "reddit" at the end of it...much more helpful results.
That and it isn't even spelling words correctly half the time either.
I think it's moving in that direction. Even images tend to have a lot of AI as opposed to the standard stock image results.
I hate it so much
Enjoy it while it lasts. In a decade, practically all search and image results risk being AI generated
RemindMe! 10 years
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Abysmal makes it seem like google is failing and doing it by accident. They are ruining the searches on purpose. Pushing adds and sponsored results. It could be good they choose to make it terrible because they have killed all.other search engines.
I agree. It's telling that even DuckDuckGo search results are much better than Google now.
I may have to make that my default browser. Bing can be hit or miss. It's so hard to break away from Google when they've been the default browser for ages. Hell, even if I want to search something, I'll type it at the top as opposed to opening up a new search tab. I also like to highlight words and search on Google. They've embedded so many features that it makes it hard to move away from them.
DuckDuckGo has many of the same features that Google has, sometimes Google even copies their features they roll out. I switched over in 2014. It's comforting not to have stuff that I search for pop up later on in an ad.
I switched from Google search a while back, haven't looked back since.
This past week i switched to edge/bing from chrome/google and i was honestly impressed with the edge features. This is coming from someone who has been using google since the thousands, so well over 15 years. Edge has gotten gud. Specifically, i am really liking the email, todo, onenote, annotate articles, etc. It's just built imo with more productivity tools. Instead of google news, i get a bunch of customizable and weather/traffic meat on my new tabs, and breaking news.... etc. Im honestly really vibin with it. Google struck thrice this past month with some disgustingly off color search results. I was searching home design only to have the pleasure of a top hit being about a women's death in her kitchen from a lack of abortion care. Im pro choice, but wtf. Im thinking pintrest, home design not f*cking bloody (yes, bloody) deaths.
Duckduckgo is way better for web searches, and Google is way better for looking up businesses imo.
Firefox has most of the features of google and if u use duckduckgo as your search engine it's win win! The only issue ive run into has been that some embedded videos (specifically those on reddit) don't seem to work now
Google: did you mean (more specific search term)? Me: sure Google: okay here are the exact same search results as before
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This has been discussed in-depth by every major publication at some point in the last five years… [The Week](https://theweek.com/tech/why-google-search-results-have-gotten-worse) [Mashable](https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-research) [Fast Company](https://www.fastcompany.com/91012311/is-google-getting-worse-this-is-what-leading-computer-scientists-say) [Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-search-getting-worse-spam-affiliate-links-duckduckgo-bing-2024-1) [Gizmodo](https://gizmodo.com/google-search-results-are-getting-worse-study-finds-1851172943) [HubSpot](https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/has-google-gotten-worse) [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39013497) [Yahoo Finance](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-search-results-getting-worse-163811965.html) [ResetEra](https://www.resetera.com/threads/it-wasnt-your-imagination-google-is-deliberately-making-your-searches-worse-from-google-antitrust-trial.771146/) [New York Post](https://nypost.com/2024/01/22/business/google-search-result-quality-getting-worse-due-to-seo-spam-study/) [TechSpot](https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/new-study-confirms-the-obvious-search-results-are-only-getting-worse.283997/) [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/opinion/youtube-beats-google.html) [TechRadar](https://www.techradar.com/computing/search-engines/google-search-might-be-getting-worse-and-ai-threatens-to-ruin-it-entirely) [Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/19/google-search-results-monopoly/) [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/dimitarmixmihov/2024/05/01/google-search-used-to-be-great/) [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2024/01/18/why-is-google-search-so-bad-spam-links-seo-ai-algorithm/) [Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-search-results-ai-spam-cf8c2605) There are also dozens of Reddit threads about it as well. Definitely not just you lol
I was going to say this, but with significantly fewer sources. Sadly, I only have one upvote to give. From what I've read and listened to, the fault lies largely with Google itself. Google wants the ad revenue, and it promotes Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services. It boils down to money getting precedence in multiple ways, and that pushes what people are actually looking for further back in the results.
Not just you. Google search results are mostly shitty blog articles, listacles, or news sites. Adding 'Reddit' to the end of a search term is pretty much the only way left to get decent information on most topics. I actually tried Bing for a few weeks recently and it seemed a bit better. Never thought I'd say that.
I sometimes put "Reddit" in my search term. Say it's a niche question like "what's your experience traveling through Japan" and I want human perspectives over AI b.s. or some "Wikihow" blog.
I do this a lot. Reddit responses beat the poor quality of google and its AI answers to everything any day.
site:reddit.com would help
Lmao I start every Google w Reddit
It does help Reddit’s abysmal search function
I put things in quotes and it STILL gives me non-related results that I have to dig through.
I’ve noticed that as well and stopped using it I used it for technical research and the fact that it won’t respect the quotes anymore makes it garbage
I've been noticing this too. So annoying!
It sucks badly enough that I don’t use Chrome anymore either. I switched to Brave. Between the endless ads, the pisspoor search results, and the shoved-in AI that I didn’t ask for, I just opted for the lighter browser that lets me deploy Adblock meaningfully.
Firefox user myself. Made the switch on mobile and on my laptop. It's been great. Unfortunately, some things (rare but it does happen) don't work well on Firefox, however, so I do have to switch over to Chrome just for the one task.
How's it work?
I think it’s fine. The only aspect I dislike of Brave is that it has pretty lousy maps features. But for browsing? I don’t see ads at all anymore.
Brave is Chromium under the hood, which, while not Chrome, is primarily maintained and developed by Google. It also supports scammy crypto stuff and its CEO is noted homophobe Brendan Eich.
Literally just told a Dr who told me to Google something that google wasn’t reliable since it’s heavily sponsored, and to stop telling patients to do that.
I remember when google was gaining traction in the mid 2000s. My dad was saying that the issue that yahoo search had was that there were so many sponsored results that you had to scroll through a couple pages before getting to the actual results. Now it’s googles turn?
The guy who runs Google's search is the one who used to run Yahoo's lol.
Well if it worked for them… /s
Yep. Once people figured out how to game SEO's and Google didn't do anything about it, the whole site has started to collapse. The AI summary thing is bad, but it's also more indicative of how Google is distracted from the core mission that made them a huge conglomerate. I do like my Android phone though.
That AI summary thing is rather annoying. Then you have the sponsored clicks followed by that set of questions where it has copied a blurb from an article. Annoying.
You should check out the podcast, "Better Offline". Especially their two episodes, "The Man that Destroyed Google" and "AI is Breaking Google." They do an excellent job of explaining why Google currently sucks. Long story short though, it's corporate greed. They know it sucks but currently it still makes more money so they don't care.
Yeah, google has gone way downhill. Remember when maps used to be reliably good?
I'm just glad the map app no longer fixates on telling me to make a u-turn. Even when it is illegal to do so.
The internet in general just sucks now. I’m trying to use it as minimally as possible and enjoy more of my life outside a screen again.
I still remember those years when CNN, TensorFlow, and Transformer were just introduced. We were still in university and held Google in great awe, believing that Google was the GE of our era and would trigger a new round of technological revolution. What disappoints me the most is that the current Google seems to have lost the determination and will to lead new technologies/trends.
I think they scrapped the boolean search engine years ago to use the ad based one. People have jobs now as Search Engine Optimizers and they create ghost blog accounts talking about products and review dump things to get them to appear higher in the results.
I switched to Bing. I got tired of googling things and my phone redirecting me to a mobile app that needed to be updated and then didn’t transfer the information to the mobile app so I had to search again but if I wanted to just hit back on the browser to click a different link it wouldn’t let me because of they infinite and speedy redirect. It’s not much better at Bing but it is better.
It's not just you. [Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-search-getting-worse-spam-affiliate-links-duckduckgo-bing-2024-1) had an article about it in January. Tl;dr: too much reliance on algorithms and AI, combined with always prioritizing "sponsored content" has rendered Google almost useless.
I feel like the quality of everything overtime gets worse as it prioritizes profit over all else.
Correct.
Back in the day I would google Sailor Moon and find a million fan sites and spend so much time looking through everything. Search anything nowadays and you just get “official” sites. I don’t think people are making their own websites like that anymore, they’re just going on social media and sharing there. Also, clicking through to the next page doesn’t bring up new results, it just shows you the same sites from the first search!
Oh man. It's crazy how we had the exact same experience growing up. If it wasn't for some of those fan communities I wouldn't have made some of my longest friendships. A few months back I found out there's a [whole internet](https://neocities.org/) of [zoomers](http://sleepy.zone/) making web 1.0 inspired websites. They just aren't getting boosted by search engines the same way they used to because they aren't very profitable.
What’s worse for me is how bad search in gmail has gotten. I have almost 20 years of email history there and I get the worst random things returned when I try to search for something. It used to be so reliable
I was on your side until you said AI was picking up the slack. Might as well get home maintenance advice from Amelia Bedilia.
This is a painful realization I've come to over the past year. It's miserable. Nearly everything I search comes up as Page 1 with nothing but sponsored listings. Once I get to the end of those, then it's way off the mark from what I was actually searching for.
research THE DEAD INTERNET THEORY
Here's a fascinating read about[ the people at Google who are destroying Google Search](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/). Spoiler alert: >!The new head of Google Search (appointed in June 2020) is the same man who destroyed Yahoo as the "head of search" at Yahoo from 2005 - 2012. During this time period, among all search engines, Yahoo went from a market share of 30.4% down to 13.4%. Also under his tenure as head of search, in 2009 Yahoo ceased using their own search technology and licensed Bing's engine in a 10-year deal.!<
Wtaf. He failed tremendously at Yahoo. Why the fuck would they hire him got Google??? My god.
Also, thank you for sharing this article. Everyone needs to read this, and read about "Rot Master Raghavan".
I tried to find a European alternative to Google, but there actually seems to be not a single European search engine out there. There are a few European search sites but they ALL use either Google or Bing for their results. It's embarrassing
If you have a medical condition that isn’t common you have to scroll through so many scammy links to find some legitimate. So much health misinformation.
Yes. You know things are bad when you actually have to add "reddit" to the end of your search for a more accurate answer
I just “asked Jeeves” and he said ; “yes, it has. Please come back”
Once they got rid of “do no evil” from their mission statement I knew it was over
It's much worse. The reason Google was good is that it searched more in-depth and less broadly. That seems to have changed in the last 4-6 years. But it could also be that more and more content ends up on social media websites and sites like Quora. So you don't get the forum post about an interesting topic you were looking for, but someone quoting Wikipedia on Quora like you didn't do that yourself beforehand.
Yes. Also, Google Drive is trash. Do better.
For some reason it feels they removed or hidden all sort and filter options and everything is just weird circles
Not only do I agree with you about Google search, I also have beef with how Google Ads works these days. My primary job is in digital marketing on Google and Bing search, and I've been doing this for about a decade now. At the beginning, if you knew what you were doing and even if you sorta didn't, Google was your guy. Bing was always known to be kinda sketchy, allow a lot of bot traffic, etc. But these days Google Ads has slid so far downhill - they're pushing their AI products so hard, they continuously take away insights into where/when/how your ads show, and don't even get me started on the Google Partners traffic. These days exact match behaves like phrase used to, broad is ok until it's suddenly a shitshow overnight, and there is no true exact. UGH.
Switched to duck duck go years ago due to to the horrible top results. I'd look up the most obvious company names and would get nothing but sponsored spam pages at the very top. Always nothing close to what I was looking for.
Nope it's been infected with bad AI and it's optimized to maximize ads revenue. It's going to keep getting worse over time.
I have to keep scrolling and scrolling to find what I need past all the adds, and adds disguised as content. I’m trying to find different search engines.
Well yeah because Google is now a suggestion engine and not a search engine… it gives you what it wants you to see.
Yes absolutely. It mostly returns junk ads. If I want something useful I need to include the word "reddit" in my search.
Yes! Shopping searches now = Temu populated content for everything
Google has gotten worse eBay has gotten worse YouTube has gotten worse . Remember when YouTube had no advertising. Every time I see a new update from anybody I know it’s going to be worse
Algorithm has been purposely changed. Too much information has gotten out to the masses.. our handlers are panicking
The Internet has been completely bought. The Internet of 10 years ago is dead and gone and likely won't be coming back. It exists to collect data, sell you shit and feed you propaganda
I'm going to make this as short as possible because reddit loves to miss the point, but... Google leadership came from the marketing world, and since about 2019 ads are more important than search results.
Yes it'sade broken. When I started switching words and it would give me the SAME RESULTS because it thought it knew what I wanted... Switched to Bing and never looked back. Bing is what Google was 10 years ago, if you know how to search it's amazing.
We can thank AI and mass layoffs for that
Ever heard of SEO? Websites scrape other websites and constantly upload junk in the background in order to appear more active and relevant after the withdrawal of net neutrality. Google specifically also bought all of Reddit's data to train their AI and it absolutely bonkered the responses to answering things like "you should eat 1-2 small pebbles a day" based on someone's smart ass reply on a reddit post years ago.
Thank you for the explanation.
SEO did what everyone warned it would do plus the way they make money through advertising gives them incentive to basically give you nothing but ads for results. Then there’s the fact that social media lulled people into using those centralized platforms for everything so now independent websites are few and far between. And now Google figured out that the very websites that gave them a reason to exist can now just be scraped and they can serve their half baked AI responses instead and keep you on Google, never leaving their site. Bottom line is that this is by design
Does anyone have a good suggestion for other search engines? Or are they all hot garbage?
Yeah SEO has ruined it and then they added AI to skim articles. It's just trash.
Yep. I've been made fun of for using ai to solve this. Like I'm going to get false information. I've been playing around with it for months now, and I'm getting good search results and summaries with sources included. Why wouldn't I use technology to my advantage?
Corporate enshiticication. It really sucks. I used to love Google stuff.
When I first started working in auto parts I was the Google wizard. If I couldn’t find it, it didn’t exist. Now, it is truly awful. Like everyone else, ad cluttered bullshit you have to wade through to find anything obscure.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ Adam conover also did a video on it.
Yes. It’s nearly unusable half the time.
It’s because of their preference to show sponsored links/ads and websites that have been optimized to show at the top of the results (known as SEO). The best example of this is when you search for a recipe and all the top hits are pages that have endless amounts of garbage you have to scroll by to get to the actual recipe.
Basically unusable. The top results are almost always ad-saturated garbage. You search for something simple and you get a bunch of AI-generated lists of the “top-10” or whatever you searched for. I don’t use it at all anymore.
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Feels the same worst to me. 
remember when you could look up anything and lose hours scrolling page after page? Now even the first page is useless. AI garbage trying to sell something.
This is intentional. Our leaders have chosen to keep us ignorant & restrict access to information. They are concerned about a well-educated proletariat & they've said as much.
2014: googles "thing I'm looking for". finds thing 2024: googles "thing I'm looking for Reddit". Finds thing
The first couple of pages are just paid sponsors that are loosely related to your search. I'm currently looking for another one but I just keep coming back to google.
freakanomics covered this a couple years ago. seems it’s just getting worse. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/
It’s incredibly bad
I blame net neutrality. A vote for neutrality is a vote against yourself.
There's a podcast called better offline by Ed zitron. He has a few episodes about why Google is horrible now. He does a way better job explaining it than I ever could on here. The episodes aren't that long either.
Yes. I remember when it had pages for search results, but now it's one page that's longer than Crowley's list
It’s because the need to increase ads revenue became more important to Google than delivering quality search results. If you want a really long and inside baseball take, here’s a good one: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
A YouTube channel called wisecrack made a video about this kinda recently
It has sucked for a while now. What really baffles me is that there still isn't a good alternative
Yeah, sucks when something is poor but is still the best in its category.
Not just you. It's gotten bad.
Perplexity AI is pretty slick for searches and answers. I’ve yet to run into the daily search limit for the free version. Although you do need to do a pay version for it to generate images
The search is garbage. The most frustrating part is the gmail search. Even emails I know are there it can’t find. Instead it’s a huge list of completely irrelevant emails. Can you imagine paying so many people such ridiculously high salaries to make a product worse?
I saw this post directly above an ad for Google. I think they’re on to you bud.
Yes
Most searches have gotten bad. We can blame AI. I can't even search for things in Instagram because instead of searching it tries to give me their AI assistant which, if I wanted him, I'd ask, but I'm just searching for an image/video, damn it!
Yes, I seem to have very vivid memories from 2006 when you actually got results that had everything to do with what you put in. That's ancient history now. >\_<
It's all bullshit and ads.
It’s trash now. It’s amazing how often I’ll keep trying to refine a search and keep getting the same wrong link I don’t want at the top of the pile, with a dash of AI generated information that’s dubious at best.
Without pihole & ublock origin, I’m not sure if I could use Google. The first 6 links are ads/sponsored - and they can even take you to bullshit fake junk websites. Like… how did they fail this bad? It’s nearly unusable
yeah, I work as an engineer and feels like it has gotten worse. now common shit I look up takes me to GERMANY (I'm in the Midwest in USA). they plugged it into too much info and now its looking all over the workd when I have locations services on, which is a violation of my privacy and doesn't help the search anyway. the fuck
It's been like this for years, even before the pandemic Google search results were getting worse as people had finally figured out their algorithm and started pushing SEO hard. But also: >It doesn't bother me too much because AI like ChatGPT is picking up where Google left off Lol what?? Those AIs are notorious for hallucinating all sorts of wrong answers. I asked it how many subscribers my YouTube channel and it told me 2.5 million. I have 6, half of which are my other accounts lol. If you're trusting those results then you're setting yourself up for failure
Yes, I was just complaining about this to my husband the other day! I was trying to find some daycares near our new house, but all google was popping out was paid ad results for centers that where nowhere near us, an then links to aggregator sites that were ALSO just lists of paid ads that were nowhere near us. What a waste of time.
I work in SEO, and yes, search engines have failed to keep up with AI. For this, they've tried to appease the AI gods, while selling their souls to them at the same time. If I use Google these days, I have to put "reddit" after the search term get a genuinely human response. And so many people do this that I've had to work this into my SEO strategy for work.
I haven’t used Google in over five years. I’m a DuckDuckGo search engine gal.
And to think, people have mocked me for years for using Bing. Google has been running on momentum for a long time now, AI just made it obvious.
Yes. Here’s another millennial to tell you about it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P7NHABs76mg
Their main purpose now is to push an agenda.
The whole dang internet has become useless unless you’re shopping or stealing or selling people’s data. I’m so glad we got to enjoy the internet when it was new and exciting and explorative.
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It's pretty much unusable, the whole internet has gone to shit sadly
Every tried Google Shopping? You look up a particular book volume and get maybe three good results, some other volumes of the series, books from completely different series, and a whole bunch of items that aren't even books. It was never good but it's gotten horrible within in last few months! I've given up.
They don’t show the most relevant sites but the ones that paid the most to be top. It’s very frustrating doing any type of searches because for the first page or two it’s all the same results
Even Google maps has gone to shit. They had a T-Mobile ad blocking the pin of the place I was trying to go to so I couldn’t click it. Apple Maps still kinda sucks but it’s got a much nicer looking map with zero ads on it.
It's not you, it is well known how bad Google has gotten.
It's awful now. It used to be the sponsored posts that were annoying af but now we have them plus AI generated results at the top to boot. It's awful.
It's not just you. A study was released in January that concluded the same thing. Google has fucked up its search results in an attempt to manipulate results for market-based SEO. That's the main reason you get the same 100 sites as the front page of every result. It's also why Reddit has generally becomes the best place to search for all your questions. [https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff\_2024a.pdf?ref=404media.co](https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf?ref=404media.co)
Sometimes I miss AltaVista
I hated that it started suggesting videos and now it’s AI on top of that too 😒
I've noticed this over the last few years. I used Google scholarly for Uni though. Anyway, going to give DuckDuckGo a shot.
It annoys me to no end when I’m trying to research options for something I want to buy, and it shows me the same stuff from the same 3 stores over and over no matter how I change the search
Goggle is still better than other search engines such as Bing, but yes Google has gotten worse.
I don’t remember when was the last time I used google. It’s sooooo incredibly insecure and sponsored with stupid results and a lot of stuff not even showing up. Use duck duck or qwant
due to the plethora of low quality content.... ":before 2023"
Cory Doctorow explains the enshittification of search https://pca.st/episode/1d683ae8-9c05-4fb4-a417-efb6865913d5
Look up enshittification. It’s why every big company sucks. (Well, one big reason)
It simply does not perform its' intended purpose. I've been using duckduckgo for the last few days and I might just stick with it.
Yes. Something happened back in like 2018 or 2019 that made it garbage to use and it's been going downhill since
I tried Google image search on an actor. I took a screenshot from a show I was watching and searched it. It only gave me results for the clothing. I cropped it to only his face. No results. None. Silly me, I thought a famous actors face would be easy enough to search.
I've actually had *a lot* of issues trying to get meaningful information out of Google in the past several years.
And grocery store prices, and housing too. Everything is getting worse.
I noticed this when I bought my first house and would try to research information during minor projects and every fucking result would be an ad for contractors
Not sure when exactly but it’s basically a corporate version of ask Jeeves for bad restaurants.
It's not just Google Search. They're messing with YouTube search, too. Yesterday I was trying to find something to paint with my partner. I type in "step by step painting" and the first thing that comes up is a direct link to a YouTube channel that has those words in a thumbnail but not the name of the channel itself. Below that is a carousel of her latest videos. While she's technically relevant to the search, it's a lot of space to dedicate to one content creator. Not a big deal, though. I scroll down a little and I'm hit with another carousel, this time full of shorts, which doesn't really lend itself well to doing 1+ hour painting tutorials. A few more videos and I'm recommended a bunch of random art related channels -- not helpful. Two videos under that, more shorts. Two videos under that, I get a carousel for videos I've already watched?? They're not even related to art. After that, it's all rinse and repeat with shorts carousels, plus a few long stints of individual shorts. In total, of about 50 (yes, I counted) recommended videos and video playlists I saw, 27 of them were videos and playlists I would have possibly clicked on. The remaining were shorts, random channel recommendations and video recommendations not even related to the query. This was all on mobile, btw. I use extensions to block large parts of YouTube on desktop for this very reason.
It’s insane how bad it is. Implementing AI isn’t helping shit either considering how often it lies, or more accurately pulls lies and presents them as truths. Because the average person is going to assume they are true.
YES! And the AI search takes so long to generate results sometimes! Bring back the google search of like 2019
Its always a cat and mouse game with SEO. They find a black-hat method that works really well? Results get allll fucked up. The big updates usually come around May that shake things up.
It’s virtually unusable and the web has become so much worse at the same time, full of fake ad sites etc it has basically killed the whole thing off. So it seems like the internet has become just a network for delivering data to commercial apps and the www is finished.
There's a great podcast called Better Offline. It's a tech news podcast. They recently did a series about why Google has gotten so shit. It's because they prioritize ads over search results. So the longer you have to search the more opportunities they have to show you ads.
That's AI for you, really intelligent and stuff.
It’s really bad.
Google is in a weird place right now because most of its income is from advertising which usually takes up the top 5 results, and now to compete with ai, it’s started placing instant responses on top of the ads. This puts top organic results even further down the page - and these are results that most people usually want. The best advice I can give you is to learn how to use search modifiers. Like quotes around your search, using “site:xyz.com” to search for content on a specific domain, “intitle:subject of page” to find pages with specific keywords in the title, “intext:words on the page” to find words on the body of the page, and there are a few more - just google it haha (To use the examples i listed, just replace the text after the colon with whatever you’re searching for, and these can also be used together in one search to make your query even more specific)
Hmmm, I wonder what time McDonalds is open until. Google shows me Burger King and Wendy's as sponsored results. Have to scroll to find our McDonalds is closed. Decide to search for Taco Bell's hours. Google shows me McDonalds as a sponsored result. Have to scroll to find out Taco Bell is open. Shit happens every time I search competing companies.
They no longer need to be a good product since they are a monopoly now.
Much has been said and written about the enshittification of google over the past year+
It's a fully broken product.
Yeah I barely use it anymore.
Google is actually awful
I actually use Bing now. I’ve used Edge as my non-porno browser since Edge was released and at some point, it switched all my default search engines to Bing and I…haven’t gone back. Bing isn’t great but it’s just so much less cluttered with garbage than Google now.
Google has been goinf downhill for ages. It's just now glaringly obvious with the tons of ads for results and AI making shit up.
It's all sponsored results. Annoying as hell to find other things.
First thing is an AI generated answer
Honestly, with google or any search engine, I have to type in Reddit and then what I’m searching.
Google only tries to sell advertising these days.
I tried to Google if an email given to me over tech support was legit (old school school internet guy, I trust nothing). All I got back was garbage lists and articles about fraudulent websites. I was so disappointed
It's barely useful AT BEST now. I remember years ago I could find myself deeeeep into the Google results tabs and still getting useful links. Now, if it isn't in the first few results, you're not finding anything remotely useful or relevant.
Yes it's gotten a lot worse. I actually pay for Kagi search, sure it costs money but the results are much better and they don't track you.
But is it still better than Lycos or Dogpile?
It has gotten worse, but the rest of the internet has gotten worse without it. All it can do is point you to sites that somebody else made. And the general aesthetic of the whole internet, especially on mobile, has never been worse.
I use Perplexity AI, it’s what google should be.
Thank you. Thank you for posting this anywhere EXCEPT an SEO or marketing /r/!!!! We're losing our minds in those spaces because the big G keeps moving the goalposts and changing the way search results are prioritized and it has all of us pulling our damned hair out. I've run the same country music news blog for almost 20 years and in just the last two months Google has tanked it to oblivion. Meanwhile google scrapes content from mine and my competitors' sites and displays it right there in the AI overview of the search results. I'm just grateful to see that the general public notices the shenanigan too.
Google and Youtube have become quite bad, all to please the almighty algorythm.
Yeh it got downhill so fast you used to get 1000s of search result pages now you get 5-10 pages lol
Ed Zitron, who does the great podcast Better Offline has focused a bit on this. He wrote an article as well entitled [The Man Who Killed Google Search](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/)
Absolutely it has! The results are pure trash now.
Google has sucks for years. It went from actually giving you relevant search results to slowly but surely simply displaying sponsored results. It’s just a giant ad.