At a recent all-hands meeting, Google search head Prabhakar Raghavan told employees that the world is changing and they have to adjust.
Things definitely changed. 15-20 years ago you actually got good search results instead of unusable crap we get today.
OTOH 20 years ago half of the sites on the internet were not yet made of copy-pasta SEO optimized copies or stolen content designed to get search engine clicks. Maybe the enshitification of the web itself has something to do with it.
I was getting decent results up until about a month ago (though partly because I have an extension to block sponsored links and arranges the page as it used to appear around 2010). It was like they just flipped a switch from “good” to “shitty.” Can’t even find images I would grab off the first page when repeating a search from history, now. It seemed to correlate almost exactly with when it started to generate blurbs through AI at the top instead of just summarizing one of the pages in the top links.
True their competition is actually getting much better whereas they just throw BS at you nowadays. It’s unfortunate but Google is no longer my go-to for searching.
The issue is that there are 1000 spam sites heavily optimized specifically to exploit Google’s algorithm for every legitimate site. Merely by not being the primary focus of SEO, alternatives have a pretty hefty advantage.
I only use maps and youtube from google nowadays. The rest are shit
I’m worried that Maps will be hit by the enshittification next. We need a good quality maps alternative. OpenStreetMap seems ok, but it lacks a few features, including trip planning.
YouTube is shit too, they’re just the only game in town
