I think what happened is that someone typed "google" into Google, and broke the internet.
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I keep hearing people complain about Google becoming unusable, but I never run into this issue. Anyone have specific examples of searches that should have worked in the past, but don't work now?
I don't use Google that often, but when I do, my search is specific enough to work. Some of my recent searches are "Skacket" (a specific Minecraft server plugin,) "Google Sheets newline in cell", "Sedecordle", and "Jeffrey Wright imdb".
I'd never have expected it to work for such questions as "movie with smart guy who stretches". Those kinds of questions are better suited for AIs like ChatGPT, in my opinion.
Lately I've been using more AI-derived search engines, I often need a direct answer to a certain problem, and not looking for a date specific answer. I haven't used Google search for years, DDG is my daily driver but engines derived from chat GPT work for me. This is when I have a specific problem like when say building a recipe, or trouble shooting a mechanical problem etc. I use ask.ai or phind.com
Why would google even attempt to fix their search results? Just look at your own anecdote, you just spent an hour searching stuff on google, and perhaps saw an hour worth of ads in the search result. This counts as positive metrics on some exec's report about how search usage increase year after year.
If anything, a paid search engine like Kagi actually have reverse incentive that they want you to search as little as possible to reduce their server costs, and thus must be able to produce great search result so you won't spend more resource searching over and over again. Subscribing to Kagi is more useful than subscribing to youtube premium imo.
Another fucking ad, are you all for real?