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This ain't just Google. SEO effectively killed all search engines. As an IT guy who's been googling shit before I was 10, I can't find shit anymore.
The entire internet has become a toxic mess.
Sadly this is how I feel too. Everything is trying to squeeze a dime out of my eyes. Man I don't even buy shit unless I absolutely need it.
As a programmer and system admin, I've been using Google since its inception, too. I can't think of an instance that I've failed to find whatever I'm looking for in recent times. People say what you're saying a lot, so I don't doubt you. It just makes me wonder what it is you guys are searching for because I search for some extremely obscure stuff quite often with no issues. This is all to say, I have a fair share of qualms with Google, but the search engine itself isn't one of them.
I think a lot of it is that the content that google returns is mostly ads or clickbait articles that contain no useful information. You can usually find what you are looking for but you have to actually put time and effort into filtering all the bullshit now.
Maybe it is my ad blocker that is filtering this kind of stuff for me. Or maybe the things I look up most often are specific enough that there isn't much bullshit or clickbaity stuff to show. Sure, I'll see the occasional "Sponsored" link. I think my brain just auto-filters those and I don't even take notice. I really don't intend to sound like a Google fanboy - I'm not. I just don't seem to experience this, but hear people say this a lot. The attached screenshot seems like a typical result for something I'd look up, and it's exactly what I'm looking for. In any case, thanks for your perspective. I'm going to try to be more conscious to see if I'm just fooling myself.
I've seen a few people mention exactly what you said, so either it's Google A/B testing some dumb shit, or it's because you haven't been using Google the same way I have in the past. I don't just look for information that is objective, few years back, Google was very good at providing links to articles with steps to do X. Nowadays it always redirects me to sites where words related to X are mentioned the most, rather than providing useful information.
I genuinely can't trust google results to be true and unbiased anymore. Nowadays I use a combination of google results, reddit results, Quorn results, ChatGPT fever dreams, and dead reckoning.
This is the issue though. I subscribed to chatgpt plus hoping it would do the work for me, but chatgpt (although it understands a lot) still fails to tell me what I need by 'browsing the web'. I also tried every other known search engine out there but sadly the results are very similar (ddg, bing). So I feel like I'm trapped in a loop where I can't get out.