I feel like Google is increasingly becoming useless as a general purpose search engine.
When I try to find information on a generic topic where I can't exactly tailor the query, the results are usually filled with low quality, SEO optimized promotional sites, clickbait articles/YT videos or aggregators. With some luck there is a good blog post with quality links on page 2 or 3.
Good results are now mostly restricted to areas where Google can utilize structured data sources (Maps/Business data, Wikipedia, ....).
This is extremely ironic, since Google originally rose to popularity because it was much better at "real" search than the competitors.
The interesting question is why!
Is Google just not able to compete with SEO tactics? Are they overly fixated on ML/"AI" techniques that don't work well in practice?
Or are regular search results allowed to become worse on purpose, in order to maximize ad revenue? It is something a near-monopoly could afford to do.
When I try to find information on a generic topic where I can't exactly tailor the query, the results are usually filled with low quality, SEO optimized promotional sites, clickbait articles/YT videos or aggregators. With some luck there is a good blog post with quality links on page 2 or 3.
Good results are now mostly restricted to areas where Google can utilize structured data sources (Maps/Business data, Wikipedia, ....).
This is extremely ironic, since Google originally rose to popularity because it was much better at "real" search than the competitors.
The interesting question is why!
Is Google just not able to compete with SEO tactics? Are they overly fixated on ML/"AI" techniques that don't work well in practice?
Or are regular search results allowed to become worse on purpose, in order to maximize ad revenue? It is something a near-monopoly could afford to do.