Obviously google was basically already unusable over the past five years but this is... this is something else. Any subject you want to look up will have the first three pages entirely comprised of procedurally generated fake blogs and websites. And there's nothing there. Just scraped text from articles mashed together with varying amounts of hallucinations on top. Not even selling a product, just to harvest ad revenue.
What's maybe even worse is the steady degradation of image searches too. Joe Everyman generates some slop, the image's metadata tags include a historical artist's name. Some one on pinterest pins it while trawling the web. Now there are fifty gooey generated sludge images when you look up the historical painter.
And its not just artists. Historical figures, animals too. Look up 'baby peacock' if you want a clear example of it.
It's a pretty funny bit google, I hope it keeps going.
Almost every non trivial information search forces me to add "site:reddit.com" to the query to only get Reddit results. That is the only way to get rid of the stupid fucking top 10 lists and other regurgitations. We all know the issues Reddit can have but it's all human-curated at this point.
Kinda disturbing when I realise how reliant I am on reddit to get even remotely reasonable results, like I knew I did it a lot but genuinely didn't realise how bad it was until all the subs went private a couple days back and suddenly I couldn't do it
Yeah I hit private subs from Google results 30 or 40 times in those two days. Trying to fix weird issues with my computer and shit like that - oh there they have a solution! nope can't see it.
whats funny to me is how bad reddit's own search function is. fucking useless even if you use the specific wording in a post it cant seem to find it.
Yeah the search always sucked except for a little while when they paid for some Google internal site search product but then they ripped that down to save money