The results from all the major search engines have been getting progressively shittier for several years.

I am sure Google:

Values the quality of its search experience very highly.

Always endeavours to provide only the best, curated search results.

And lots of other marketing crap including words like: 'strives', 'synergy', 'quality' and 'listens'.

But we're living the reality of the situation - and it's dire.

Never mind, those profits still look oretty good for the shareholders.

Google strives to send you to sites that have Google ads

So all the responses have become like those recipe sites that have 20pages about their Italian Grandmother to click through before it tells you how long to boil an egg

I'm a tired old Hash House Harrier and I asked my AI Android phone to search for, "I'm a drinker with a walking problem" and it started searching for "I'm a drinker with a War King problem"

Trying to remember when I changed my home page from AltaVista to google. Soon after they moved to Page Mill Rd in 1999 I think. Because their search results were so much better. More useful. I know I drove past the AltaVista office on Arastredero in early 2000 thinking, well they are finished.

And so it was for the next 20 plus years until about two years ago. When I changed my home page to duckduckgo. Not because of any ideological or privacy reasons. But because Google search could not longer return useful search results for even very well formed search terms for technical references. Which duckduckgo could. We are talking very basic stuff. Like the JVM opcode spec.

Its improved a bit recently but Google search has been broken so badly by their "AI" push as to make it mostly useless. The experience is even worse on mobile platforms. If a search term might have even the most cursory connection with a retail item or a search term that can be sold or is in any way "political" the results returned on the first few pages of a google search are as bad as the very early search engines of the late 1990's. (Apart from AltaVista). Totally useless.

That third rate mechanical engineer Pichai (but epic player of C-suite politics) with his dodgy degrees has utterly destroyed Google. He promotes mediocrities like himself and has turned Mountain View into the worst sort of echo chamber. The profoundly racist Gemini fiasco is the first time I have seen Google screw up so badly. The Alphabet anti-trust defense only works when you have a generally positive public attitude towards your company. Pichai like all upper caste Indians is totally tone deaf to the fact that the US is build on neighborly good will and his BJP worldview as reflected in Gemini and other recent PR disasters shows nothing put contempt for the country that made him powerful and wealthy. For which there will be a reckoning on day . Not the first upper caste Indian in the Valley to make that mistake.

If Larry and Sergey want to save Google they need to kick out Pichai and his incompetent crew as soon as possible. Because unlike HP (destroyed after Bill Hewlett left) and Boeing (destroyed by the McDonnell Douglass people) Googles eventual fate with be just like AT&T in the 1970's. Destroy by hubris.

A real pity. Because up to the last 5 years or so Google had done such a great job of being a force for good who produced so much useful and innovative technology. Like Sun, DEC and pre 1997 Apple. And are now becoming arrogant, nasty, feckless and outright evil. Like Microsoft since 1975, Apple since 1997, and Intel and Cisco forever. A real pity. Because all my dealings with the Googleplex in the old days were more like dealing with Sony. Very bright people who did not give you the run around, did not try to screw you over, and who were a pleasure to deal with.

Oh well. It was great while it lasted.

DDG's search results are going downhill too; which reflects mostly on their sources.

Since online search has collapsed to a duopoly between Google and M$, you don't really have good choices of course. If people move en masse to Bing, or Bing backed results with an alternate front end (DDG) M$ will claim users love it's enshitified results and add more of the brown stuff in response. If's Google's traffic is holding, it will also conclude it can get away with adding more of the brown stuff, as they only need to be slightly better than M$ and avoid losing too much market share.

So unless people stop searching, it's going to be a fast ride straight to the bottom until a viable 3rd party search engine comes to light. So I hope you all like meadow muffins, bison brownies, and cow pies.

An alternative front end such as DDG could improve the results. Simply recognise some proper filtering terms the filtering terms not and and (or seems to be implicit in the underlying search) and apply them to the results before putting them in front of the user.

Gee. I dunno. Do you think it could possibly be the internet itself that is going downhill? I know that is unlikely because everything is getting newer and shinier every year. And newer/shinier is always good. But still ...

I've long tired of trying to get useful results for any software technical query from a search engine, particularly with anything relatively new. There are so many results for the alpha, beta and various releases of anything that most search engines seem to be incapable of putting the results which apply to the latest release at the top of the result list. The engines themselves get little help from an army of (Indian mostly for some reason) CV fluffers who all pirate the same copy from the first article it appears in, to show that they have a web site full of technical tips. The fact that none of these cloned articles have a meaningful publication date or any indication as to which release they refer to hardly helps the search engine, or the unfortunate reader.

AI was supposed to be the saviour of search engine results. If I'm trying to filter a list of results, I can almost without actively looking, filter suspicious URLs out as I scan down the list. If I can do that, matching obvious patterns in almost less time than it takes to skip my eye over each result, what can't this wonderful new AI technology do it better than me and save me the trouble?

I'd say that the answer to that is: It's not AI. It does exactly what you would expect a Machine Learning system to do when presented with data it has not been trained on. There's no adaptability, instinctive pattern matching or deriving new knowledge from past experience. There is NO AI, it's just a marketing buzzword term. The press at large deserves the ultimate nut kick for misleading people, who have no understanding of computers, that artificial intelligence actually exists.

The hype has become so bad that I'm almost considering giving up correcting people when they say "AI" that they mean "ML".

Almost...

It is uniquely and intrinsically bad at resisting attacks by SEOs and other scumbags. There are no known effective countermeasures for the many classes of poisoning and manipulation attacks, and the core of the technology makes the results and their causes even more opaque. As an added bonus the results are even more computationally expensive to produce.

Much like the voice assistant craze of recent years, Google is deploying these tools as a knee-jerk response to Bing's use of LLM drive summaries. IF people moved to that model of search, Google could loose their shirt. But Googles interest is in the more profitable status quo. So no surprise it's AI search results suck, they benefit from if people hate them so they can protect the their more easily controlled link search results.

The only people with skin in the game at Google are the people on the natural language search and "AI" teams building their OpenAI knockoffs. And their reward for succeeding will be to decrease Googles bottom line.

(and semi-ironically increase their prospects of getting hired either at OpenAI or another Micropants affiliate and in the long run cost THEM money too.)