I keep seeing this sentiment around here, which confuses me because I think gsearch is better than ever. I find what I need instantly in 90% of cases, and when I don't, other engines don't really do better. Granted, I use ublock, but even with that turned off I'm not bothered by the ads. Can you provide examples of a query which gives unusable results, but Bing (or whatever) works?
ADDED: There are individuals in some domain niches but you pretty much need to know who they are.
They dont get to complain there is no content to steal after bthey've pillaged and burned half the web
Currently they have a "caretaker CEO".
Google was sitting on a massive cash cow, so they appointed someone who would just keep it ticking over.
In the face of an existential threat, like ChatGPT, they need someone who can actually drive innovation. Not innovate themselves, nobody expects a CEO to do that, just create a culture which has a hope in hell of rising to fend off challenges to the empire.
They don't have this.
That have a CEO who is only capable in "good times" ... along with most of the company.
Faced with sufficient adversity, they will need a CEO who can succeed in the face of adversity.
Not to mention the transparency nightmare of subreddit moderation.
But in that ideal world, ads are clicked less.
This is exactly it for me, there's no way to tell the computer "this is what I want you to do." Maybe it's because product designers don't want to tell the user no. If something does fail to work, we couch it in language like "oops, something went wrong, we're very sorry" with no further hint of what to do next.
Sometimes I just want the big database in the sky to tell me what it knows about a specific string of characters; this seems like it should be straightforward but I suppose it isn't.
I run into this for a lot of things beyond just product reviews, such as recipes or "what is X?" etc.
Granted I don't think that is entirely Google's fault.
also, "bestmitersaw.com" or other similar single product review/spam sites filled with affiliate links. Jeez. Kill them all.
I don't know what it is, if their algorithm is getting worse, or there is just too much shit on the internet to accurately index. From my experience, Google Search hasn't even just stagnated, it has gotten consistently and steadily worse for at least the last half decade.
Same thing happened to my Google Home, literally got dumber as the days went on, queries that it could answer yesterday, would just stop working the next day. I threw that thing in the garbage.
However once you look for very specific narrow results it attempts to outsmart you can be a real annoyance. When it decides to ignore some rare term and correcting your query while that rare term actually is the thing of highest significance.
So yeah, for 95% of the searches it is great, but on the 5% it feels like modern advances are in the way.
On mobile or without adblock though or when trying to do discovery of something new, you really have to sift through pretty much the first 5-7 results as they're all sponsored, ads, or terrible SEO spam.
But it is a hard problem to solve, and no other search engine is better in that regard imo.
Problem is now you get ~6 ad links for many queries (given some ads have 'secondary links' in them).
This now means even on a 4k monitor I only see 3 actual SEO results. It's much worse on mobile.
I'm fully aligned on hating ads. It is silly how the top results are all sponsored. Curated, I would like. Sponsored? Not so much.
Perhaps, but that's still a good reason to stop using Google, because other search engines do better.