Is anyone asking for this? All the Google search users I know have been asking for search that actually gives good results and isn't made up of 70% recopied stackoverflow articles into sketchy blogs and AI written listicle garbage articles. But instead of fixing that and maybe making an advanced search that doesn't suck, they "make" this "improvement."

Here's why I find it funny: following topics/tags is something Google on android had ten years ago. It's also the type of info I have no doubt they have been keeping in the background forever and are only now exposing. They have known if you like mountain climbing, now they are letting you say it yourself.

The only reason I can think for this is because their search algorithm has gone so off the rails making guesses about people's habits, now they need to pin it down with actual user input. That or you get more ad dollars if the user said they like mountain climbing than if you guessed they do.

Features I actually want from Google Search:

* The ability to get results for the terms I actually searched for. Even adding quotes around specific terms hasn't worked reliably for years.

* Less clutter and junk on the results page. Some of the SERPs can be jarringly noisy and bad, especially on mobile.

* Less SEO spam in the results. The norm for any remotely monetizable search query is to get a page where every result is a long and terribly written article with the same handful of basic facts. Google seems to love automated or poorly written articles that copy from the same source as 100 similar sites.

Instead we get... whatever this stuff is.

I like that Google is adding new things to try to make their search more personal, though these changes seem mostly superficial and I am unsure many will use them. I certainly don’t and won’t install the Google app on my phone to follow things, if it doesn’t work on web.

I used to be able to "find what I need on Search" by typing it into Google and clicking on the results. This worked very well for me, but apparently not for Google.

I was hoping for more modifiers to limit to sites, authors, proper names, and titles. Should've known better.

I think the ship has sailed on this one, not sure how Google can be denial of the more intuitive search trend that is available today.

Google should just bite the bullet and do ChatGPT styled search by intuitively asking questions with RAG capability.

The thing is can they provide this service for free without the subscription fee unlike ChatGPT? Perhaps they could and should, and the cost will be much lower than buying OpenAI. Imagine GoogleGPT with backends of Google Search (not Bing), with Google Scholar, Google Books, Google Patent, Gmail, etc.

I haven't used Google Search for about a year now.