My main focus isn’t on quality of results.
The real problem is, whenever I type a query that’s even the slightest bit out of the ordinary, I get no results. Google, Duckduckgo, Startpage, Searx, all of them.
It strains credibility that these advanced pieces of technology could not find anything among billions of websites, when in the past, less-advanced versions of these engines could find results for similar queries among smaller numbers of websites.
To reiterate: My problem is not with SEO, or spam, or AI-generated websites, or irrelevant results. My problem is getting no results much more frequently than in the past.
Ed Zitron has been reporting on this in his newsletter and on his podcast. Yes, Google deliberately made search worse to drive engagement, hence ad dollars. You can find Ed’s work pretty easily, but here’s a specific article on the topic:
The Man Who Killed Google Search
It’s available in podcast form, if you enjoy podcasts. The show is called Better Offline. I listen every week.