Re: When did Google get so weird?

Google.com is REALLY bad right now in my opinion.

The AI answer dominates the page, and is usually wrong, so it's just a waste of the most valuable space on the page.

The ads have proliferated, and rarely have what I need.

Video search results also take up a lot of the page, and are almost never what I want if I haven't clicked over to the Video tab. Again, just a big waste of space.

Speaking of the Video tab its accuracy/relevancy has gotten worse too.

The organic results have deteriorated, and are still competitive, but are no longer clearly and consistently better than Duckduckgo.

So it's duckduckgo as the default for me on all devices now. If I don't find what I want, which is maybe 30% of the time, I switch over to G just by adding !g to the query. G might have what I need in about half of those cases.

You can see why a lot of people just ask an LLM to do the web searching for them.

Across the board, this is all quite bad compared to web search from 10+ years ago.

If there's a single thing which has really pushed me away from Google, it's simply google.com devoting so much of the page to things that aren't organic web search.

safety1st, 5 hours ago