> The other thing I don't understand is the idea that Search is somehow becoming less accurate over time.
The search is probably fine, but it's relegated to the bottom half of the page. It could also get worse if Google isn't able to keep up with the SEO and scammers. Personally I feel like Google has lost interest in providing a good search experience, they still have, what, 90% of the market. There's zero incentive to ensure it's a good experience and they can keep milking the advertisers.
Meanwhile the competitors have been forced to do better and especially Bing has. Any search engine that rely on Bing has become really good in the past five years. That might also be part of it, those of us who went to Bing, DuckDuckGo or other search engines for other reasons have learned to use those and when we then go back to Google it's worse, because we haven't used it for ten years.
But you're probably right, the search bit is fine, it finds the same results as Bing, so it's down to presentation and Google used to be the best and now they are the worst.
This echoes my experience as well. I switched to DDG some years back, in part because I could always compare with Google easily by appending !g. I still use !g (perhaps 1 in 50 searches), usually when I'm willing to trade worse presentation and degraded privacy for better long-tail results.
Try Kagi Search if you're willing to pay for a better search experience!
I've been using it for over a year, 100% of the time, and love it. Great results and awesome functionality like weighting certain sites, AI summarization, etc.
The search is probably fine, but it's relegated to the bottom half of the page. It could also get worse if Google isn't able to keep up with the SEO and scammers. Personally I feel like Google has lost interest in providing a good search experience, they still have, what, 90% of the market. There's zero incentive to ensure it's a good experience and they can keep milking the advertisers.
Meanwhile the competitors have been forced to do better and especially Bing has. Any search engine that rely on Bing has become really good in the past five years. That might also be part of it, those of us who went to Bing, DuckDuckGo or other search engines for other reasons have learned to use those and when we then go back to Google it's worse, because we haven't used it for ten years.
But you're probably right, the search bit is fine, it finds the same results as Bing, so it's down to presentation and Google used to be the best and now they are the worst.