Comment by narag

What always confuses me about the „search has gotten so bad“ mentality is that it is often based on anecdotal evidence at best, and anecdotal recollection at worst.

I can't speak for anybody else, just trying to find stuff online, not writing a treatise about it or writing my own engine to outcompete Google. It's been asked many times here over the years and the answer was always explanations, never solutions.

Shittification does not happen overnight, but along many years. It started with Google deciding that some search terms weren't so popular: "did you mean...?" (forcing a second click to do what you intended to do in the first place) and went downhill when qualifiers to override that crap got ignored.

For me enough was enough when I realized that a simple query with three words, chosen carefully to point to the desired page, gave thousands of results, none of them relevant. YMMV.