Comment by cml123
9 hours ago
I don't think searching for answers to simple questions was a problem until Google nerfed their own search engine.
9 hours ago
I don't think searching for answers to simple questions was a problem until Google nerfed their own search engine.
I don't understand this position, do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse? Before I'm misunderstood I do want to clarify that IMO, the end user experience for web searching on Google is much worse in 2025 than it was in say 2000. But, the web was also much much smaller, less commercial and the SNR was much better in general.
Sure, web search companies moved away from direct keyword matching to much more complex "semantics-adjacent" matching algorithms. But we don't have the counterfactual keyword-based Google search algorithm from 2000 on data from 2025 to claim that it's just search getting worse, or the problem simply getting much harder over time and Google failing to keep up with it.
In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".
Pretty sure Google attempting to curb SEO tactics is what led to whatever nerfing you are talking about.