If I remember correctly, around 5 or 6 years ago, Google Search leadership changed such that the ads org started running it. The focus since then has been on advertisers rather than regular users.

This is literally the definition of enshittification: the company first focuses on gaining users, then switches the focus to business customers, then squeezes both of them.

SEO did this. It started before LLM and chatGPT. Blogger make money be generating trafic. So they wrote shits in a format that please search engine.

That's why if you search "search into file Linux", instead of just a grep command line, you end up on 2000 lines article with introduction, paragraph, explanation, blablabla. Because search engine boost this kind of content. Title, introduction paragraph that repeat the title, subsections, etc...

I read an article about it somewhere, but, can't find it. Basically the guy in charge of search realized they were at the highest level of users they can get so the only way to increase search traffic is to make it just bad enough you have to search different phrasing a couple of times to get the result therefore increasing search traffic.

SEO and decent search results were having a fist fight for years, then AI showed up and shot it in the face.

I've never seen any search engine officially confirm this, but search across all search engines became terrible just a few months after the release of ChatGPT.
Which is why my assumption is that LLMs are being used to generate heaps of credible-looking, but ultimately worthless webpages. And search engines have to try to filter those out or their results would be even worse.

But then there's no obvious distinction between a human-crafted blog and some spam webpage, which means the human-crafted blog is likely to be caught in the crossfire and get filtered as well.

Well, and on top of that, search engines presumably got hit by AI scrapers looking for training data, so that's why I would assume, they now limit the search results to one page...

I do think that part of the problem is that so much up-to-date information is now trapped in discord, also that people are generally using forums and the like less to solve their technical problems because they're privately querying robots. This on top of enshittification... We did not know how good we had it 20 years ago

I use kagi and metager. They've solved it for the most part for me.

It's called enshitification, basically web services get worse so that you spend more time on them and see more adds. Switching from Google to Duck Duck Go has made things a little bit better for me.

Because "Fuck you, pay me"

The goal of a search engine is to make the company money, not to aid you in finding what you are looking for.

People with bad info put more effort into SEO than people with good info. Google changing focus from getting people good results to getting people to stay on their site. Powers that be filling the web with misinformation. There's always been conspiracies and misinformation on the internet, but now there's major money in pushing it.

SEO. Everybody is blaming corporations but nobody today can develop a search engine that can't be spammed. If they could, they would.

There are leaked emails from Google (from many years ago) where it was proposed to purposely degrade search quality to increase ad clicks. While some at Google responded with dismay as this, it is not a great leap to assume that this faction eventually won and they did in fact deliberately do that. Advertising is Google's main revenue source, they are clearly motivated to do so.

Because data is never free. Google, duckduckgo, kagi, they all cost money one way or another whether that be a subscription service or by forcing websites to be shit so your only option is using their LLMs. Yes the reason why the internet has gone to shit is because of LLMs

I've went through hundreds of search results on duckduckgo, even when I make it intentionally broad and genetic that wikipedia would cover it, it still doesn't come as the first search result. Search engines have gone to shit because LLMs make the most money in terms of data surveillance. Meaning (take for example google) they have a profile of you, they have queries to train, they have data that can be sold to advertisers. The only reason LLMs are being pushed so much isn't because its intelligent, it's because it makes the most money.

There is a "search engine" that hasn't gone to shit, and that's called marginalia search, It's not exactly a search engine where you can type a url and it will bring you to a page, Instead it compliments your general search engine as a research aid and you can find some golden sites.

I've personally used it for data sheets on IC electronics and their implementations. Unfortunately I've found it insufferably difficult on duckduckgo (like multiple pages deep for a datasheet, something that should pop up on the first page), and I don't trust the output of LLMs (large lying models).

So yea, hopefully this helps.

As others have mentioned, it was engineered to be worse for the capitalists to make profits from ads and the statistics to look better to shareholders. This in turn has made people to create a shit ton of garbage articles and blogs that say a ton while saying nothing, so even if you used a new search engine with the funding of Google but the algorithm of back then it would still be shit probably, because the volume of shit on the internet has now reached a level where finding anything in it is impossible.

The explosion of AI has come right at this moment where search engines have been lobotomized and gives people an option to be able to find things again, which is also another factor contributing to the profits of the AI companies, but even that is limited to what an LLM can average out from the totality of information that it has been fed and has the obvious danger of making stuff up and treating its biased training data as truth.

Generally, I think we're fucked. I really don't know if we're ever going to get back the internet experience that once existed and what it's going to take to get there, but it would probably involve a massive societal change to come before it.

Check out SearxNG.

It's simple. Cause Search engines transformed to ad engines.

If you're not paying for it, then you're not the user, you're the product.

There was more money in showing you things than there was in helping you find things.

If you ever watched any of the saturday morning, over the air, wrestling "news" shows in the 80s and 90s, then that's all everything is now. There used to be a pretty good article about it.

You might try to give one of the alternative search providers a try. There's duck duck go for the USA, and Qwant for the EU.

I think they intentionally made search engines worse to push people into using LLM's

Because the AI hallucinations are pushed ahead of traditional search engine results?

This evening I was repairing something. My google search gave an AI summary that gave two important dimensions of a part I needed. I was like "OK let's go eat"

Two hours later, because I didn't write anything down, I entered the same search verbatim and got a different AI summary missing one of the dimensions.

We have made computing non-deterministic. We're busy giving sentience to refrigerators that can't keep ice cream frozen.

I have a bunch of Search engines where they say different things about your search (I combine it with noscript because fuck JS)

Startpage: you need JS to verification, basicaly is an API from google.

Mojeek: also JS verification, their results are focus in local websites (.es .nl .de).

Searx.be: you need write a code before start use it, index all the fediverse, opensource frontends and scientific works in an anti-massmedia site, also can fail in specific searchs.

I trying different ones, because as you say is not realiable anymore so I have to act as if I asking help to a bunch of greddy friends with their own interests

Google in particular getting worse to get you to click through more results pages or to run more queries so they can sell more ads on each of those is well attested. I used Bing for a while and didn't think it was better or worse than newly bad Google. So now I use an equally shitty non-US search engine (start page) and just give up sooner.

In their defence, I think the exponentially increasing content of the internet, and the not insignificant portion that just sits there dead or unmaintained, plus the bits and bytes that just disappear as subscriptions or support run out are difficult problems. It's getting ever harder to write an algorithm to sort through that as well. That plus greed equals shit.

Pre-Google we had very shitty search results. Than Google became the Kleenex, the word everybody used. Then Google got worse. While my faith in "American Intelligence" is somewhat limited, I think we will get back to better results soon. What Google had to do (build big server farms to look at all of the internet to index it) may become trivially easy for a sufficiently good LLM eventually. Although we're not there yet. Given that it's not just Microsoft or Google fighting in that market for dominance, I live in hope that competition from OpenAI etc. lights a fire under their arses.

Ever since the deployment of machine generated results for search engines, there has always been a competition between the search engines and various others using search engine optimization to get to the top of the results. It isn't worth it for Alphabet or Microsoft to fix their search engines if they can push you to AI, so their non-AI results naturally degrade.

Because it makes AI much more appealing.

No more reading about the recipe author's grandma and how the food reminds them of home. AI will extract the useful info and ignore the SEO bullshit.

Episode of the Better Offline podcast: The Man That Destroyed Google Search

Greed

As others have said in the posts, you can no longer find information that was found many years ago. From my point of view, I think there are many causes. Some of them to copy from a movie would be "information is worth money". Another cause would be that the information you are looking for is no longer wanted to be searched. Because of this, I noticed that on the dark web sites there is still some information. In short, the information will be limited.

Copy - pass in your pc

I have not had good luck with any search engine I've used lately, even Kagi. I pretty much have to go directly on the website I expect to find what I'm looking for and search there now. Also I suspect that with AI people might be posting in forums less now.

SEO.

I've been using metasearch engines (engines that pass your query to multiple search engines so you can aggregate them easily) and the two I've been using were pretty good in my experience. 4get.ca and degoog.org.

Money.

Anytime you think it's not about the money, it's about the money.