Google Search

“Google is many years into an intensive project to make their search results so bad that even a magic eight ball, let alone a moderately advanced AI, can do better.”

“Google search was also famously just a UI, a search box that lets you get in and out very quickly (it is all garbage content now).”

“Google until 2019 or so did, even as SEO and ad considerations nibbled at it for years. Eventually it broke though so here we are”

“Google works like an automatic black-box which tries to deduce your intention from 4-5 words you typed in hastily.”

“I get decent local results on Google, in contrast to basically any other privacy focused search engine.”

“The free thing lasted a long time (and you didn't need to sign in), and the initial monetization with ads, when it eventually came, was not immediately shoved in the user's face.”

“The AI Mode is auto-enabled, so the only thing it tells you is that 5% of users are annoyed enough by it that they take the time to disable it.”

“The Google today has nothing to do with the original Google; it is now basically just a money grab company trying to force ads onto everyone.”

“Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page”

“Search hasn't been neutral or stable in a very long time, although I agree it has been pretending to be those things.”

“Sure, like every democracy, it had some unfixable fundamental flaws. But lack of democracy was not one of them.”

“googles search and ability to cite textbooks down to the paragraph make it better than every other model for human in the loop tasks”

“Google's UX is terrible - but a search engine (a tool that can put you right into contact with the FAQ or forum where actual experts are discussing your problem) is always going to be powerful.”

“nothing even comes close, for coverage and usability of Internet search, to Google Search for my geography”

“In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked.”

“If for the past ~20 years nobody has come up with something clearly better, then I would say that speaks to how outstanding the product that are being copied are to this day.”

“they also completely defined their product category and today are among the most popular software products ever made”

“The original Google search that used inverted indexes and page rank and respected boolean operators was very good and let you actually find obscure information.”

“Where Google used to be magical and other search engines quickly improved, it all kind of turned into shit.”

“When Google came along I have very vivid memory of it providing not only better search results but also faster loads times”

“I wish it wasn't Google that currently has the best free product, because their well-oiled ad machine is going to inevitably turn the crank”

“the AI summary and the general degradation in the quality of search results from Google really hinder me”

“It changes the default search results to "web" rather than "All", which removes all the extraneous crap they've added over the years.”

“I've noticed recently getting frustrated because I'm looking for a search list but the UI throws me into AI mode first”

“What mattered was that it was much faster and much more relevant search than what was available at the time.”

“Google has been fighting aggressively to replace its search results with snippets, now generated by LLMs, to avoid sending traffic to other websites.”

“provided arguably the best and most popular search tool which empowered and connected its literal billions of users”

“I hope Google takes this issue seriously and works on a true PageRank algo / service that fixes their search because its been bad for a while.”

“Google's indexing is insanely quick too, I'll post a question on Reddit and I search Google and the reddit thread is there same day/minutes”

“Google Search was head & shoulders better than the alternatives back when Google was developing into the behemoth it is today.”

“Google was clearly superior fo a long time. They got close to 90% before enshitification started in earnest.”

“AI summaries work pretty well for me on Google and my overall subjective sense is the results have been getting better”

“You're breaking the expected behavior of something that performed flawlessly for 10+ years, all to deliver a worse, enshitified version of the search we had before.”

“You can probably serve 100x more Google Search queries with the same resources you'd use for Google Gemini queries”

“From my point of view Google Search is terrible, too. Is hard to find relevant results, you mostly get results optimized to make money, or junk.”

“Google has spent an immense amount of time and effort identifying the underlying intent behind all kinds of different searches”

“seems to work. relies on that individual quote being indexed, and google SERPs feeling like returning full results at the moment”

“Google search was an absolute revelation. You could type in a search term and the first hit would usually be what you wanted.”

“Google Search's date filter is useful for finding documents about historical topics, but unreliable for proving when information actually became publicly available online.”

“having a LLM summary + a list of websites to deepen the search if I need, is just a superior user experience IMO”