Aliexpress is just as bad as well, they have taken the Amazon model and ramped it to 11. Yet they don't seem to be intentionally mixing in bad results like Amazon is, instead because its all external sellers they are all embedding searched keywords to push their product in front of you. There are loads of shopNNNNNNNN based sellers doing this with various products that clearly don't last long. Both store designs only seem to exist due to having almost anything on them but the cost is long, complex and detail checking searches, they are minefields of wrong products.
Is Google.com even any better these days? It brings back a lot of results where the page appears to not even include the words I searched for far. I see the same thing on duckduckgo/microsoft now too.
When did searches that bring back results that don't match become the right answer? Its one thing when that happens with ads but they are doing it for pages that don't even pay them now (or at least don't declare they pay them, but it seems unlikely given the page contents).
My observation with Google is that an astonishing high percentage of their users stopped clicking organic search results around 2010 or so. They exclusively choose from amongst the top two or three ads, which they don’t even realize are ads since the indication of “what’s an ad” has gotten more and more subtle and the position of the first organic result has gotten lower and lower on the page to the point where today you generally would have to scroll a bit to find the first organic research result. The same users who only clicked the sponsored links before now don’t click any links, usually preferring to simply read the AI generated summary of some random spam results (which notably is far worse in accuracy than what you would get if you simply asked an LLM directly).
I think as a result, Google doesn’t really care about the quality of their organic search results since on the scale Google cares about, “nobody” clicks them anyway.
My conspiracy theory is that Google has been deliberately making its search results worse to subtly train users into engaging with ads and the AI assistant.
There is little reason why the AI Assistant can be a summary of the exact page you want, while that page is buried 8 deep in the search results behind a bunch of spam.
Recently I've had Google return results lacking search terms I've put in quotes (and then clicked "Show results for xxx instead" when it tries to 'correct' me). I have no idea how I'm supposed to make my desire any clearer.
It has been a long time since double quotes worked reliably for me on Google.
It has also been a long time since Google showed me any search results that weren't 100% ad-laden blogspam with wordy vague (and often incorrect) content with clickbait titles. I have basically given up on Google altogether.
I stopped using Google at work when they forced javascript. Since then I realized that I haven't missed it at all and I've stopped using it entirely. It's become trash.
I find the need for a "search engine" reduced very considerably with all these "answer this question (NOW!)" options so readily available. They're the modern day "I feel lucky" button.
This has been going on for over a decade for me now (I know because I blogged about it at the time).
For years I used DDG, not because it was better, but it wasn't worse and I wanted to support competition.
Then I started using Marginalia and shortly after I found Kagi.
Kagi works like Google used to do (and has a range of nice extra features) and in the very unusual situations were it doesn't work, when I posted it to the forums it was quickly acknowledged and dealt with.
Extremely refreshing to be on the customer side of a search engine the last three years instead of being some kind of livestock for Googles ad sales machine.
Is Google.com even any better these days? It brings back a lot of results where the page appears to not even include the words I searched for far. I see the same thing on duckduckgo/microsoft now too.
When did searches that bring back results that don't match become the right answer? Its one thing when that happens with ads but they are doing it for pages that don't even pay them now (or at least don't declare they pay them, but it seems unlikely given the page contents).