Google is an ad company, not a search company. Unsurprisingly, Google will always prioritise ad revenue over quality of content. For example:
- Google search is full of ads (since a long time)
- The search results themselves have gotten worse due to sites prioritising SEO over good content
- This is why when you search for a recipe, the top results include long narratives like the author's life history in relation to that recipe
- Google's search algorithm uses ML and Google engineers no longer understand how it works
- This further has deteriorated the quality of search results
- Google no longer allows users to access cached search results
- Google uses AI to summarise search results
- This leads to a lot of fake results now
- Google interprets search results loosely
- Google will often ignore words from search entirely
- Google is now ignoring double quotes
- One used to be able to use double quotes to prevent Google from ignoring certain search terms or to search specific phrases. Google started notifying users when it would ignore these, allowing the user to click to include them. Now Google has started ignoring them altogether.
- Don't use the Chrome browser
- Again, Google is an ad company. Google will always prioritise ad revenue over quality of content.
- Firefox, Safari are good alternatives
- Edge probably not a good option because it has Bing integrated, which is worse than Google. Plus ad blockers are going to break on Edge too since it uses Chrome's engine.
- Use an ad blocker
- uBlock Origin is great and works even on Firefox mobile so you can block ads on your phone as well
- When searching for opinions or human interpretation, append
redditto the end of search results- For example:
best network attached storage reddit - This isn't quite as useful when searching for factual information
- For example:
- Use a different search engine
- DuckDuckGo is a good option. Double quotes work!
- Bing seems to actually be worse than Google