Isn't Google data driven?
Are you asserting that they look at their copious data and decide to make search worse because it makes them more money? Rather than figuring out a way to make search better and then further optimize their advertising income with this better product? And it seems like they've been pretty damn clever about monetizing quality over the years. It's possible that they have chosen to make search worse for profit, wouldn't be the first time a business did something like that but they have a pretty deep institutional fear of search losing relevance and it's hard to see them doing that.
As a long time user and user of the other guys before google, I think Google is shockingly good at finding specific answers to specific questions that I have about all sorts of things, often with fairly deep technical context. Now what is definitely lacking is in the good old days I'd enter some search terms, get pages of results and then some time later I'd find myself enjoyably down some rabbit hole that is tangential to my search needs on some part of the internet that I never even knew existed before. Maybe I'm too busy with work, but I used to spend a lot more time doing internet "research" to get some specific answers, that time seems to be much more efficient; I do sort of feel like I'm corralled to smaller portion of the internet than I used to be. I don't feel like I can't find the information but I have had a hard time re-finding some specific web page I found once way back.
Where does ChatGPT and Bard fit in this? I've played with ChatGPT and it's fun, it's neat, I haven't been able to get it to some how synthesize some wisdom though. It's not hard to see it just mimicking things. That might be valuable. That might be fun. Using it to seed search might be an enjoyable thing. Maybe it can help extract context from people to find out the actual question they are asking to find the actual answer they seek. Now I can absolutely see ChatGPT/Bard assisting in me wasting time going down rabbit holes, I'm not sure it'll be as enjoyable or as magical as how it used to be.
Are there some examples of shitty google search you can bring up? I just entered "Roth contribution income limit" and without even going to another website, I got what looks like a legit answer to my question. Now I'll click though a few to make sure it's accurate and authentic; at a glance, it's coming from Schwab and it looks like a legit answer to my question. Bing comes up with the same answer, it's presented in a nice table but it's lower on the page and below a sizable paid ad from Merrill Lynch (edge?)