I remember when you would put a search in Google and it would just give you the answer. Almost psychically, the number one link would probably be what you wanted. Maybe number two.
Today, first of all, you have to be careful to ignore all the fake search results that are actually ads.
Then there’s the problem of spam sites. References to what you want from Pinterest, but no way to get to the original source. Copies of Stack Overflow answers (or whatever primary source) on some scam domain that steals content to show ads. But it ranks very close to the primary source. Gotta ignore that.
My new favorite is Google ignoring what I’m actually searching for. I can search for “objective-c library to do X without Y”.
Google will helpfully give me pages and pages of “swift library to do X”. That is a much more popular search, so clearly that’s what I meant. Forget Objective-C. Forget without Y. Just dozens of tutorials on the far easier/more popular thing I’m NOT doing.
At this point in many ways it’s worse than the old keyword-based search engine like HotBot. They at least tried to find what I asked for instead of guessing what I probably meant based on popularity.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s kind of amazing that I can search Google for “the female comedian who was in a movie with a dinosaur” and the first result is about Tammy and the T-Rex, a truly awful movie with Whoopi Goldberg.
But that’s offset by seemingly simple searches that go sideways for no discernible reason.
I want 2007 Google back.
Edit: and don’t forget the ways they bent the market. Why does every recipe have a 5+ paragraph story to go with it? Because without that Google penalizes the page for having “no content”. So now all recipe sites are terrible, because they have to be to get visitors.