[ftlio]

Google search has become nearly unusable, while Microsoft’s core consumer products still seem OK - you can still install Windows 11 without a Live account through a workaround.

I can run games on Linux and do work on a Mac. Search is still a problem, but I am increasingly turning to ChatGPT for searching anything non current event, with Bing increasingly.

I was a full Google stack, Android, Home, TV, everything, for a few years. I don’t know about trust, but Google products just flat out suck with constant disappointment, and search is no exception.

[araes]

Part of the issue with search, I cannot 'totally' blame on Google. (Note: I blame them some. Made $300,000,000,000 last year. Have 140,000 employees. Their main product is search + ads. There should be an army of programmers working to make the experience relevant / pleasant / not unusable).

However, there's also an army that works to fill every single slightly "wrong" search result with 100's of answers (they're not even necessarily malicious).

I tried to search for HyperPhysics [1] the other day. Yet, for the life of me could not remember the exact name. Hypertextbook, Super Physics, Super Curricula, Super Simple Physics, ect... In some ways its just name collision. Only so many words that mean "hyper, super, awesome" and 10^10 humans that want them.

[1] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/index.html

[bagacrap]

> Google search has become nearly unusable

This is a weird meme given how many billions of searches Google handles daily.

[TillE]

Google is fine if you're searching for restaurants or a Wikipedia article. I'm sure they handle the vast majority of their mundane queries well.

It's awful, much worse than it used to be, if you're looking for some specific piece of information. Put a word or phrase in quotes, and it will still just ignore it after the first 3 or 4 results and give you a bunch of irrelevant garbage.

[darklycan51]

I legit have to go to bing (or duckduckgo if I wanna keep it private or so they claim at least) to get actual search results lol...

[ftlio]

Not as weird as this meme. You assume it’s some signal expression rather than that I would just pay Google money every month to provide search results that don’t prioritize advertisements over more accurate results that don’t calculate a margin.