[dicriseg]

I’m in my 40s so Google wasn’t my first search engine but it’s definitely been what I’ve used the most. And I do think it has changed similar how to you describe it. But I see the change more as:

You used to go to Google and effectively be asking, “Google, find me information about X.” Today you’re implicitly asking, “Google, show me ads related to X.” You just kind of accept that what it shows you will be the thing that is most fine tuned to appear most related to X - and the most common reason to do that fine tuning in the first place is to deliver an ad.

So you gotta search in natural language like an ad, and hope that someone in that first page of results decided to SEO some particularly good content so they could get you there to look at more ads.