Zack WhittakerIt's not just you. Yes, Google absolutely sucks.
Great podcast w/ @jasonkoebler: https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2024/04/the-devolution-of-google-search
Jason Koebler
Paul Anderson@zackwhittaker @jasonkoebler . Added to my playlist and will watch, but yes, Google doth surely suck now. Amazing how 'search' engines have been racing for the bottom lately.
Alan Miller 
🇺🇦@huddie @zackwhittaker @jasonkoebler I don't entirely blame Google - there's plenty of other stuff to blame them for, but the massive rise of SEO driven crud was probably inevitable and I'm afraid that even if they did a better job of reputation based ranking it'd still be gamed and abused.
@fencepost @zackwhittaker @jasonkoebler
Gaming results with SEO is only part of it. When the entire first page is ads not search results, the search engine itself sucks.
smxi@zackwhittaker @jasonkoebler This has been extensively discussed in the webmaster scene. It's also been noted by observant people who see the SERPs aka search results suck. The cause is obvious: google started using machine learning to give users the answers that _most people_ wanted. They even disabled modifiers to the query, and just kept giving the same response. Oddly, we found this when we realized that our site had popped back into the natural results at #1. For a big money position.