I know it’s been getting worse over time, but I could still find what I needed after some digging.
Recently it’s been like 10 minutes of adjusting search terms, still getting completely useless or irrelevant results, and me just giving up afterwards. Other search engines seem just as bad.
I always feel a sense of dissonance (I think that’s the right word?) when I see posts like this. Everyone seems to be talking about this, but I haven’t noticed a difference. Honestly, when I look up something, what I’m looking for is usually in the first few results. Not really sure how to feel about my experience being so different from others.
Are you pretty consumercentric, or do you have some niche interests as well? Google is great at basic tasks and delivering product results and promoted content, and if that’s what you’re usually looking for it probably works great for you. People have trouble these days trying to find the specific stuff. Google used to really excel at this in the past, but now it’s buried under pages of promoted content or pages SEO gamed to the top but not being very helpful