>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion
this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.
Sure they do. People don't abandon products very fast when they turn worse. And the power of being the default option is massive.
And it's easy to imagine a situation where the other options are still mediocre most of the time, so switching has an advantage but it's not a big compelling thing you shout to the rooftops, so it doesn't get a big popularity wave.
The first 3 pages are literal copy paste blog slop or SEO ads for the competitor of the thing you are looking for. I dropped Google as primary search ages ago. It's a pale shadow of what it once was.
Google search business is not the most successful in history. It's their ad business and monopolization of online advertising that's the most successful in history and the only way to break their ad monopoly is to stop using their junk.
Google Search hasn't been designed for users in like 10 years
Google search is extremely vulnerable to SEO scams. It's very common to see advertised/high ranked scams with similar domain names (e.g bankname.com vs bankname.co). I switched to Kagi mainly for this reason.
The fact that Google grabbed a monopoly and now is making bank does not mean the product is good.
It was amazing.
Today it’s pretty terrible for me. I’ve switched to Kagi.
But Google has a MASSIVE advantage. They have the most used browser (they push the hell out of it). They get the most search traffic, so they can use that to tune results better than anyone (if they want). Thats part of how they took off so fast. Got so good. The rich get richer.
And everyone knows Google is #1 by 1000 miles. So that’s the engine they want to be in. That’s whose advice they follow.
Google gets the searches so it can get better faster. It gets the eyeballs to make the money to invest in other Google stuff. All of it pushes Chrome, which pushes Google Search.
Google is not the best. Google years ago was. They’re a shadow of their former self, destroyed by spam of their creation and AI slop they’ve helped make.
They’re still THE default. But as they say, “past performance is not an indicator of future success“.
Then prove it? There have been actual studies that confirm this fact. You could also use the fact that google search has been losing market share steadily since 2023 and since search was supported on things like chatGPT as evidence it has been in decline. But, as I have in the past also said, I refuse to argue about this with google employees/devotees because there seems to be a fair amount of delusion involved.
For me, the user, it didn’t work. I got that from my own experience with it. You can point it at me and say it was my imagination, or i wasn’t “doing it right,” but that experience was absolutely true for me. If you care to you can even go back to my oldest posting history to see me complaining about it, and similarly people rushing in to defend it (very aggressively)
this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.