A few years ago anything you wanted to search for would generate hundreds of pages of results. From sources all over. If you structured your query well you could dramatically cut down the irrelevant results and then spend a bit of time skimming through the offerings until you found your target.
Searching felt like a hunt, it could take you to far flung corners of the web, and hitting the jackpot on some obscure forum was part of the fun.
Now searching anything feels incredibly frustrating. You know what you are looking for is out there somewhere but it feels impossible getting to it. Basically we have only two main routes now, Google and Bing (and I swear Bing is just copying Google's homework). I've tried a handful of others and they all fall very short.
Something has changed dramatically under the hood.
It seems like the results are very shallow and no amount of prodding will get either search engine to produce anything besides the laziest output. Any subject has a limited pool of sites they lean on and then pretend that that's all of the Internet.
It generalizes very quickly and if you try to counter by putting things in quotations it gives up.
Even in the rare moments I've buckled and used their stupid AI, it takes even more time browbeating the program to just deliver the damned specifics.
What is going on??
How do we get our old search back?
I swear every day of trying to navigate the web feels worse than the day before.
How did we get here?
There's got to be something better, right? Or something we can do to pave a new structure that benefits the denizens of the web better than the lazy slop our tech overlords scrape off the table for us. What can we do?
I know it's not the thing you likely want to hear, but... At this point, I'm glad I switched to a paid search engine (Kagi).
Theoretically, there's nothing stopping them from enshittifying down the road. But at least for now (and hopefully the future) they are a great search engine.
They have their own index (so no relying on google/bing), and it actually works as I remember Google working 7+ years ago. Minus the ads, and plus a ton of flexibility permanently boosting/removing sites from your searches, auto-grouping/ignoring listicle-type articles in results, flagging sites as AI slop and punishing them for it,...
They even have a fediverse search "lense" that actually works really well to search Lemmy/mastodon/...
I just realized I sound like a paid shill. Sorry about that. I'm not.
I use Kagi too, it's great.
The other commenter corrected your index note.
What I found most illuminating was a comment by the CEO in an interview, perhaps The Verge? The TLDR of it was that Google makes money when you dwell on their site (so they want the highest ad serves per search), and a paid search engine loses money every page they have to serve you (so they want to give you your answer fast).
So, the user and Google are at odds, and the user and Kagi have the same goal.