I've read similar comments so many times. Am I the only one who thinks Google has become way way better than it used to? Very often I get immediate answers even without needing to click on any site. It's truly magical.
I agree with you. There are way too many "X used to be better" for all of them to be true, most likely you don't remember all the bad parts.
I remember when half of search results would be pages literally filled with nothing but keywords to get hits. I remember getting a ton of programming results from forums that couldn't even format code snippets properly.
Not to be dismissive of other people's subjective experience but it seems to be like nostalgia glasses remembering things in a more favorable way from the past.
> Very often I get immediate answers even without needing to click on any site. It's truly magical.
Yeah, why should anyone else but Google be able to monetize a website? If you click through to anywhere else but Google, you risk diverting some ad money to someone else than Google! The horror! Naah, much better to read the Google-approved cooypasta...
Also, ~90% of those "immediate answers" are directly copied from Wikipedia anyway; if those are what your after, why not just go directly there and see the whole article in stead of just Google's snip of the intro? (Furthermore, ISTR reading somewhere that WP isn't all that enthusiastic about that "magic".)
