A lot of folks are focusing on the AI answers that Google gives, but for me the real downgrade has been the change in their algorithm a few years ago where it tries to search for what it thinks I mean instead of what I search for.
Even putting entire chunks of text in quotes isn’t enough anymore. I can never get Google to search for what I want without trying to engineer a prompt, when it could at some point.
In trying to become more helpful, it’s become worse.
Especially for programming identifiers. You put in some really tech sounding camel case identifier and it tries to split it out and match straight to celebrity trash scraped from Taboola.
Even putting entire chunks of text in quotes isn’t enough anymore. I can never get Google to search for what I want without trying to engineer a prompt, when it could at some point.
In trying to become more helpful, it’s become worse.