When possible, sure, but this is often not viable. Just to give an example, looking for information on a local performance or exhibition. I can go and dubquote the name of it, but that still gives me 20 "authoritive" websites with vague info on last year's edition, not the few smaller local blogs that have info on this year's edition. Even if I add e.g. "2024". This got far worse since the December update, and many times there's no reasonable way to craft an arcane search query that fixes it.

I see. There’s also “after:2023”, but that only works if the pages with last year’s info don’t appear newer to Google. Personally I haven’t run into the issue you describe yet to a degree that I would have noticed, but we also may have different use cases for googling. Conversely I rather have the issue for certain search terms that Google shows me a page of shopping results before getting to the “authoritive” websites.

I'm sure locale matters. If you're in NYC, there's bound to be authoritive websites with the content you're looking for about almost anything you could possibly want. But the further away you get from the US, the less this is the case.

Though even in the US it largely holds for niche things. It's been a topic on HN for years, how Google has just stopped surfacing small websites with high quality information on a niche topic that can't be found elsewhere, but it's been greatly accelerated since last month.

Are the shopping results you're seeing ranked higher not from authoritive websites (Amazon, Walmart et al)?