It’s gotten really worse over the last year or so. They try to be overly “intelligent” by suggesting search phrases you didn’t even input, watering down the results.

I’m a web developer and when I google for “string”, I don’t want to get results for “yarn” to put in a fake extreme example. Rewording my search phrases is one of the worst features they ever introduced. I know what I’m looking for and I don’t need assistance with that.

Google even started ignoring operators sometimes. Back in the good old days you were able to put a word into quotations to tell the engine it must be included in the results. Now when I do this it only mostly works but when they run out of results they just go back to the default behaviour of including everything that might loosely fit the search phrase.

It feels like Google is afraid to show you no results, as if that was a crime or something.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Bing works so much better for me when I look up specific error messages etc.

there was definitely a time where i got some results from google in a very ad-like manner, super fucking annoying: “you may like this…” and spamming different search terms, locations etc.

i haven’t seen it since, i figured they were A/B testing the design