Relevant song.

Honestly, Google's decrease in quality feels very noticeable to me. It's not just Google itself but it's across their services. They're making the user experience worse, and promoting irrelevant, mass-produced garbage. On occasion when I've been looking for something non-technical and niche, I've been taken to random machine-translated websites that just seem entirely AI generated.

This is a great example.. A friend of mine was contemplating getting a sugar glider (swedish: Korthuvad flygpungekorre, or just flygekorre) and I got curious about what they're like as pets. So I Googled it and got the above result. It is poppycock! Almost entirely nonsensical!

Sugar gliders in the Wild

Babysugarslips begin life in their mothers bag and are called joeys, just like kangaroos. Because of this unique start on life sugar gliding aeroplanes are classified as pungdjur, not rodents like the similar sexy squirrel.
...
The sugar whisk is an omnivore, so apart from nectar and juice they'll also eat both plant material and meat, including fruit, insects, and even small birds or rodents.
...
If your swingers aren't tame and not used to being handled, it might take some time and patience to get them to the point where they're sexy.

This type of content has gotten "better" since the release of better language models, but whenever you bump into an article that's written by a machine, it's always so very obvious, because they have a tendency to just meander and not really say anything of substance at all. A prime example being this article about World of Warcraft players being excited about "glorbo", archive.org link.

Google, the Search Engine company, to improve its capacity to search optimally.

There's your problem- Google isn't a search engine company, it's an analytics company that uses searches to generate data to sell to advertisers. Think about this: what are the goals for a "good" search engine? Results that are:

1. Fast- get users to their results as soon as possible.

2. Accurate- get results that users want to see, and minimize what they don't.

Immediately, it becomes apparent that the goals of a "good" search engine are literally the exact opposite of the goals of a "good" advertiser:

1. The faster users leave a search page, the less time they spend looking at ads which advertisers are paying to show.

2. Users want to see what they are searching for, which is probably not what's being advertised.

Advertisers want to maximize the amount of time you spend looking at their ads- in other words, advertisers want you to look at content they want you to see for as long as possible.

Given that, is it likely that Google will ever "improve"?

Enshitification has reached google search too :(((

I don’t even think Google is always the driving force behind these. Once someone found out how to game the engine it was over.