this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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I'm sorry, yes the search engines suck and are getting worse, but you really don't actually. You simply don't have to. A chatbot provides the illusion of a perfectly tailored answer every time, and leads us to expect that, with little to no effort, but it's an illusion, it's highly likely to be wrong, answering a different question than you actually meant to ask, etc. And even if it was actually just giving you great quality answers every time and google or DDG or whatever couldn't find them, you still don't have to use the slop machine. Sometimes things might take multiple searches, background reading, asking another human, or, occasionally, you might just not find the answer. And that's okay.
I think operator use the actual reason that most people have seen a massive decline in search quality while power users are significantly less impacted by this (and have always had far higher search quality than average users).
90% of having "incredible Google-fu" was just putting in the effort to specify and trim search functions, and there was a whole cottage industry of people who made it their job to just... Use Google properly because nobody else could be bothered to put a + or - in front of a word.
No, google explicitly fucked its own search results, partially as a result of enshittifying to keep people on the google search results and partially failing to do literally anything about SEO 'optimization' gaming everything
I know how to use fucking operators and I still personally witnessed google search results become increasingly useless
They definitely made things worse over time, I just meant that it was largely something you could mitigate using advanced search up until pretty recently. For the last 2-3 years, google search has been pretty much entirely unusable.
You can thank Prabhakar Raghavan. He was in charge of search at Yahoo and then went to Google, where he pressured the search team to improve their metrics by getting more searches made so more ads could be shown. So results were intentionally worsened, which lead to more searches, and so on and so forth.
As we presently stand, Google aims to remove search altogether and replace it with an AI "experience" where the results are dynamically generated by an LLM from the scraped web. This completely denies all websites any revenue from traffic, because they're not going to get any but LLM feeder bots. Google aims to profit off this by auctioning off the words that the LLM produces to advertisers. Pay more, get your product mentioned earlier or with greater gusto or with greater frequency.
Tbh this stuff is less rigid than it used to be. I've been finding searches increasingly do "did you mean xyz" without actually saying that or giving me the option to correct, just replacing entire strings in my query with more common strings silently.
Yeah, I know people were talking about Google getting really really bad by like 2018, and honestly I experienced almost no changes in day to day usage up until they decided to just forcibly mainline the Lying Machine into every search which was only 2 years ago.
I haven't used Google in more than a decade, when they changed '-' to stop meaning strictly exclude but duckduckgo increasingly has this problem.
yeah idk what version of google other people are using but it's been fucking forever since quotes or booleans were respected
Uhhh, this one. https://www.google.com/advanced_search
Operator use definitely can help a good bit, but the onslaught of keyword farming slop sites is really bad these days and as far as I can tell the search engines have just given up on that front, maybe intentionally. slop sites can have a plausible sounding exact match for almost every conceivable phrasing of your query so they're hard to filter out
I don't want to be a jerk I just hate the "its inevitable I just had to start using AI" take. Most people hate this stuff, it isn't inevitable! Its like a worse version of "nobody else is masking so I had to stop too" and it can easily be extended to justify doing pretty much anything
Yeah, absolutely. AI is just awful and it's made google really bad over the last 2 years or so, but up until that point I experienced basically no degeneration of search quality.
Now they're culling operators from searches, automatically rewording your searches, ugh.
We're called software developers, thank you
Well, youse also know how to copy things from StackExchange which is important for managing medical software written in MUMPS or creating a python program that displays cigarette ads on a cash register.
used to be that you could vaguely describe something into google and find useful results without knowing specific terminology to use.
the LLM is sometimes OK at turning "i have this this and this but don't know anything about the field" into something that i can do a new search for and read something a human wrote, but under no circumstances am i trusting the hallucinatory vomit for factual information.
yeah, the enshittification is very real I am just pushing back on the framing "I hate AI but I have to use it". I don't honestly know why, it just bothers me when we deny our own agency in these things. LLMs may somehow reach that level of saturation into society that it is completely unavoidable, or even just mostly unavoidable, but currently it really isn't, at all, for 95% of people. It is choosing convenience, and that's not like, a sin or whatever, I just think we should be honest with ourselves about it, the contradiction bothers me.