> Anyone who complains about search engine result quality is a completely different demographic from the typical person. I don't think Google's search as gotten

> Anyone who complains about search engine result quality is a completely different demographic from the typical person. I don't think Google's search as gotten worse but rather typical user (i.e. training data) becoming more average. I hear this argument a lot, and I think it is a cop out. Google literally bills itself as being able to personalize itself to your interests and being able to learn based on your queries. On top of that, google used to work 7 years ago essentially perfectly. If there were really such a divergence between myself and "typical users" you'd have heard them all complain about google then, because they were using it also. What's going on here is a misalignment of incentives between users and Google. They don't have an interest in being useful, they have an interest in herding eyes to the most profitable places and in using people to train their AI. They believe nobody can oust them as incumbent and so they no longer feel they have to deliver a good product if doing that hurts the bottom line.