This whole article feels like Danny Sullivan cooling off and patiently trying to explain that no, we're all wrong, the sky really is red. It just doesn't fit wi

This whole article feels like Danny Sullivan cooling off and patiently trying to explain that no, we're all wrong, the sky really is red. It just doesn't fit with my experience. 60% of the time, for actual searches (not just using Google as my lazy equivalent of a memorised bookmarks bar because bookmarks don't work well on mobile) don't work, and I have to wade through crap that is mentally tiring to deal with just to be given the privilege of discovering that it didn't work, the information I want is not being provided by this search, or the toll being exacted by SEO spam crap for the information is soul destroying enough that I need to go somewhere else. As just one example, my husband likes to play Minecraft. Sometimes he asks me to look up something while he's playing. A couple of weeks ago he asked me several questions about a creature called a "Vex". This is what happened when I tried to use Google to answer those questions. One of the questions was about its health on Hard difficulty, another was if there were any blocks it couldn't phase through, another was if it's going to attack the villagers he's trying to keep safe in this little area. I don't want to search all of these individually and I figure all of these answers probably exist on one wiki page, so I search "Minecraft Vex wiki". The first result is a Fandom link; click on that, immediate banner scam ad covering half the screen, pop-up scam ad on the bottom, a third scam ad doing some weird scrolling thing on the side of the screen, that turns into an auto-playing video. One of the ads features a group of sexualised women selling deodorant in a tropical environment. The auto-playing video appears to be trying to tell me how great it would be to have a beer (I am 7 years sober, and I've told Google not to give me ads about alcohol). It has been approximately five seconds since I hit the search button on "Minecraft Vex wiki". It is a failure on Google's part that the first result is a site that has this experience. The second result is one of those IGN "wikis" that are generally worse than any other option and also full of ads, so I'm not interested but click to confirm - okay, this looks like it was written by a bad teenager, someone from Fiverr, or both. And it's absolutely full of ads, time to swipe back. The next thing in the results is four variations on questions about Vex, none of them being the questions I had. The next thing in the results is eight little thumbnails directly in the search results, with a little icon in the corner of each image indicating the website it's coming from - why would these image thumbnails ever, ever pop up on what is clearly a search for detailed, technical information? I didn't run an image search, I know how to click the image search button if I want that, and what I was looking for wasn't even possible to solve with an image thumbnail. They don't even have any text to tell me whether they're worth clicking on, they are a completely useless result for my search. What's worse, between them and the useless questions that I didn't ask, this takes up maybe five results worth of space. By the time I get to the third result on the page, I am maybe a third of the way down the page and it's the official Minecraft announcement page for the Vex mob. This is basically a good result for the Minecraft and Vex portions of the term (third time's the charm), but it still doesn't have the information I'm looking for, it's a general overview that doesn't answer any of the specific questions I had. Every other result from here on out was worse than this, until the result that was second to last. That was a minecraft.wiki link which wasn't torturous to navigate, and after clicking on it it was able to answer all of my questions, after I clarified some things with my husband. Why wasn't this result first? "Just make a good website" does not, in any way, describe what Fandom is providing, and Google recommends it to me as the first option. I don't know if it's specific to me because of my search history now, but conducting the same search now has the minecraft.wiki link as the first result, so it's clear Google is trying something to improve. I have zero confidence that the next time I search for information whose location I don't already know, that it will be any different. This is how at least half of my attempts to use Google to actually search go, and this was an absolute best case scenario for search because it was about probably the world's most popular video game with extensive technical documentation in existence, and I knew exactly what I wanted (a good wiki page on the Vex from Minecraft) and put it in the search, and because Google actually gave me the answer eventually instead of just crapping the bed and having nothing, like it often does. The entire experience was onerous and visually/auditorily offensive drudgery, so that I could answer someone's questions about a video game while they were focusing on another resource they were using to build something in the game. Does Google mark this as a "success" because I got the information I wanted? Because it wasn't successful, it made me want to gouge my eyes out just like every other time I use Google, and what it made me want most of all was an LLM from five years in the future that can just field those questions and provide answers without all of this... "experience". This was not my experience Googling questions 10 years ago. I do not know or care if this is all Danny Sullivan's fault, I don't know him from a can of bread, but it's someone's fault and frankly I hope the company that does this crap can't adapt fast enough and gets destroyed by AI. And you know what's funny? Before my first time using an LLM, I had just accepted that every time I was going to search on the internet it would be a little more soul destroying than it was before, every day for the rest of my life, and there was nothing I could ever do about it because no one would ever be able to compete with Google's monopoly. I had no anger because I had no hope that a solution to this was even possible. After my first time using an LLM with internet access, there were a boatload of problems and potential for abuse but I could immediately see that this technology could insulate me from the demons on the internet that make it a soul-trampling experience, and at least if it got the answers wrong it could say sorry instead of exposing me to unwanted pictures of a woman in a bikini covered in beer foam. Google is a bad, bad, bad experience, and the fact the SEO spammers and this Google employee think it's very effective is both unsurprising and unconvincing. Don't even get me started on the actual Google ads and their determination to make me read the Epoch Times, a newspaper run by a cult that my friend barely escaped from and which there's apparently no way to inform Google I am never going to click on so please don't show it to me anymore. Okay. I got mad but with reason, Google is rage-inducing in the modern era. Now I can move on with my day.