I have another explanation. Lets start with what the article says, but doesn't explain: > And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. The

I have another explanation. Lets start with what the article says, but doesn't explain: > And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives. My theory is A/B testing or other research led then to short term optimization after short term optimization: - a new design was tested that made ads more like ordinary links - profit increased (I am not saying this was on purpose to trick people, only I think experiments were made and their results guided the design) - research in some form or another showed that most users reacted positively when search was made less hard core by removing or significantly reducing the effect of search operators like doublequotes - etc etc - meanwhile content farms and more legitimate web sites on the other side were also experimenting - at some points the old engineers started to leave search and indexing and indexing deteriorates Still everything worked for a while: - DuckDuckGo were still worse and did all the same things: didn't prioritize results correctly, ignored search operators etc. - Same goes for Bing until GPT But at some point Google has optimized its result and its workforce to where we are today: - results are as bad as the search engines they replaced - the once clean results have been optimized step by step until most of the page above fold is ads - search operators are gone - and meanwhile Kagi and others have snuck up and snatched us that used to tell people to use Google Google is a sad mess now IMO, but I guess every step on the way to were we are today was a measureable improvement.