Yes, and that's why I switched to Kagi

I recently tried switching to DDG for my browsers default searches... Instead of Google. It's wasted so much time.

The others are significantly worse. Even using very specific search terms for threads and content I've already gone to.

Bing was nice for porn for a while... Not so much anymore.

Yes.

When I'm on a VPN connected through the US, absolutely. When I'm not on a VPN, also yes, but not nearly as bad.

Big time.

No but only because I stopped using google search years ago.

It has been getting worse for the last decade.

Yes, I unironically use bing now because it yields better results

Yeah, here's a fantastic recent article about it:

The Discussion Forums Dominating 10,000 Product Review Search Results - Reddit's dominance and the downsides of that https://detailed.com/forum-serps/

What I will find interesting since it seems I find better content on stuff like lemmy. I wonder if we will go back to the model of webrings and human aggregated with a mix of user generated links search like yahoo used to be to combat the AI wasteland that is current search. With a web of trust model.

I think this video is relevant

I haven't used Google in years in favor of DDG, which had a degraded search already, but I have noticed the YouTube search is super unreliable now as well, but it seems to be getting better the last few months

If you want to pay for search (and some other stuff) you might consider Kagi. Check out discussions on Hackernews, the consensus is quite good for Hackernews Standards. I personally use it since it matches my view about privacy and I like to pay for that since that's seem a logical way to enable me not to be the product. The results are good and you can prioritize sites easily.

Now that every website has a search function, Google has slowly turned into "I'll show you to the website and let them take it from there". It's absolute dog shit. I think the AI has already taken over, and it's progressing really slowly so we aren't aware of the change. It's already too late to pull the plug, the AI knows we're all driven by greed for attention and occasionally money, and it turns out those are both easily created and distributed in the modern age of the Internet, and very very unregulated.

It is rather terrible.

Yep, and now you have to scroll through ads and the AI bs. I switched to DDG a few weeks ago. It's mostly good, my biggest issue is that Firefox on Android always takes several seconds before loading the page. Gotta do what ya gotta do for uBlock Origin though.