For over 20 years Google Search was arguably the best web search engine around. Prior to it, and for several years alongside it, other search engines gave poorer results, were much slower, and usually gave you pages full of ads and/or other extraneous stuff, making the pages look extremely busy and full of visual noise, as well as heavy for web browsers and computers of the time.
In contrast, Google Search was like a breath of fresh air: When you went to google.com you got an absolutely minimalistic page with just a logo, a search bar, a couple of buttons, and some tiny links to more info about the site at the bottom, and that's it. An extremely lightweight page (both in terms of loading and browser rendering times, as well as in terms of visual noise). And it was incredibly fast, and mostly gave really good relevant results.
Google Search continued to be the best, lightest and fastest search engine around, with its minimalistic design and fast and high-quality results, for about 20 to 25 years. Most people very quickly moved to use it exclusively because it was just outright superior to all other web search engines.
However, in the last 10 or so years, and especially in the last 5 years, Google Search has become more and more annoying, and its search results less and less useful.
In the beginning it didn't have any ads. At some point it started showing ads, but they were very non-intrusive text-only ads, which were very clearly separated from the actual search results. For many years the results page was still quite minimalistic and high-quality even with the few ads on the side.
However, during the last 5-10 years feature creep has been plaguing the search results. The results have started accumulating more and more extraneous stuff, making the page visually noisier and noisier by the year. Sometimes the new stuff might be somewhat relevant (such as a direct answer to a question you ask in the search field, which might consist of for example a list of things you were searching), othertimes not so much. More egregiously, though, the ads have become more and more intrusive by the year. While for the longest time they were extremely non-intrusive and couldn't be confused with the search results, Google has made them more and more to look like part of the search results.
But none of that is the most annoying aspect of how Google Search has changed over recent years.
The most annoying part is that if you are searching for a word or expression, and it just so happens that it's also the name of some random movie or TV show, most of the time 90-100% of the search results in the first few pages will be about that movie or TV show, rather than what you were actually looking for. If there's a Wikipedia page about that word or expression (rather than the movie or TV show), that might be included among the results on the first page. If not, it's likely that nothing relevant will appear.
This is sometimes actually genuinely frustrating. Oftentimes I have searched for such a thing, only to get flooded by a dozen results about some stupid obscure movie or TV show that nobody has ever heard about, rather than what I was actually interested in.
It would be one thing if one or two results showed that such a show exists. That would be fine. What's not fine is that almost all of the results in the first few pages are about it, and nothing else.
As an example, I recently wanted to know what a "megalopolis" is. Well, it turns out that it just happens to also be the name of some stupid movie. And what do you know, the first 10 or so pages of results are literally nothing but about that movie. Not a single search result was useful to find out what that word actually means. I literally had to go directly to wikipedia and search for it there, as Google Search was completely useless.
It used to be different in the past, and for the longest time. If you made such a search 10 years ago, you did get relevant useful results. The show might have been given as a couple of results, but mostly it would be full of more relevant results. Not so anymore.
It's very well known why this is happening: Advertisers. The publishers of all those movies and TV shows are paying Google to have their shows be shown on the first page of results. This alongside so-called "search engine optimization" ensures that the first few pages of results will be almost nothing but about those shows.
This makes Google Search significantly less useful and significantly more frustrating.
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