[art0rz]

The only people losing faith in Google (search) are power users such as us. Regular users haven't noticed the decline, and search may even have improved for them. We are not Google Search's target audience. We need to stop pretending all products are built for the power user niche.

[jajko]

My wife is an opposite of power user and she now uses mostly chatgpt for anything more complex. The ease with fluent sentence search compared to trying to fit those few right terms that google search would understand, not overdo it, avoid over-SEO-ed pages... google search has been gamed for so long it became victim of its own success. It just has momentum but thats waning.

Plus often first results are pure ads, fuck that and fuck them. Maybe LLMs will one be gamed similarly, then we move to something else but right now its night and day even for common folks. Who cares knows it.

Just recent case - we were looking for a robot vacuum cleaner. Spent an hour battling shitty seoed crap sites in google search like nytimes with their paid very selective biased reviews, went over quite a few reliable ones, user reviews etc and came to my wife with list of preference vs cost vs reliability vs other aspects. She puts a short sentence in chatgpt and its the same freakin' list, in 20s.

[alister]

> we were looking for a robot vacuum cleaner

For this kind of product search, may I suggest Consumer Reports. It's one of the very few sites I'd consider unbiased since they (a) do testing with actual technicians and extensive laboratories, (b) anonymously buy all the products they test and they don't take gifts or manufacturers' sponsorships, (c) don't take advertising. They are funded by subscriptions, donations, and grants, and have been in existence for 89 years.

Specifically for robot vacuums, I looked just now and Consumer Reports has reviewed 46 different models from 14 manufacturers. (I knew about Roomba but had no idea that robot vacuums had become such a big category.) I'm putting the robot vacuum link below to give an overview. It's worth subscribing to evaluate options for a big purchase.

https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/vacuum-cleaners/r...

[croissants]

+1 for Consumer Reports. They're not expensive either, something like $5 per month. If they keep you from buying a bad fridge, it pays for itself!

Their recentish coverage of lead in foods is a bit embarrassing though, since they used a California standard for dosage limits that even the EU would blush at.

[throwaway2037]

I love this response, and I agree 100% with your suggestion, but, isn't it obvious? They didn't want to pay for high quality information. Instead, they needed to wade through rubbish "unpaid"/"free" search results. Or in their own words: "Spent an hour battling shitty seoed crap sites in google search".

[TheOtherHobbes]

Regular users have absolutely noticed the decline. A number of people I know have mentioned it to me unprompted. None of them are power users or even particularly tech-oriented.

[surajrmal]

I'm a so called power user and don't really understand why everyone says it's worse. Google is better than ever. The problem I've seen is folks using older techniques for searching that don't really make sense anymore.

[ido]

What are the newer searching techniques that make more sense?

[owebmaster]

> I've seen is folks using older techniques for searching that don't really make sense anymore.

Like typing what you want to search in the search input and hit enter?

[tuyiown]

I don't see how exact search string can lose its sense. But it does yield "no results", more often than before even if the string has to be publicly available somewhere, in a source I could make sense of.

I can see how google can be seen as better in some ways, but brushing all case where it's worse as irrelevant looks like an easy shortcut to shut down complains without caring if they might be legit.

[kenjackson]

A lot of non-power users are complementing Google search with ChatGPT. The main reason is that it will give an answer to more specific questions. Like “what are some quotes famous athletes have said about Usain Bolt”.

[throwaway2037]

    > Like “what are some quotes famous athletes have said about Usain Bolt”.

What a strange counterexample. When I try exactly that search in Google, I get a nice list of quotes from "AI Overview" in the results.

[kenjackson]

I thought they were talking about the traditional blue links Google search results, not the AI returned results. Then sure -- ChatGPT, Gemini, etc... I put them all in the same bucket as complementary. Interestingtly though, I don't get the AI Overview on mobile, so there I'd have to explicitly go to an LLM focused interface.

[throwaway2037]

I just tried the same search from my mobile phone. I see the same AI generated response.

Real question: Do you think normies distinguish between traditional Google search results and AI Overview? To me, normies use Google to find an answer. They don't care too much where the answer comes from.

[kenjackson]

I get this message on mobile: “An AI Overview is not available for this search”. But it does work on desktop.

[nyarlathotep_]

Beyond that--most non-technical people associate "web search" or search engines with Google. There's nothing else to them, even those old enough to remember the 90s/2000s before dominance was established.

[Ylpertnodi]

Most people I know are now using deepseek. I don't even have to show them a filtered ad-free web, anymore (that most didn't even notice the lack of cruft).