[mock-possum]

I appear to be one of the rare few that doesn’t have any trouble - or even see much difference - in the ‘new’ google (non-) search.

Maybe this is a frog in boiling water situation but… it’s just the same search as it’s always been, there’s just now a chunk of Gemini up top, that you take with a grain of salt, same way you’d take the promoted results. If you don’t like it, Adblock it.

When I ask myself honestly, has google search gotten worse over the past 25+ years? My answer is… ehhhhhh… not really?

Other people have always claimed google was ‘getting worse’ and I just don’t see why it should be any more true now than it was then. Isn’t this just the latest round of whinging?

[acdha]

It’s unambiguously worse, in part because they backed away from spam filtering after merging with Double Click when the SEO parasites started buying tons of AdWords. There were multiple years where they’d rank the sites which scraped Stack Overflow, GitHub, Wikipedia, etc. higher than the sources, which is not a problem on Kagi in general but also one Kagi doesn’t refuse to give you tools to solve: a Kagi user can block low-quality domains and never see them again. Google not only doesn’t offer the option but if you ever click on a spam site they’ll treat that as a sign that you want more.

[goosejuice]

What's your method of blocking promoted results, recommended products, etc?

Digging through the crap in a Google search is like finding a recipe in a blog. Sure, it's there, but the experience isn't great. I'd rather pay for a better experience, like buying a cookbook or subscribing to nytc. If you can afford it, why wouldn't you?