It seemed like Google was good ten+ years ago and then gradually trended towards being rotten around 2020-2022. In those days blogspam was king. I want a cooking recipe and it would show me a life story. Or I wanted a OG web game but a link farm would come up top. I think there are leaked internal comms where they discuss nerfing search results to pump engagement and ads impressions. No doubt it would boost ad bids too if businesses couldn't be found organically.

Around that time Bing and DDG were actually better. Then LLM's came along and they started to take things seriously again. Maybe they think the OpenAI threat has abated enough to begin enshitification cycle 2.0.

I know Google started deteriorating. It was in 2008 or 2009. Up until then Google would return 0 results if it couldn't find a document with all the words you specified.

Then it started serving synonyms, attempted to correct spelling, and so forth. Instead of serving up that there was 0 results, it attempted to be "helpful".

For a while, you could enable "verbatim" search, but even that has gotten corrupted.

Their search quality has deteriorated ever since that change. It is sad.