That somehow hurts me to hear more than anything. I remember days spent in my youth trawling through Google search for anime fandoms and homework answers. Joke used to be that beyond page 1 is the definition of desperation and in the 00s that was definitely true but I discovered a lot of cool distractions in that desperation. This feels like they killed Google Reader again.

Don't know how modern this is, but I remember being disappointed that despite Google claiming it had millions of results, you could only see a few pages' worth.

Looking now, I've just noticed they no longer give a count of results.

I wouldn't mind that one. That a man in the US and a woman in Japan would get different results for a search for "sushi restaurant" is perfectly reasonable (even if the woman in Japan was searching in English).

It's when two people in the same neighborhood got different results for the same search that I said "wait a minute, they're personalizing search results now for ad-targeting purposes" and ditched them. The potential for them to deliberately hide things from you was too great.

Try Brave.

I'm hoping for a future where we create static HTML pages again styled with a bit of handmade CSS, because we're so tired of bot attacks and long loading times. Then suddenly a Cloudflare network becomes absolet.

How u reliable personalised search results are depends on who controls the personalization and for what purpose.

I would love a search that lets me ban results from certain sites. I don't like search that's showing skewed results for reasons I don't know or control.

It means they're capable of burying news stories that would contradict your worldview and pushing news stories that support your pre-existing biases, leading to more engagement from you (a win from their point of view) but also burying you in an echo chamber. And unless you were in the habit of doing the occasional search in Incognito Mode, you wouldn't know. (And even then, they probably would be able to put together enough clues to figure out your identity even without your Google login cookie).

Yes, the fact that they could do it does not prove that they were doing it, not right away. I ditched them as soon as I found out that they could do it, because I was absolutely certain that eventually, they would end up doing it. And I wanted neutral search results, not biased ones, even ones biased towards my own point of view.

Anything that isn't repeatable is by definition unreliable.