Dunno about Google but Youtube seems to be making some things harder on purpose, like seeing the date of a video or showing search results in chronological order.

It’s all monetization directed, no matter what. Boolean search is gone.

It also feels like some pages in top results didn’t even exist before I made the search. They are filled with generic babble about the subject without ever going to details or conclusions. Dribble that no human would ever write

Use duckduckgo and turn off ai results. Problem solved.

Search has been becoming smarter for years (decades?) by now.

The problem is that search has been made to work with the “you know what I mean” factor… fixing spelling mistakes, considering different tenses or forms of words, including related words…

Search became more friendly to the average non-technical user, but it became harder for users who know/knew how to search for exactly what they want.

Other factors include…

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) where websites try to appear for as many searches as possible, occasionally regardless of relevance
• Monetization of search, where people with SEO and a lot of money pay to be included in as many “relevant” searches as possible
• AI incorporated into search by trying to find additional relevant pages
• Search engines being reluctant to return zero (or few) results and padding the results with other things you “might be interested in”
• Also, search trying to use what you “might be interested in” based on what they know about you/your account/your IP address/your location based on your IP range.

I’m annoyed that YT got rid of the search by newest first option. At least Rumble has it still

Yes

I’ve been using Ecosia since Google turned to absolute dogshit because of SEO and sponsored links. Now I don’t even use search engines anymore, I just ask an LLM immediately and tell it to link its sources so I can verify for myself