To think Google search is busted?

[ThoseWeirdStones]

Increasingly awful, the vast majority of results for any search (no matter how specific I am) brings either totally unrelated results to the top, or more.....bloody questions.
And most of these 'questions' are ridiculous. For example, say I search for 'how to get more fiber in my diet'
Most results will presume and anticipate me to have wanted higher PROTEIN, not fiber. If I search for vegetarian recipes or health adjacent info, it presumes, off the bat, that I wrote vegan.

And those ridiculous 'questions' that appear several results down the page, usually badly spelled or with questionable grammar: so your search for high fiber meals will result in:

• What's the 30/50/70 rule for cancer
• What's did Kurt Cobain think about God
• What is fiber diets
• Does veganism cause cancer

It's a shit show. It is either optimised to answer very low IQ queries, or presumes that I am under the age of 10.
I get that the algorithm is spewing the most searched for stuff up to the top, but it is usually the very worst and often only slightly related to what I asked. I wonder how far this will go before the damn thing is rendered useless.

Every time I ask something it takes me to Reddit for the American idiot answer (which Google owns). It's rubbish.

It's the enshitification of everything.

The same happens with Amazon, Ebay and Etsy now. You no longer get what you asked for, you get what the company who paid the most money to advertise gives you.

There are loads of videos on YouTube at the moment about the death of the internet which sounds ludicrous but what they mean is, it's full of slop.

I recall the worst being when I search for a film or some artwork or other, and the search bar decides to complete my sentence for me. Often you don't notice it doing that so press 'return' and land in a completely different universe to what you expected!

For example, I once wrote Harry Price Ghost Hunter into the search bar and it completed it for me as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Not the end of the world but infuriatingly rude.

Or you type a film title and it gives you the remake's cast list instead of the film itself, so oddly random.

I have to be honest, I don't think it matters if you use a US or a UK spelling. It's Google, it does this and it doesn't care, lol.

Anyhow, I'm off now, so Merry Xmas mumsnetters, have fun and stay safe and don't let the google search bar get the better of you x

Often you don't notice it doing that so press 'return' and land in a completely different universe to what you expected!

That press of "enter" is then fed back to Google as "proof" that it got the guess right, and will so is more likely to appear for the next person. It will also go towards the bonus of the executive who is telling the board how phenomenally successful the "AI" is, and so can they have a few more billions (power stations not included) to beef it up even more.

Two tips for Google searching:

Use inverted commas around your word or phrase to force inclusion in results

What foods are "high fibre"

To exclude AI results, at the end of your search term put

-ai

These don't work in image search btw

Agree with PP, I always put -ai after search terms

Whether google respects that is another matter. I've had searches where it's ignored the quotes and returned results anyway.

Enshittification is a thing. And should be recognised as such in the Chrome (proudly supplied with added "AI" by the Chocolate Factory) spellchecker.

At this rate, Google will be unusable by 2027 with a corresponding drop in productivity.

Don't have a massive problem with it, apart from that it's too US centric in its search results. Imo.

A feature, not a bug.

I find this very annoying.
I search for items and so many search results come up that are very different from my request.