But I think if I polled random people on the street, I think about only 10–20 per cent would agree. In my Twitter account cyb_detective I talk about tools and techniques for OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) and I am read by a lot of people who are professionally engaged in searching for information on the Internet.
Google has actually gotten better at simple queries like “Paul Altman’s age” (thanks to “quick answers”), but ut don’t good for complex search tasks, like finding the maximum number of mentions of a certain non-media person or seeking answers to complex scientific questions.
Unfortunately, I can’t pinpoint the exact time frame of the period when Google searches did really well. My feeling is that in 2008–2013 most of the search results matched the query and Google was a pleasure to use. But even then, some of the problems described below were already occurring.
2014–2019 were also pretty good years (but the problems have become more and more frequent). Last few years something really wrong has been going on. This became especially noticeable from winter 2022–2023, when there was too much AI-generated text in the results.