Goodbye Google. Hello Ecosia!
There was a time I thought I would never switch away from Google. But times change, things fall apart. An incredible search engine starts giving you answers for the questions you never asked. A search engines job is to find best results for given keywords and then allow the user to navigate away from them. With Google, they are choosing the result for me. They are showing way too much information that I’m not really looking for. Try searching for a city and you will know what I’m talking about.
They are tuning search such that it becomes more accessible to people who like asking questions and getting answers. There’s nothing wrong with this. The sweet analytics that they collect must have been telling them that large number of people like to ask questions and are expecting answers. So that’s the direction they have chosen for search. This is normal progression of any Software when they choose to follow analytics. Of course with their popularity they could have chosen to ignore analytics and make search better. Everyone would eventually learn the art of searching but that’s just my idealism.
I prefer good old searching with keywords instead of asking questions. When I’m typing those keywords I want the search engine to find all the pages across the web that might have those keywords. Google still does that but there focus has shifted from returning best results to keeping users engaged on the search page. AI generated answers are now front and center. Then there’s that annoying questions panel that keeps expanding with more questions if you click one of the answers. Search results are below all these panels. This shows their priorities. Instead of all this AI fluff they could have chosen to solve the SEO spam issue but no.
