alt Hacker NewsGoogle.com is REALLY bad right now in my opinion.
The AI answer dominates the page, and is usually wrong, so it's just a waste of the most valuable space on the page.
The ads have proliferated, and rarely have what I need.
Video search results also take up a lot of the page, and are almost never what I want if I haven't clicked over to the Video tab. Again, just a big waste of space.
Speaking of the Video tab its accuracy/relevancy has gotten worse too.
The organic results have deteriorated, and are still competitive, but are no longer clearly and consistently better than Duckduckgo.
So it's duckduckgo as the default for me on all devices now. If I don't find what I want, which is maybe 30% of the time, I switch over to G just by adding !g to the query. G might have what I need in about half of those cases.
You can see why a lot of people just ask an LLM to do the web searching for them.
Across the board, this is all quite bad compared to web search from 10+ years ago.
If there's a single thing which has really pushed me away from Google, it's simply google.com devoting so much of the page to things that aren't organic web search.
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I've been on DDG on all my devices for a few years. I used to use !g somewhat regularly but these days it's extremely rare. I realized that I would just search DDG with my first stab at a query and then revise the query when using !g and I'd get the result I wanted. So I just stopped using !g and just revised my query on DDG and then I basically never had to use Google Search.
I started my journey on DuckDuckGo and got tired of the “30% of the time” bit that you mention, where a large section of your searches end up going back to Google anyway.
I find that Kagi is pretty much 99% “never need to use Google.” The results are just really good.
It’s the wrongness that bothers me. I wish Google would just link sources where it thinks the answer is, but don’t bother trying to answer directly if it’s wrong 10% of the time.
Adjust your browser's search engine setting for Google and set it to append "&udm=14" to the URL, that'll force it to bring up the "Web" tab without annoying useless "helpful" other stuff.
Maybe intentionally. If you know you won't find things, they know you are going to use their ai just to not have to type it elsewhere. I am strongly considering kagi
While shitting on YouTube and video…
I was taking with a family member about fentanyl zombies. They had never seen the lean/bend. So I pull up Google and click video which is YouTube results… ALL AI. All of it. All a couple months old, all filler, faked, a few scenes stitched together on repeat and AI voice reading AI script.
It is fucking amazing to me that Google let YouTube fall so far so fast.
I don’t even click a video if it’s less than a year old now. Want to see a praying mantis eat a grasshopper? Wonder how clay is refined? Better off with an 11 year old Discovery Channel clip than anything 2026.
Google has become useless.
Possibly, it's worse than useless, even harmful now.
>Google.com is REALLY bad right now in my opinion.
It is completely cooked. I tried to google a coding question today, same like you would have done 4 years ago instead of asking an LLM. I didn't get any SERPS, just an AI answer. I asked myself... is this even google.com anymore??? Sure as heck didn't feel like it.
The AI answer dominates the page, and is usually wrong, so it's just a waste of the most valuable space on the page.
I started noticing that for a lot of niche questions, AI overview often uses things like Reddit comments as the source, which are often partially or completely wrong. Then it gets reformulated with the typical confidence of an LLM.
Very scary because at the same time I notice people taking the AI overview answers as truth.