Whenever there’s a big shift like this it’s always tempting to look at the new thing as say how great it is - and ChatGPT is awesome.
But it’s also worth looking at how shit the old thing has become. Google.com now literally delivers you an entire page of ads before any real results. It’s blatant profit-squeezing instead of trying to serve their users. This is their reward.
Or how Google now aggressively autocorrects search queries, to the point where I’m regularly spending 3-4 queries just trying to convince Google to accept the input as-is. I get that it’s likely an effort to assist mobile users who make lots of typos, but the fact that the same autocorrection is deployed on desktop computers rubs me the wrong way.
This has been a major pain point for me as well, especially related to developer documentation. Recently switched to Bing, and it seems to be handling my queries better.
What's truly horrifying, and cannot be explained by "mobile", is that they autocorrect quoted words and phrases quite often now, if query has "too few results" (one of which is exactly what you need, of course, which is why you used the quotes in the first place...).
It's not just font end users feeling this, but advertisers too. Google ads just keep getting more expensive, harder to control and in many cases less effective. You have to, as an advertiser, give Google so much data about your operations and revenue to get the algorithms to work, it's ridiculous. I'm immensely suspicious of how they use the data they have access to about advertisers businesses.
Google entire business model is now about squeezing as much out of their advertisers margin as possible. It's only a matter of time before advertisers push back significantly.
But it’s also worth looking at how shit the old thing has become. Google.com now literally delivers you an entire page of ads before any real results. It’s blatant profit-squeezing instead of trying to serve their users. This is their reward.