I think the big problem is simply that the results are bad. They’re full of spammy links to weird websites with verbose but useless content or just links going to the obvious sources that you could visit yourself like Wikipedia or stack exchange. All the sponsored content and allegations of politically manipulated results don’t help either. Using a chatbot seems more effective most of the time.
But Google has one resource that others do not, which genuinely contains a lot of good content. And that is YouTube. If they could simply make the content of videos easier to search, they would be able to offer a unique set of useful answers. At least for now before AI generated garbage takes over YouTube.
A search engine having bad result is not a simple problem though.
Especially at the position of Google, it's neither a coincidence nor something taking them by surprise. They've been in an arms race with spammers and SEO gurus since the beginning, and had all resources on earth to deal with it. The results being bad as they reached a monopoly position is of their own making, or more precisely a situation they saw as the best tradeoff.
That's where I don't see Google turning the ship around: people who were there for decades to make searches relevant have probably already left a long time ago, or they accepted the new direction themselves. And new people with expertise and enough energy to rock the boat are also in a position to do more impactful work in other companies where they won't have to fight an establishment.
As a example of how hard it is to change direction, we haven't seen Microsoft suddenly build customer friendly OSes, nor Meta having good taste, nor Apple come up with open ecosystems.
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