Search engines don't search.

At least not how we might want them to or how we may have grown up expecting them to. Just type "anyone else notice search results are useless?" into your favorite mainstream search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc...) and you'll get a bunch of hits ranging from Reddit posts to serious articles outlining the failings of modern search engines.

The issues are generally the same - SEO spam, intrusive ads, companies filtering or redirecting results to their own services and affiliates. And it's all being accelerated by AI - AI generated images, AI generated site content, AI filtered and interpreted results.

And it isn't your imagination, consider this TechSpot article by Alfonso Maruccia titled "New study confirms the obvious, search results are only getting worse". It outlines the results of a German study that spent a year tracking product review search results from three popular search tools - Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Suffice to say, the results are not encouraging:

Popular search engines are losing the cat-and-mouse game against SEO-oriented spam, the German researchers say, while the line between "benign" content and worthless link farms has become increasingly blurry. The situation will only worsen with generative AI algorithms, which can be (ab)used to instantly eject a lot of low-quality, fact-free content that would be perfect for SEO spam and SERP manipulation.

The research team focused on product review searches, and per the article Google responded to the study saying that it doesn't reflect the overall "quality and helpfulness" of search results.

I disagree.