comment: >
  
  I switched to Brave and only use Google in the rare cases I don't find what I need immediately. Google feels more like an advertising company than a tech company at this point.
context: I'm actually literally curious what happened to make it worse. The sponsored results thing makes sense, but I don't think that's all of it. >
  
  Google, like most big tech companies, have been adding more and more moderation on what people can see over time. This started out with pretty reasonable things, like blocking porn on most queries, but they are also trying to promote who they believe are authoritative sources are. There are a lot of problems with this approach, but it will bias the results of their queries.
  There is too much data in the world for Google to curate everything, and they depend heavily on AI systems to do the heavy lifting. Any bias in the training sets, intentional or not, will result in it being replicated consistently in the algorithm; and often have unexpected results. In an attempt to down rank Russia today compared to CNN their algorithm might pinpoint that content from Russia Today uses "cannot" instead of "can't" more often and all articles across the web that use "cannot" will subsequently be determined to be less authoritative.
  The more google (and other search engines) try to censor results the worse their results will become. There is a practical limit to how much curation is good, and after that the curation become a barrier to finding the results you actually want. >
  
  This is really interesting, thanks!