One of my passions is searching for information. I do that professionally, but it’s also easy to find me outside my working hours, obsessively researching a topic that interests me. The detective I have inside gets activated and tries to get to the bottom of whatever it is; I can’t help it.
There are many tools for information retrieval, and depending on what I’m looking for, I’ll use one or another, or a combination of what’s available. For general topics or those where I still don’t know where to look and need a first general approximation, I’ll check Google, like most people do. The problem with Google is that it has become less of a search engine and more of a content grinder and stuffer, especially lately in the name of AI. It is increasingly complex to find valid results for searches, and often it’s only possible after wasting too much time fighting Google’s intents to force all their crap on you: AI summaries, miscellaneous widgets, ads. If that was at least useful, well… but most of the time it is a minefield that will easily lead you to wrong or misleading information.
I’ll admit it is sometimes good to search for the weather, a tennis match score, or things like that, and get the result without having to click anywhere else. But most of the time, it’s annoying. I celebrate being able to add udm=14 to the URL, and they have recently added a Web filter where you can sort of go back to the old Google being an intermediate, simply a search engine. It’s something, but I wish it were the default.
PS. I know there are alternatives. That fact doesn’t change how much I wish Google returned to simply being a search engine (with a reasonable amount of ads).