It's not a summary of what happened to google (as far as I can tell), but an example of what it's become.<p>I want to know what happened. What were the individual things that made sense in isolation, but added up to this steaming turd.
I have noticed that these sort of results pop up whenever you google something related to a Windows problem, but when you search for something related to Linux problem the results are way better.
I doubt the report is factual (fyi, here's what came out for the same query in my browser <i>The twin-spotted sphinx moth is a pretty moth with beige-brown and white wings and pinkish-red and yellow markings...</i>), and I haven't really experienced such results anywhere. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I regularly delete my browser data, but the point of this critique is lost on me.
FWIW, I just ran that query, and got what looked like materially better results.<p>That being said, I've seen the same sort of useless results elsewhere (so maybe someone saw this particular case and intervened). I have been told that part of the SEO industry works like "take this sample post and rephrase it with the following keywords and product links". So you get the same warmed-over results on the topic, and it's hard to find the posts that drill deeper.
Similar to this but not (maybe) as nefarious is the links to what looks like the result of the <solemn-and-important-font>Quarterly Conversation with Your Manager to Set Goals and Milestones</solemn-and-important-font>. The outcome of the QCYMSGM is "Goal: understand $(technology); Milestone: write a blog post about it". So you get a lot of half-baked "Intro to OAuth2" links that don't really help that much.
One comment after the Twitter post suggested trying neeva.com. First-page results are useful.<p>For some kinds of search, DDG's image search ... (faster: append '&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images' after the search term(s) ) ... is the best. For example the search on 'brown spotted moth southern us identify' quickly shows several useful images; click on one to see the source title & url.
This is scarily accurate, and partly why I've switched to Kagi (www.kagi.com) for what Google used to be. While they will introduce their paid service soon, I believe it would be worth every penny.