I would kill for 2010-era search. I suspect it's now intentionally bad, but I don't think I understand the business strategy behind it being so awful.

There was a time when I could remember two uncommon words in the same reddit post from 5 years prior, and searching those would bring it up as result #1.

The scary thing is, I suspect that search is still their most recent successful product. Just that it's not meant to help any of us.

It wasn't necessarily Google's search that got worse.. it's that SEO became better and better leading to an arms race situtation.

The same thing will happen with the internet and LLMs. The next 5 years will probably be the golden age of LLMs followed by a flood of copyright protectionism and regulation.