Google Search is broken. Not “needs some tweaks” broken. Not “could be better” broken. Fundamentally, catastrophically broken. And if you’re still pretending otherwise, you’re either not paying attention or you work for Google.

The Evidence is Overwhelming

The pattern is consistent across queries: search for product reviews, get affiliate marketing sites that never tested the products. Search for technical information, wade through SEO spam and AI-generated content that confidently provides wrong answers. The problem is systematic and well-documented.

A year-long study by researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics analyzed 7,392 product review searches across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Their conclusion: “Higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality.” The majority of high-ranking product reviews use affiliate links, and significant amounts are outright SEO spam.

HouseFresh’s investigation exposed how Google’s first page for product searches is dominated by sites like BestReviews.com and CNN Underscored, sites that consistently outrank actual reviewers despite never testing the products they recommend. These publishers use stock photos, fake “testing labs,” and manufactured expert quotes to game Google’s ranking algorithm.

Technical Search is Degrading

As an engineer, I rely on search for documentation, error messages, and implementation examples. The quality has declined sharply.

Try searching for an exact error message in quotes. Increasingly, results include AI-generated blog posts that confidently hallucinate fixes that don’t work. Stack Overflow threads that once ranked first now get buried under content-farm tutorials that mix outdated syntax with modern examples.

When users are forced to add “site:github.com” or “site:stackoverflow.com” to basic technical searches to filter out SEO spam, the search engine has failed at its core function.

The Reddit Refuge Phenomenon

Every developer I know has adapted the same workaround: append “reddit” to every search. Need to research a web framework? “nextjs pros cons reddit”. Debugging a database connection? “postgresql connection refused reddit”. Shopping for hardware? “best laptop 2024 reddit”.

This behavior became so widespread that Google noticed and built it into their algorithm. In summer 2023, Google deployed a “hidden gems” update specifically to surface Reddit and forum content, essentially admitting that their organic results had become so polluted with SEO spam that users were routing around them entirely.

This isn’t because Reddit has better information. It’s because Reddit has human-generated content that hasn’t been optimized to death by SEO consultants. When users reflexively add a site filter to every query, the search engine has failed.

Google’s Deliberate Choices

This isn’t incompetence. Google’s search results are bad because Google chose to make them bad.

Internal emails from Google, released as part of the DOJ antitrust case, reveal the moment search died. In February 2019, Google’s ads team declared a “code yellow” because search revenue growth was behind targets. Ben Gomes, then head of search and a 19-year Google veteran who built the foundation of modern search, pushed back. He warned that Google was “getting too close to the money” and expressed concern that “growth is all that Google was thinking about.”

Gomes lost. In May 2020, he was replaced by Prabhakar Raghavan, previously head of ads. Raghavan’s credentials? He ran Yahoo Search from 2005 to 2012, during which Yahoo’s search market share collapsed from 30.4% to 13.4%, eventually replaced entirely by Bing. Under Raghavan, Google prioritizes advertising revenue over search quality. When your business model requires people to click on ads, making organic results worse is rational.

The company has systematically degraded search operators that power users rely on. The + operator for forcing inclusion of terms? Removed. Exact phrase matching with quotes? Increasingly ignored. Date range filtering? Unreliable. Time-based sorting? Broken for months at a time.

The Technical Breakdown

Google’s algorithm now prioritizes “engagement metrics” over relevance. Content designed to generate clicks and time-on-site ranks higher than content that actually answers questions. The result is a search engine that serves content marketers, not information seekers.

The Verge documented how this optimization cycle has homogenized the web. Publishers using SEO tools like Semrush are told to avoid “complex” words, break up paragraphs, and insert keyword-stuffed subheadings. The result: “thousands of website operators all using this same plug-in to rewrite content. No wonder people feel like the answers are increasingly robotic and say nothing.”

The Bigger Picture

Google Search’s failure represents a broader problem with how information gets discovered online. When the primary gateway to human knowledge is optimized for advertising revenue rather than accuracy, we lose access to the collective intelligence that made the early internet valuable.

This affects more than just developers. Google’s algorithmic changes have amplified misinformation by prioritizing high-engagement content over authoritative sources. The same optimization for “engagement” that fills technical searches with useless blog posts also promotes conspiracy theories and health misinformation.

What Comes Next

I’ve abandoned relying on Google Search. I bookmark high-quality sources directly, go straight to official documentation, search GitHub issues, and use curated communities. Alternatives like Kagi (paid search without ads) and Marginalia (focused on non-commercial content) exist, but the real solution is changing your workflow to route around Google entirely.

The web is still full of good information. Google won’t fix this because their revenue depends on it staying broken. Find better tools, bookmark quality sources, and stop expecting a search engine optimized for advertisers to serve your needs.