In my opinion, Google is getting worse constantly, which boils down to basically the following aspects for me:
1. I don’t like the UI anymore. I preferred the condensed view, with more information and less whitespace.
2. Popping up some kind of menu when you return from a search results page shifts down the rest of the items resulting in me clicking search links I am not interested in.
3. It tries to be smarter than me, which it fails in understanding what I am searching for. And by “understanding” I basically mean to honor what I typed and not replacing it with other words.
I try to use DDG more often but Google gives me the best results most of the time if I put in more time.
Yeah, number 3 really pisses me off recently. If I type in 3 words I would like to search by those 3 words. What ends up happening is Google just decides that it's too much of a hassle or that I've made a mistake and just searches using 2. So now I have to input all the words in quotes so that it works like it supposed to in the first place.
This functionallity literaly never helped me during search. Not once.
You don't even seem to be able to simply get the URL of a search result any more: some hierarchical token thing is used instead to display each search result's address, and copying any link just gives you:
Everything that you're looking for is (fortunately) still in the HTML source code. When Google started messing with the URLs I wrote a filter for my MITM proxy to put them back. Then it recently changed the format so I had to change the filter again. It's annoying for sure.
1. I don’t like the UI anymore. I preferred the condensed view, with more information and less whitespace.
2. Popping up some kind of menu when you return from a search results page shifts down the rest of the items resulting in me clicking search links I am not interested in.
3. It tries to be smarter than me, which it fails in understanding what I am searching for. And by “understanding” I basically mean to honor what I typed and not replacing it with other words.
I try to use DDG more often but Google gives me the best results most of the time if I put in more time.