The other day, I was searching for something, and google's suggested, on-site answers took up 1/2 the first page. All wrong.

The actual search results were another 1/4 page of completely identical results, followed by google ad placed search results.

I thought to myself, they've finally done it. Real responses are no longer first page.

A lot of the cause for google getting crappy, is "ok google", another "all platforms are the same" form of sickness.

No, a desktop is not a phone. No, voice searching is not the same as phone, or desktop.

I was just thinking that they finally became Lycos. It's what all the search engines except Google looked like back in the early 2000s - ad laden cesspools of irrelevant search results and other content. And it's why we all switched to Google at the time.

It's time to disrupt the market. As Google can't compete with a newcomer that penalize ads on page.

Seriously, yes.

Moores law means a modern day 2007-style Google should be significantly less expensive to run now than back then.

Also the most relevant patents are now free to use.

2021 Google is a sad story compared to 2007 Google and I'd actually pay to get back 2007 Google - ads included - meaning a double revenue source :-)

Wacky idea: instead of Google changing it's algorithm every couple of years, it could run 50 algorithms in parallel leaving no way for sites to "optimise" for the current one.

The output of the parallelism is itself an algorithm, that can and will be optimized for.

You're absolutely correct, and a lot came from their nerfing of search modifiers like + - "search term" and whatnot. There's also a lot of ads and "PSA" type nonsense. If I'm looking for anything COVID related for example, I have to sift through a heap of PSA nonsense that's not even related to my search query.