Google Search Results are Increasingly Disappointing as AI Results Are Pushed

My professional career and this website (first published in 1999) have grown up through the entire Google adventure. From the upstart clean search page that offered no distractions and good results, compared to the Excite@Home and AltaVista pages of the day, to the modern day corporate silicon valley behemoth. I well remember when my RoboGen shareware hit page rank 9! And inbound results have allowed this company to grow to where it is and have fed my family and paid many others who have worked here for a time.

I also use search engines professionally in my daily work: researching security issues, working through code, and figuring out obscure error messages. It has been hard to put words to it, but the results have increasingly become “meh” in my experience, well beyond the normal SEO spam that has always been with us.

On his blog, Andrew Stephens put his finger on the pulse of what in part seems to be happening with “Yo Google, Thanks For The AI Overview But Your Search Sucks Now” (sheep.horse, 2025). I think he has identified a cause in his observation that “the improvements to the AI Overview seem to be at the expense of Google’s search results.”

I dislike AI results because they are slow, and I feel I have to be on guard to scrutinize every aspect lest I be fooled by the latest hallucination. It is exhausting. And as Andrew observed, the other natural results are getting worse.

Can Google turn this around and become actually good again, or is Doctorow correct and enshittification is inevitable here too?

In the mean time, as a search user, finding the content I want is becoming much harder. As a business, it seems Google is increasingly changing the rules of the game and sending fewer readers to independent websites than ever before.

If I may add, as a point of privilege, this Tuesday marked the 20th anniversary of this blog! I look forward to the next 20 years of sharing useful technical content with you.