I'm not surprised. With the cancer that is SEO, removal of advanced search features, and mandatory and aggressive fuzzy matching, Google search has been increasingly broken for years. It is technical-user hostile and arguably even average user hostile at this point.
Today I switched back to ddg after not using it for months, hopefully it's more mature now. This way at least I'm less likely to be tracked. I was tolerant of the privacy issues when the search results were good, because the power behind Google really is phenomenal, they had at one point achieved a truly marvelous technical feat. But now scrolling through two pages of ads on mobile only to find crappy matches from conceptually different synonyms is simply intolerable. I imagine they're using some sort of transformer/encoder and clearly the difficult problem of disambiguation is still not quite solved. We're going to come up on a similar problem soon at the startup I work for, but our domain is limited so it should be easier to constrain, but I digress...
It's a shame to watch Google search gradually ruined by revenue driven features.
Today I switched back to ddg after not using it for months, hopefully it's more mature now. This way at least I'm less likely to be tracked. I was tolerant of the privacy issues when the search results were good, because the power behind Google really is phenomenal, they had at one point achieved a truly marvelous technical feat. But now scrolling through two pages of ads on mobile only to find crappy matches from conceptually different synonyms is simply intolerable. I imagine they're using some sort of transformer/encoder and clearly the difficult problem of disambiguation is still not quite solved. We're going to come up on a similar problem soon at the startup I work for, but our domain is limited so it should be easier to constrain, but I digress...
It's a shame to watch Google search gradually ruined by revenue driven features.