I worry that people in these tech community conversations have socialized themselves into accepting and repeating this narrative and reinterpreting their experiences to align with the consciously adopted narrative. So you just get this vague, lobotomized commentary to the effect that the results are "terrible" without it meaning anything.

I'm personally frustrated with Google as much as anyone else, but I know they are metrics driven and I wonder if, according to a certain metric, Google is nailing it just as much as they ever have been, or perhaps are even more so.

Or they've shifted strategies to optimize for things that give them a high hit rate, perhaps things that leverage their knowledge in maps, or people's desire for extremely recent news. All of the unconscious times that we use !g because we don't trust DuckDuckGo enough to get the right answer.

I don't know what the right answer is here, I think the question "does Google suck" breaks down into several sub questions that get at the essence of what we mean, and certain variations of the question the answer is yes, such as niche discovery or deep dive research, credible long-term commitments to any kind of specific algorithm whatsoever that can help you grow an extinctual relationship with the product, and for certain other questions the answer is no.

So it's not even that I disagree, I just think anytime I see this feeling expressed, it's always reiterating that very vague first pass subjective unprovable version, and it's not breaking down into sub questions.