Turns out that making Google search unusable was an intentional strategy by the company.

I have a long-running conspiracy theory that Google deliberately makes the UI's of their various services (Android, Google Docs, Youtube etc.) baffling and they hide important features away so that you have to use Google to search how to do things.

You may be interested in this video by Gamers Nexus from about 10 months ago:

"Google is Getting Worse," ft. Wendell of Level1 Techs

https://youtu.be/-vMKm44ypFY

Basically, Google has made their search engine results purposefully worse, so that users need to keep scrolling to find the correct search results, while they feed more ads to users.

Lots of other search engine options.

Kagi seems good.

I'm currently using duckduckgo and it's roughly as good as google search at this point. I remember it being considered a joke when it first launched.

God forbid, bing is also an option.

"Since google doesn't have any real competition" Thankfully those days appear to be behind us. At least partially because of the shit they pulled.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ It has been known for a while

I'm 100% convinced their internal testing is flawed and possibly suffers from confirmation bias. The strategy might work for a couple of years but in the long term they are killing their brand. Once people start migrating to other search engines Google will be beyond rescue.

Guess it's time to start thinking about Android and Chromecast alternatives because when Google becomes desperate they will turn everything they touch into shit.