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

I remember when just 'browsing' the internet (google) was a pass time. Like you could just search random things into google and find something interesting or novel. The earliest iterations of google basically functioned exactly how you'd want a search engine to and needed zero improvement. we really do live in a fucked world where a technology or service can be perfected but inevitably made worse over time to the benefit of no one but the top
- Yeah, now it's all SEO and AI slop. At least Yandex helps you with pirating shit lmao
  
  AI is especially bad because as useful as it can be what happens when it's just wrong information? I hate when lies are presented as fact
- Google has also become extremely censored, like to an absurd degree. Search anything on a remotely political current topic and all you will get is pure propaganda from western media, governments and think tanks. It is virtually impossible to find anything else. They just won't show it to you. You have to use Yandex.
  
  That's if you get anything at all. A lot of my searches return no results on Google or derivatives, so I have to use Bing, Yandex, or others instead.
  They do return a large number of results on all of those.
- 15 years ago i could type a half remembered thought into google and find exactly what I wanted to find and it got 20% worse every year from then until now
  
  Even up until 2016 or 2018 search was pretty good. By destroying it, they also teach new generations that we don't know how to make good search. It's going to become on of those things we forget how to do. As you said you could find anything in a few minutes at most. Now they even change your query to give you different results.
- You're right :( as a kid I could type 'vampires' on Google and get a bunch of cool html 3 websites from random people who also liked vampires and wanted to talk about them on their websites dedicated to the topic. It didn't even matter if the information was false it was just fun seeing new websites. This was before twilight, fandoms etc. It was just people talking about something they liked. They might even make the website black and red and play some music on it to put you in the mood.
  Now type the same word on Google and you get wikipedia, britannica, news media (BBC, Nat Geo etc), IMDB because there's a movie etc. You know, just in case you're the one person in the world who knows how to use Google but not Wikipedia.
  And that's when Google doesn't outright change your query for something else. At least lenmygrad brings back some of this.
  
  SEO society and it's consequences
- Ah yes, the early days of google. Back when you could easily find.... Porn.... Of anything. Of everything. Everything was porn.

The "I love capitalism because it makes consumer products and tools more efficient, useful, and affordable" crowd is going to have a hard time explaining this one.
- "just vote with your wallet and use ~~chrome~~ ~~edge~~ firefox! can't do that in communism!"
- one time i told some redditor classmate of mine that the soviet union invented the mobile phone and he immediately went "but the americans did it better!!!" and pointed to his iphone
  fuck my life
  
  The goal post basically never stops moving on that one. "Commies can't innovate!" points out that they do "Yeah well not as good as Usonia!" and the one up they offer is a shitty consumerist product designed to break in two years so you buy the next model, but I can play fucking flappy bird on it or something.

Reminds me of how they shut down the incredibly successful Vine (short form video) because they figured they’d make more money with Periscope (very long form video). Despite literally nobody wanting it.
These tech bros live in a deluded bubble with no understanding on what average people want.
- Hilarious it was immediately replaced by TikTok. The niche was there and was on the verge of blowing up, but they thought short videos weren't wanted.
  
  That’s the ironic part, ByteDance was developing a clone of Vine as they saw that was the future, they had developed a killer algorithm and bought another Vine clone Music.ly for cheap to rebrand as Douyin (or TikTok internationally).
  Mind you, Vine made money, it’s just that Twitter refused to pay content creators, they saw people posted for free on Twitter and were looking for ways to convince people to make profit without paying. On numerous instances, groups of creators demanded to be compensated on Vine and even Periscope, or they’ll leave and Twitter told them to go fuck themselves.

I really wonder what goes through the heads of people designing these awful experiences when they do so and how nihilistic you have be be in experiment review just view the world in pure metrics and sign off.
- They're thinking "my boss is gonna be impressed when they see this."
  
  And we know how Google works internally. Employees have to prove themselves worthy of being promoted by their bosses and to do that they have to submit projects. This is why they do seemingly senseless changes like the YouTube UI that seems to change every 6 months, or completely redoing an experience that worked just fine and making you relearn it. If they didn't, they'd have nothing to show their bosses and they would get fired - this is documented.
  You can do super important maintenance stuff but that's not what they like to see because it's not showy enough, so you redo the UI with round instead of square corners and also add a bunch of metrics to the new UI to track how people use it and then they can pull some stats that looks good when they type the report out, and hopefully not get sacked at their next review. Employees are always looking for stuff like that to do because of this system.
  Its a bunch of bullshit upon bullshit just to satisfy each other's need for bullshit.
  Im glad that on prolewiki at least we design for the reader and nothing else, and I think it shows.
- The feeling that your job is shit, since your manager is pushing that shit feature to appease the corporate execs who don't care about your personal opinion, but you have to do it because it pays your bills, and your family depends on you. At least until you find another job with decent pay.
  We live in capitalism, so we workers are alienated from the products of our labor.
  
  Yobs that pay better than Google are not that easy to come by, especially these days.
- They are thinking about how superior they see themselves to everyone else because they love the taste of their masters boots.

Profit over functionality aside, one thing that can make Google slightly more tolerable is to switch it into "web search" mode. This strips away all the AI crap, sponsored links, etc. apparently there are ways you can set it to be the default. I find I use Google less and less anyway, but it's a good option when the first page is useless garbage.
The number of times the Google AI summary has either outright lied or given me some horrible hallucinated approximation of an answer is disgusting. Asking it anything remotely complicated, technical, or uncommonly searched gives the most egregious results. It's to the point that I question anything it says, which means it's truely useless. At best, I read a few lines, see if the information seems relevant, then I click on its source links, often to find that the information stated just isn't at those links.
- I find I have a better time just using other search engines.
- Startpage.com is pretty much old school Google search.

I have no love for google, but this can easily be misinterpreted. Within the screenshot, there are two mentions about studies. The first one refers to Google's internal studies that were disclosed to the courts, and the second one refers to an independent study from WalletHub. By cropping the text in this way it is easy for someone to conclude that the referenced study in the final paragraph is Google's internal study (at least that is how I read it), but it is not.
The antitrust case claims about the internal studies are found in page 48 of 1:20-cv-03010-APM.
Here is the screenshot:
The source documents can be found in the trial exhibits. Unfortunately, the specific internal tests are referenced as UPX1082, and this document does not appear to publicly released.
One can look at this combined information and reach the conclusion that Google is actively decreasing the quality of results to keep users longer. But it is still that, forming an opinion based on some available evidence, not a proven assertion.
- There are plenty of emails showing their intention to make search worse for $$$. Ed Zitron wrote on this topic: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
  
  I appreciate the added context, thanks.
  I am not claiming that Google is or isn't doing this. I made my comment because from the title and the text in the image I built an initial impression which was refuted when I looked further into it.
  Critical examination of this post is not about answering "Is Google making search results worse on purpose?", but actually a much less ambitious question: does the sourced article provide strong enough evidence to support the assertion "Turns out that making Google search unusable was an intentional strategy by the company"? I don't think so, so I made a comment.

Did something happen?
- I think there's new disclosure cause of the antitrust case.