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I used Google heavily for more than 25 years. I used it well enough to take advantage of AdSense in its early days, so I'm not speaking as a casual user. My experience has been that I used to be able to find obscure information quickly. Now I have to wade through optimized content and sponsored results. Queries that once yielded specific pages now return generic high-authority sites while small independent sites are harder to locate. The amount of irrelevant material has increased, so more time and effort is required to achieve the same result.

That's the subjective part of my answer.

I'm not claiming that my experience proves the case, of course not. I'm saying that my experience led me to suspect that something had changed. The experience is subjective. The underlying question—whether Google Search became less effective at helping users find relevant information efficiently—is objective and testable.

But the broader question isn't subjective. Researchers have documented the rise of SEO-driven content, Google has spent more than a decade issuing updates aimed at combating low-quality and manipulative results, and the search results page itself has evolved from "ten blue links" into a far more commercial and feature-heavy interface. Whether search has become less efficient at helping users find relevant information is an empirical question. My experience suggests the answer is yes.

Search results became increasingly optimized for Google rather than users. This isn't controversial. It's one of the defining developments of the modern web. SEO evolved from helping sites be discoverable into an enormous industry devoted to understanding and exploiting Google's ranking incentives. Researchers have documented this repeatedly.

A recent longitudinal study found that highly ranked pages tended to be more heavily optimized but often judged to be lower quality, concluding that SEO can work against users' perceptions of expertise and quality.

Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines
https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Google itself recognized the problem. The entire history of Google's major updates tells this story.

• Panda (2011) targeted "content farms."
• Penguin (2012) targeted manipulative linking.
• Helpful Content updates targeted low-value content.
• March 2024 updates explicitly claimed they would reduce "low-quality, unoriginal content."

Google has spent over a decade trying to undo problems created by incentives within its own ecosystem.

Google Changes Search Algorithm to Oust Content Farms
https://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-content/google-changes-search-algorithm-to-oust-content-farms-010325.php

The search results page itself changed dramatically. Google used to be "ten blue links." Academic analyses of archived search pages show that the results page evolved into something much more complex: ads, featured snippets, shopping modules, maps, knowledge panels, direct answers, Google-owned verticals, AI summaries.

Researchers describe modern search results pages as "feature-full" interfaces that increasingly provide answers directly rather than simply pointing users to external sites.

The Evolution of Web Search User Interfaces -- An Archaeological Analysis of Google Search Engine Result Pages
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.08613

There is evidence that many users perceive declining quality. Even major newspapers have covered it. The Guardian summarized the debate this way:

"Critics argue that Google increasingly surfaces spam, clutter, and commercially motivated content, while struggling to combat SEO-driven degradation." Importantly, the article also notes that measuring search quality is difficult because results are personalized and constantly changing.

‘Google says I’m a dead physicist’: is the world’s biggest search engine broken?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/20/google-is-the-worlds-biggest-search-engine-broken

The irony is that trying to use Google Search to find objective evidence that Google Search has become worse turns out to be harder than it should be. Twenty years ago, that sentence would have sounded absurd. Today, many people immediately understand what it means.

Google Medical Update: Why Is the Search Engine Decreasing Visibility of Health and Medical Information Websites?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7068473/

Is Google making search worse to sell more ads?
https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search-worse-to-sell-more-ads/

The Continuous Log of Google Search Changes
https://uberall.com/en-us/resources/blog/the-continuous-log-of-google-search-changes

How Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Grew from Nascent Stages to AI
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378633575_How_Search_Engine_Optimization_SEO_Grew_from_Nascent_Stages_to_AI

Study Shows Decline in Google Search Quality and Reveals Path for Generative AI Adoption
https://synthedia.substack.com/p/study-shows-decline-in-google-search

That is the objective part of my answer.