You have probably realized, like me, that Google is getting worse and worse as a useful search engine. The one who pays the most is visible at the top and today you have to scroll down quite a bit to get hits that are not sponsored. That is, companies have paid to be seen against the keywords you enter. If you as a company do not buy your keywords yourself, for example the company name, your competitor will surely do so. But before the list of sponsored search hits, you now have Google’s own list of buy links to go through. And maybe a bunch of Youtube videos.
Trying to find travel tips is the absolute worst, I think. When I want answers from travelers who have blogged or signed off on various forums, I instead get an endless list of company offers. Often irrelevant landing pages that do nothing if I happen to click. Googling “cheap hotel Crete” is, for example, completely useless.
But even if I seek help where there are not as strong commercial interests, it is difficult to find the right one. As, for example, tips on a specific point in Photoshop. Here it is seo (keyword optimization) that totally screws it up. Namely, Google prioritizes old pages that have been around for a long time, over fresh material. And I don’t want Photoshop tips from 2012… Here it is required every time that I go under tools and refine the search. But as a user, fresh content should be rewarded higher, right?
Recently I started paying for the Chat GPT 4 service and a new world has opened up. Not only because I can upload documents and get help interpreting texts and create my own virtual assistant. But also because I can get help searching and sifting through the web. Here, for example, it is easy to just write, in plain Swedish, that I want help with travel tips from forums where users themselves share what I want to find. And what I want to sort out.
If I write that I want accommodation tips from users on various forums, with links to the source, then I get it. If I specify that I only want direct links to the hotels, without intermediaries? No problem. The answers aren’t always 100% accurate, but it’s so much nicer not to sift through all the irrelevant junk around.
Google is digging itself into a hole and I don’t think I’m alone in looking for alternatives.
