This is absolutely not my experience. My googlefu has gone to shit. I can no longer have some sense for what I’m looking for and find it. Something I know exists, I just don’t know the terms of art to pull up the wealth of knowledge. I used to be able to do a half dozen searches, and finally on page 4 or 5 finally find some clues as to the terms I need. Now, there is no page 4… like ever. Clearly not many people were going past page 3 so they stopped serving that content.

Now I use chatgpt for these kinds of queries, and it feels like using google circa 2004.

I know this is a small edge case, and ultimately I need to use google to crosscheck, but it hints at the rot that has taken over at google, and represents a potential shift. If I could get good reference links from chatgpt, I may be able to stop using google for an increasing number of my queries.