The change to google becoming an entire new AI response thing that completely destroys its prior function and everything connected to it just reminds me of when Deviantart rolled out its major Eclipse update and overhauled its entire search function
Devart's original art categories were arbitrary at best and weirdly hyperspecific and unnecessary at worst, but for the most part you'd get things in the right place to be able to search for them. i.e. you'd find art tutorials in the art tutorials and resources category.
The update overhauled the search to be keyword based, an update that was not retroactive for the millions of already-uploaded art, often by people who were no longer active. They didn't repurpose those categories to include them as tags by default to the art that was in them; they just severed them and left them behind.
So now you go to search for a tutorial, but there's no tags associated with any of the old resources. It could find relevant searches, but only if they said the right words in the title or description, which wasn't always.
Years and YEARS of art and resources, references, the ability to easily access a huge scope of inspirational pieces and collect visual libraries, suddenly destroyed. The wider sense of community was suddenly choked down to a pinhole scope of who you follow and what shows up in popular. On top of that, I recall a statement that their algorithm would try and push low view pieces to the forefront, so there was no middle ground between the popular and very unpopular.
I remember trying to look up clover references, so I searched clover. Prior to the update it would have given me photography and stock images in abundance, interspersed with art, and I could further limit my field to be ONLY photography or stock images.
This time around: it gave me Clover, the character from Totally Spies, specifically involved in inflation art, because that's what the algorithm decided to push at me since it wasn't massively popular and it clearly needed more attention. I couldn't narrow my search, because the references I wanted were old and thus had no keywords. Mass-uploaded photos by amateurs and professionals alike often just had numbers for a title. There was no way out. It was just me against the Clover inflation art.
Google is doing the same: turning its entire function as a resource into a slurry that channels down into one single process that isn't what anyone asked for. There's no scope, no way to filter what is and isn't relevant to what you want, no way to pick and choose between a huge range of results, and thus it's losing its entire purpose. It's just kind of sad.
