Yeah, you're not the only one to notice this. Cory Doctorow wrote a long post on it just earlier today: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/05/absentee-landlord/

We're increasingly in a post-Google-Search world. Pay for Kagi or use an LLM. Honestly, I find that Sol-5.6-Medium returns much better results than Google, and it's quicker because it sorts them for you.

"We all know how horrible Google search has become."

Say thank you to all the commercial rubbish out there, generic spam, AI agents/chats spawning dozens to hundreds of Google Search requests on every prompt, and on top of that the SerpApi leeches and others.

Shooting the messenger is easy, and gaining attention on the back of Google is certainly still working.

Although it is netizens' fault that search can't find anything sensible in this amount of trash, and that everybody's overflowing search engines with loads of useless requests.

I nearly always use DDG in noai mode. A couple of hours ago I failed to find information about the origin of 'click piano' - a setting on my electronic piano - so I decided to try Google Search, only to be hit with the "click here to prove you are a human" then the "select the boxes containing a ... to prove you are a human".

I closed the window rather than waste my time more, which is my increasingly common response to CAPTCHAs.

I'm also seeing issues with Google Scholar. A few days ago I was at the local college library to look up some papers. The same Google Scholar search on the library terminal, reloaded, would bring up anywhere between 3 and 17 citations. I also got CAPTCHA'd on Google Scholar, only to find the CAPTCHA triggered the library terminal's URL filters, which prevents anyone from actually doing the CAPTCHA.

I showed it to the librarians. They had not seen it before. It is, after all, between sessions. The fall term starts soon. I wonder what will happen.