Is Google search actually getting worse, or does it just feel that way?

Both things are happening. The open web has more low-quality, SEO-tuned content than ever, and Google's page now leads with ads and AI summaries that push real results further down. The feeling is real and has measurable causes.

Why are there so many ads on Google now?

Search ads are Google's core business. As growth pressure increases, more of the top of the page is given to paid placements, which means organic links start lower than they used to.

What is a good alternative to Google search?

Engines like DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage and Bare return clean results without profiling you. Bare in particular shows a plain list of links with no AI summary and no stored history.

Why Google search feels like it's getting worse

You are not imagining it. For a lot of people, searching feels harder than it did a few years ago: more scrolling, more ads, more confident AI text, and fewer of the plain, useful links you actually came for. Here is what is going on, without the conspiracy theories.

The page itself changed

The first thing that changed is what sits at the top. Where you once saw organic links, you now often scroll past sponsored results and an AI-generated summary before reaching anything a human chose for relevance. Each addition is defensible on its own, but stacked together they push the real web further down the page.

The web underneath changed too

Search is only as good as the pages it ranks, and the open web is flooded with content built to win rankings rather than help readers. Recipes buried under life stories, thin articles padded for keywords, near identical pages chasing the same query. Google did not create all of this, but it now has to sort through more of it than ever.

More pages optimized for ranking, fewer written for people.
AI-generated filler competing with genuine sources.
The same handful of big sites crowding out smaller, specific ones.

the honest part

Google is still extraordinarily capable, and for hard, obscure queries it often finds things nothing else can. The frustration is not that it stopped working. It is that the simple act of finding a link now takes more effort than it should.

Where the incentives point

A search engine funded by advertising has a quiet tension at its core. The faster it sends you to the right link, the less time you spend on the page seeing ads. That does not make anyone a villain, but it does explain why the experience tilts toward keeping you on the results page a little longer than you would like.

What you can actually do

You do not have to fix Google. You can route around the parts that wear you out. A simpler engine that returns plain links, with no AI summary on top and no profile of you underneath, removes most of the friction in one move.

That is the idea behind Bare. It shows a list of links and, when it is genuinely confident, a single quick fact with a source attached. No essay, no ad stack to scroll past, no history building in the background. If search has started to feel like work, a barer page is the quickest way to make it feel fast again.