Yeah I feel all search engines have had declining quality for some time now. Not sure if it's unintended consequence of fighting bots. Or unintended consequence of trying to remove some content from the results. I'm assuming it's unintentional.
It's hard to see how removing the ability for the user to be more specific could be a result of fighting bots. That shouldn't have to add anything spammy to the search results, it should only remove things that would otherwise be there.
I have to assume it's something along the lines of, they found that a lot of people would put things in quotes when they didn't actually want an exact match, and so changed what it did to better serve the wider audience. But there is no excuse for doing this without replacing it with some other way to specify exact match for the people who know how to RTFM.
From my experiences nowadays it feels like it's all about pumping SEO positioning with very little actual content you look for.
If I try to look for IT related stuff I'm getting trapped around these obnoxious blogs and "sites" that shamelessly rip off someone else's content.
Then, for a while looking for anything related to Windows was filling top most results with Microsoft forums, with threads that have all these generic "have you tried turning it off and on again" diagnostic solutions.
I feel like this is a big reason for people wanting to using ChatGPT (LLM's in general) for search results.
Search engine quality has declined due to ads/sponsored results and the adversarial nature of SEO driving the signal-to-noise ratio into the ground. So now people are using ChatGPT to lookup the information they'd normally use a search engine for but don't want to wade through the tens of sponsored posts to get to something useful.
The idea of LLM's taking over search is pretty gloomy to me, because it destroys the discoverability of unique information. Sites that have expert information often leads you down the rabbit hole and introduces you to new information. With LLM's you will get 'mean reverted' results and won't be introduced to that information that sparks curiosity.
On the other hand, it's pretty hard to find those nuggets with search engines these days. Years ago, you'd be able to just Google for the answer. Now you have to go to specific sites to search those knowledge bases.
In a recent Google, the first non-ad result was accessible only after scrolling through two pages (phone height) of ads. At least they're marked "Sponsored"...
