I don’t know how much of it is specifically Google making their search engine worse vs the web being flooded with AI generated SEO trash that’s intended to keep you on the page for a few minutes when all you need is a simple one word or one sentence answer.
It’s definitely some mix of both though because I found getting concrete answers a lot simpler a decade or two ago just by using quotes around key phrases in conjunction with what seemed to be actual operator keywords like “OR”. I personally don’t think any of that behaves the same way these days, but I have no concrete proof of this so maybe I’m just imagining things.
Either way, I’m slowly coming to terms with the web portion of the internet being a lost cause as AI, bots, and bad actors infiltrate and abuse more and more of it.
Many years ago I deleted all posts/comments that were listed under my user profile, but hundreds of them still show up when I use a search engine. I even tried going through all of those search results and deleting the comments directly from where they were posted. Doing that makes it look like the comments are being removed; you can even refresh the page and confirm that you don’t see them anymore, but after some time they always come back. I’ve done multiple cycles of trying to delete these comments and they never actually get removed.
Reddit is run by scumbags.