Do they want us to be dumb and stupid?

Well duh 😁

This has been going on a lot longer than 2016. I reckon that we hit peak Google about 2010 or 2012, and its been downhill since then. Other search engines like DuckDuckGo, Yandex or StartPage may be better for some searches, and worse for others.

First, Google started bubbling and curating your search results, to make them more "relevant". That makes it harder to find anything that doesn't already match what you have already seen, and means that when you and I search for the same terms, we'll probably see different results.

Then they tried to "improve" their search results so that most people would get a hit in the first one or two results. That means that search results are promoted up the ranks if they are popular, not whether or not they are accurate, useful or match your search terms.

If Google knows that people who search for (let's say) "biscuit" also search for "cookie", when you search for biscuit they will give you hits for cookie as well. That's all fine and well when they get it right, but when they do it for search terms that are less obviously synonyms, it means you often get heaps of irrelevant junk.

Then they crippled or outright removed functionality from their advanced interface. Asking to exclude words with -word or insisting that the word actually is present with +word simply doesn't work any more -- it might change the search results, but it won't do what you want it to do. Excluding a word doesn't exclude it. Requiring a word doesn't require it.

My guess is that this dumbing down and crippling of functionality probably happened by accident; as the Google algorithm got more complicated and "smarter", the ability to exclude or include terms got less and less effective until today it barely does anything. That makes it really, really hard to find an obscure website even if you know exactly a key phrase on that site. Google just doesn't do exact matches any more, it would rather give you 200 wrong results (including many ads) than one right result.

And that's really why it all happened: we're the product that Google sells to advertisers, and so they have no incentive to make searching good for us. It has to be good for advertisers, Google's actual customers.

And then 2016 happened and the IT companies weaponized all of this for political purposes. And then 2022 happened, and they deliberately started censoring sites that don't toe the American/globalist neoliberal world view, because heaven forbid anyone might find out what Russians actually think about the Ukraine war instead of getting it fed to us through pro-USA anti-Russia propaganda 🙄

Which reminds me... one of the big reasons that the search engines can do this is that they were forced by (mostly) the American government to invent a way to censor piracy websites.