I feel like Google’s search result quality has been steadily declining
With ChatGPT and other AI tools being introduced
Could it be they are de-tuning search intentionally so that people are more likely to be accepting of it's replacement? And I agree with you that search result quality has been dropping, at least for my searches. I can almost instantly find any comment on HN using Google however results for technical articles seem to be harder to find or require digging dozens of search pages into Google.