Last night my son was reading a Marvel comic based upon the Knights of the Round Table, which reminded me of a Sega Arcade game from the 90s. I decided to look it up:

My search text was “knights sega arcade game”

Google gives me back “Nights into Dreams” which is a Sega Saturn game. The correct game “Knights of the Round” is the second or third result, but note also the text at the top of the search:

Did you mean nights sega arcade game

Well, no. I didn’t. I put in the word “knights”. Also it’s not an arcade game.

I’ve been seeing this again and again when searching technical articles, but it’s harder to explain why the results are wrong. This particular search made it easy to demonstrate how much Google Search has been hit by enshitification. This is what Bing returns which is exactly what I expected:

If I put “knights” in double quotes on Google I get the correct results, but I’m not going to put everything in my search in double quotes, so I get the results I expect.

So, I’m switching to Bing by way of DuckDuckGo. It’s frustrating it’s come to this, but Google Search is fundamentally broken.