It may just be me, but I find googles search console surprisingly inaccurate or at least hard to parse. Even the data within it is often conflicting and I'm not sure why the results show as they do. Things like it will show a click through rate for specific pages but have no correlation to the search terms that drove that click, yet show impressions for the page far beyond what it shows for terms. Can't imagine it will be better for something as hard to track as creator tracking cross-platform.
I noticed yesterday that they've managed to make editing the text field on their search page lag and flip/reorder characters entered during the edit: editing “foot pedal” into “foot pedal keyboard” became “foot pedal oardkeyb”
I don’t think google should be held responsible for “breaking” this. It was crazy that one website got to see what i was doing on a second completely unrelated website.
Yep. There was all kinds of data a user could enter into Google search and unknowingly share with a search result site. Sucks for "SEOs", but great for users.
They made search worse on purpose to make more money, then tried to gaslight everyone by blaming SEO. It was getting rather hard to find things with it, I would have to explain to people that search wasn’t always this bad. I have negative sympathy for them.
If they indeed made search worse “on purpose”, there should be plenty of alternatives with better results. I’ve tried about a dozen of them, including paid ones like Kagi, and found the quality of results to be universally worse than Google’s, especially for niche searches where it matters the most.
It takes a huge amount of money to compete with Google in search and all Google has to do to destroy that investment is to dial back the sandbagging. They really did have a moat.
So, artisans, metalworkers, engineers?
Used to be you'd look at your server logs and see referrer headers of google.com/?q=search+terms
Then they broke that (deliberately, well before cross origin header concerns were a thing) so you'd have to sign up for their webmaster tools.