Given the “unfortunately”, I assume that you’re talking about search engines becoming worse rather than product manufacturer sites getting better.

I use Kagi; they’re commercial and don’t do ads, so they don’t have the malware ad stuff. They do have some generative AI feature to try to answer questions directly, but I don’t think that generative AIs are nearly at the point where they’re better than looking at search results, and I can turn that off.

If I weren’t using Kagi…I don’t personally want to create an account with a search engine that doesn’t have a no-log policy. But some people don’t care, and sometimes with an account, you can turn off some features. So for some search engines, I bet that that gets the AI-generated answers out of the way. Google has a lot of hard-to-find parameters that you can insert into your search URL to toggle search functionality without needing an account – in Firefox, by editing your quick search bookmark, and while I don’t know if that includes stuff like AI-generated answers and “featured snippets”, which appears to be the latest thing, I’d guess that Google might have a way to toggle things.

There’s spam – maybe a year back, when I was using Google more, I remember Google really melting under a shit-ton of AI-generated spam sites. I mean, a significant proportion of my searches included not-very-useful-and-sometimes-wrong AI-generated text sites in the top results. Was the first time in a long time that Google was starting to lose to the spammer crowd. I haven’t been using Google much since, but the few times I’ve hit it, I haven’t seen that, so my impression is that they’ve managed to push the spammers back.

In some cases – and I realize that a lot of people just aren’t going to bother with this – the GreaseMonkey addon permits pages to be mutated, and people often write scripts to hide unwanted content.

On the company website side of things getting better, which I assume isn’t what you mean…

Well, the world does appear to have adopted some conventions for navigation. I don’t like all of them, but at least it makes various sites somewhat more predictable.

To find software associated with a product, it’s almost always possible to go to the support section, maybe select your region of the world. Then sometimes you choose a product category, sometimes just search the product catalog directly. For very small companies, sometimes there’s no search, just a list of products. Sometimes the search can be very obnoxious, like requiring one to look up a model number, but that’s in a minority of cases. That will take one to the product page, and then there’s usually some sort of links to firmware and manuals and such. It’s not common these days to require registration to get access to them.

Another downside is that it’s very common for companies to want to have large promotional images and sometimes video on their main page and sometimes product pages. That’s obnoxious if I’m on a slow cell link at the time.

So…it’s not terrible. But a search engine can generally get me to the relevant page in the top results, without needing to traverse the rest of the website.

Finally, while it’s not an issue with Logitech, it’s not always obvious where a company lives. For the US, yeah, it’s usually companyname.com. But that’s not always true. For the UK – and sometimes I buy products from abroad – it’s often in .co.uk. In the US, due to an infamous trademark fight, “nissan.com” is owned by a small auto company who the much-larger auto manufacturer tried to take the domain from. After an acrimonious fight, the small company is now determined that Nissan Motors is never getting the domain, so Nissan Motors is at nissanusa.com. Sometimes companies spin things off or sell divisions; Thinkpad used to be an IBM product line, until it was sold to the Chinese Lenovo. And one of the more-convenient ways to find a company’s domain name is, well…to hit a search engine. Yeah, I know some domains off the top of my head – kernel.org, microsoft.com, apple.com. But for most manufacturers of most products, I don’t. The domain name is still useful, helps me validate that this is an official site. But it’s not necessarily the ideal way to get there. So if you’re potentially already going to hit a search engine to find the company domain, you might as well just jump directly to the product support page.