Google Experiments with Restricting Results Per Page

"The first time we noticed some inconsistencies dates back to early 2023."

At least the blog acknowledges this reduction in results is not new. It has become common with many www "search engines" (cf. website search engines)

This has been going on for years. Google was one of the few that still returned a decent number of results like 100, but it has actively tried to prevent searchers not using Javascript and cookies from going deep into SERPs, i.e., beyond pages 1, 2, ...

There has also been a change in the restriction requiring Javascript as of several days ago, some user-agent strings that previously worked are no longer working

Time to move away from Google search I guess

"So are there any positives in this change?"

Evolutionary pressure to use alternative sources

Years ago I saw this ruin of www search coming and developed command line meta-search with temporally separated "continuation searches" to overcome the SERP limits and avoid CAPTCHAs

TBH, it is much nicer using older search methods that still have a reasonable selection of operators, including exact match, and do not have the auto-correct, query second guessing,^1 self-promotion and "AI" garbage that Google has introduced over the years

1. Only the searcher truly knows what they are looking for (and that is not always represented in the query or in past behaviour of the searcher or other searchers), but Google is driven by _advertisers_ that want to steer searchers to particular results, and so Google attempts to guess what searchers want. But in the end this is what advertisers want, not what searchers want