You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago
-
@HeptaSean @Paradox Not the snippet, no. Pages on other domains linked by the search engine results.
There's a certain... meandering meaninglessness to the text with a bunch of huge empty spaces on those sites (thanks adblockers) that's typical.
Oh sure, the meaningless nonsense also used to get written-up by humans before but I don't consider spam to be worth more when written by humans instead of autogenerated. -
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean where is this coming from? What's the source?
-
@ocean
Ha! Knew it!
Not long ago I pointed out to someone that in a way, worse search results meant more time scrolling and ergo more ad impressions, so it wouldn't at all surprise me if they quit bothering to improve.Fuckers. I'd assumed a sort of passive acceptance and laziness had led to degraded quality, but the fact that it was actually designed that way means there should be a "recall" of their product and they need to compensate me for all the wasted time before I finally gave up and went to DDG (which, IMO, has dropped significantly in quality since I started using it
).Thing is, look at ANY online business that makes money off of ad impressions and there is an immediately obvious incentive to find ways to increase your scrolling time on the site. Not all are scummy grifters, of course, but when the incentive is there, someone is going to take advantage of it.
Well, as with other companies, competition and product reviews are needed to link good service to profits. So maybe consumers should change up their search engines.
Here's an article from PC Magazine that compares them:
https://www.pcmag.com/picks/go-beyond-google-best-alternative-search-engines
-
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean this big issue here is that everyone else's search is still worse
-
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose -
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose -
@ocean As predicted by Brin and Page: "we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998 - http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)
-
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean this is why they have heavily invested in trump 2.0. It just makes cynical business sense.
-
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean@raru.re
I wonder if they utilised the same strategy for Google Translate? Because it's equally unusable now — I recall early machine-assisted translation systems from the nineties doing much better job that what Google Translate does now. At times it's hard to figure out what is the meaning of the resulting text even if you speak both languages and know what the usual pitfalls are.
-
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean
.
what about when we don't need, "competition," for a pile of crap and just stop using it since it doesn't work?
.
Is "market share," a joke here? Everybody turns their computers off, because they're fucking useless but they're still winning, "market share?" -
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean@raru.re Can you believe "Buick" was once an innovative company. Then GM bought them. Oh well.
Not that I care much about network software, coz nearly all of it pretty much sucks. But anywayz think of all the companies Google has ruined. If there was a great idea in there- it'd likely get lost. -
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean so Google search results are bad intentionally
ok, annoying but why not
but then how is DDG even worse
-
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean Wendell of Level1Techs spoke about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vMKm44ypFY
-
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean Even better, if you go back to the PageRank paper, they call it out in the appendix, pointing out that advertising definitionally means that you want to provide worse search results to get people to look at the result page again.
-
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean
Now it's possible to move... Duckduckgo gives pretty good results -
@ocean what is the origin of this?
-
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean@raru.re Here’s the source of that image’s text (found with Bing and double quotes).
https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search-worse-to-sell-more-ads/
@seq@infosec.exchange @christianschwaegerl@mastodon.social @alpha1beta@libretweet.com @kuba@toot.kuba-orlik.name
-
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean This strategy was pushed by the cretin that Google hired, after he completely tanked Yahoo's search engine.
-
@roooooland @ocean thanks for this link!
-
@HeptaSean @Paradox Not the snippet, no. Pages on other domains linked by the search engine results.
There's a certain... meandering meaninglessness to the text with a bunch of huge empty spaces on those sites (thanks adblockers) that's typical.
Oh sure, the meaningless nonsense also used to get written-up by humans before but I don't consider spam to be worth more when written by humans instead of autogenerated.@lispi314 I usually search programming, Linux, politics, and science stuff and then strongly prefer sites I know – Wikipedia, StackOverflow, universities, well-known publications, …. That works quite well even without adblocker and is not overrun by LLM-generated garbage up to now.
But I just tested searching "Steak Medium Rare" and you might be right with the language thing. Google's AI summary isn't even that bad as far as I can tell. The first few German articles I get are ad-infested, but the content is at least quite informative. There, of course, is the Wikipedia article on “Doneness”.
But the first English article is just *awful*. Even more ad-infested than the German ones. And it just promises that it *will* tell me how to cook a steak, but *never* actually starts. @Paradox
