You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago

[peterbrown@mastodon.scot]

@ocean “The study suggests that poor organic search results actually benefit Google's bottom line in two ways: they make paid advertisements more valuable to users seeking accurate information, and they force users to refine their searches multiple times, exposing them to more advertising in the process.”

Aaargh!!

(glad I’ve stopped using Google as a search engine)

[alpha1beta@libretweet.com]

@ocean is there a source on this?

[heptasean@social.tchncs.de]

@Paradox By the way: Never heard of “Harold and the Purple Crayon” before, but https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Harold+and+the+Purple+Crayon%22+PDF results in a PDF with a Hindi translation (including the English original, but black and white without purple) and a PDF with a version with additional graphic explanations for people with disabilities on the first search result page. … which probably is as good as it gets for a work still under copyright.

[heptasean@social.tchncs.de]

@lispi314 You are not only talking about the snippet from *Google's* LLM at the top of the search results, but also about the other results? Haven't had *that* many obviously LLM-generated, but perhaps my interests are just niche enough. @Paradox

[gcvsa@mstdn.plus]

@ocean that's...actually diabolical.

[paradox@raru.re]

@HeptaSean
It's an old kid's book about a boy that explores the world while drawing it all with his crayon.

Thanks. ^_^

[dorothywillson@mastodon.social]

@ocean right

[cassolotl@toot.wales]

@ocean Source: https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search-worse-to-sell-more-ads/

[lispi314@udongein.xyz]

@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.

[mdione@en.osm.town]

@ocean where is this coming from? What's the source?

[anne_delong@musician.social]

@Mikal @ocean

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

#searchengines

[cosmocatalano@mastodon.social]

@ocean this big issue here is that everyone else's search is still worse

[jesterchen@social.tchncs.de]

@ocean Nein!

Doch.

Oh...

[amazing_helenab@mastodon.social]

@ocean

[khleedril@cyberplace.social]

@itamarst @ocean That was back when Google pledged, and did, no evil. Since then they've told us they are going to be evil.

[peteriskrisjanis@toot.lv]

@ocean this is why they have heavily invested in trump 2.0. It just makes cynical business sense.

[m0xee@nosh0b10.m0xee.net]

@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.

[punishmenthurts@autistics.life]

@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?"

[nom@mk.spook.social]

@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.

[elsactivitypub@goto.freakstic.fr]

@ocean so Google search results are bad intentionally

ok, annoying but why not

but then how is DDG even worse