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

[dgodon@mastodon.online]

@ocean I suspect it’s not so much that they want to make quality worse, it’s that quality is just very low priority. Not that it matters much. Like other big tech monopolies, they still knowingly do deprioritize quality. I think many employees try to mitigate, but their power is also getting deliberately smashed

[m0xee@nosh0b10.m0xee.net]

@WandererUber@poa.st @ocean@raru.re
Yes, exactly! Even in its inception it was better and same as with search it got worse recently. I used to have a tab with SimplyTranslate open, it was a great tool to access Google Translate — not anymore, with languages I somewhat understand it's barely useful, I might as well use Reverso to translate some words, and with other languages — I'm not even sure the result has anything to do with original text. Even a year ago you could pull an article through it, fix a few sentences here and there and be done with it — it was good enough. Right now I'm giving it a few well-formed sentences in English — not even complex ones where it might get lost, to translate into my native language and… the result is gibberish. It can't handle passive voice at all, it's incorrect tenses, incorrect cases all over the place — this isn't a translation even, this is some word soup! A schoolkid with a dictionary translating word-for-word would do a much better job than this!
The motive? It gives you slightly better results if you use it directly, not via API as SimplyTranslate does — here the motive is obvious, but otherwise… no, same as with search. Do they have ads in Google Translate? I don't know because I have those blocked. Does it give you better results in Google Chrome? I don't know, they might be incentivising me to use it in a way they could serve me more ads or harvest more data. I didn't do a thorough research — just sharing my observation and for me, the way I used to use it, it got noticeably worse.

[toadofsky@mastodon.social]

@ocean What I don't understand is how one can argue that Google is violating antitrust laws while also making itself less competitive.

[nicksilkey@hachyderm.io]

@ocean sufficiently advanced capital extraction is indistinguishable from infinite rent-seeking. every single time

[delroth@mastodon.delroth.net]

@gsuberland @osman @seq @morgunkorn nah it's people jumping to conspiratorial conclusions as usual if you read the source. The email is pretty clear that it's a stupid proposal (of course you can increase queries by making the UX worse) to illustrate that query numbers are a stupid metric ("The nature of how you would easily increase queries is a key reason I don't like queries as an end metric." - can hardly be clearer).

[reconbot@toot.cafe]

@ocean literally the head of advertising got the head of search fired

[mistermaker@fosstodon.org]

@gsuberland @osman @seq @morgunkorn Pretty obvious that they kept the metric that keeps users on their website.
Also logical they are doing this. Now they are tuning it so it's just shit, but not shit enough that users will leave.

Important stuff like web search shouldn't be free.
I'm really eyeballing to get @kagihq it's a bit expensive atm.

[johnoestmannmusic@mastodon.social]

@ocean I was literally just wondering about this. Gemini works amazing compared to search, and so they could get users to embrace AI simply by making search worse

[petrichorsquirrel@meow.social]

@ocean I've noticed that whenever I use google, I instinctively ignore the first 5 results because I know they will not be what I want.

[lazysupper@famichiki.jp]

@ocean
#degoogle

[shadsterling@mastodon.social]

@delve @ocean At least with YouTube you can pay to get it ad-free. Google doesn’t have a way to pay to get actually good search results

[lisa0480@mastodon.social]

@ocean Glad I've already ditched Google in favour of Qwant

[joostvb@mastodon.green]

enshittification explained again

[christianschwaegerl@mastodon.social]

@xepia_ @morgunkorn @realhackhistory @ocean @hjoest thanks

[aryamiller@mastodon.social]

@ocean how to #degoogle? Could you recommend another browser to me? Ths.

[irina@wandering.shop]

@ocean "interact with more ads"? I don't think I've never interacted with any ads except right-click to block them.

[nzlemming@mastodon.nz]

@raktheundead @ocean It appears their "code yellow" has left them in the code brown.

[lacraia@mastodon.social]

@ocean 🤯

[raccoon@hollow.raccoon.quest]

@ocean@raru.re
I'm shocked.
Shicked!
... Well, not that shocked...

[gothodile@furs.social]

@ocean so they did the grocery store thing on a technological level.