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

[em_and_future_cats@mastodon.social]

@ocean
I learned about this strategy back in the early 2010’s which has made me more deliberate when I put in any searches. At the time I was shocked (I was a teenager then)but I quickly learned how to work around the system. I remember when searching had to be only a couple words at most to work, but now you can use whole phrases, this helps a lot with being more specific about what I want. But yes, it’s sad it’s a marketing strategy to keep people searching instead of “finding what you want”

[legion495@mk.absturztau.be]

@ocean@raru.re I gave up on Google Search like 2 years ago.
I am not surprised.

Still fond of the memories when you immediately found what you looked for.

[postie@possum.city]

@ocean@raru.re
if anyone else wanted to read the rest of the artaicle, the screenshot is from the following article:
https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search-worse-to-sell-more-ads/

[mattesilver@101010.pl]

@em_and_future_cats @ocean

next up, selling people more medicine is better for big pharma than actually curing people

[aperture@snug.moe]

@christianschwaegerl @ocean @hjoest www.google.com/search?q=%22The%20recent%20court%20documents%20showed%20that%20Google%27s%20internal%20testing%20demonstrated%20that%20significantly%20worse%20search%20results%20would%20not%20harm%20their%20business%20operations.%20This%20apparent%20immunity%20to%20quality%20concerns%20stems%20from%20the%20company%27s%20dominant%20market%20position%2C%20which%20the%20recent%20federal%20court%20ruling%20addressed.%22

- carrie

[heptasean@social.tchncs.de]

@Paradox @ocean Same! I *can* somehow tell it getting less good over the years – some paid results to ignore here, some only seldomly helpful AI result there, … – but all in all it is still useful enough for me to this day. Do I include enough keywords in my searches? Do I only research topics that are not *that* prone to bad results? Don't know. ‍️

(It's not always on the first page, though. I tend to ignore quite a lot of results based on the preview.)

[mikal@sfba.social]

@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.

[jazzy_butts@gameliberty.club]

@ocean Bullshit it benefits their bottom fucking line I've switched to Yandex.

[jake2@kolektiva.social]

@ocean i fucking knew it

[cowman@nfld.me]

@ocean this is the core problem with metrics that target 'engagement', and things like A/B testing that enable it.

[alkaris@meow.social]

@ocean I knew Google Search was so bad long before this document proves it, because I could no longer search for certain things on the Internet anymore, you'd have to use special tags just to find things, its also the reason I stopped using Google for searches because it's just so unusable

[lispi314@udongein.xyz]

@Paradox @ocean Even just looking for straightforward cooking instructions leads to LLM vomit being the first few results on Google.

(It's somewhat better if one searches for recipes in other languages than English.)

Not exactly what I'd consider niche.

[tvaughan@mastodon.social]

@ocean Capitalism does not allocate resources efficiently.

[xepia_@social.bau-ha.us]

@morgunkorn
Yup.
https://archive.is/HoB1U

@realhackhistory @ocean @hjoest @christianschwaegerl

[paradox@raru.re]

@lispi314
Llm is always the first thing tried. You can ignore it.

[lispi314@udongein.xyz]

@prisixia @Stellar @ocean Publisher corposcum did their utmost to make it impossible for libraries to have practical malware-free access to ebooks through libraries.

Borrowing the book to scan by oneself and digitize it is onerous and tedious.

[lispi314@udongein.xyz]

@Paradox It seriously covers multiple pages at this point on the worst search-engines.

Any topic that /isn't/ particularly niche suffers from it more.

[darwinwoodka@mastodon.social]

@ocean

duckduckgo ftw

[darwinwoodka@mastodon.social]

@svenjacobs @ocean

duckduckgo

[galamadryade@piaille.fr]

@ocean That's why I now use duckduckgo. SO MUCH BETTER.