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

[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

[jackracc@furry.engineer]

@ocean Wendell of Level1Techs spoke about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vMKm44ypFY

[jcolag@mastodon.social]

@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.

[lep0le@piaille.fr]

@ocean
Now it's possible to move... Duckduckgo gives pretty good results

[furby@towns.gay]

@ocean what is the origin of this?

[thatwouldbetelling@shitposter.world]

@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

[teeceegee@mastodon.nz]

@ocean This strategy was pushed by the cretin that Google hired, after he completely tanked Yahoo's search engine.

[anildash@me.dm]

@roooooland @ocean thanks for this link!