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

[mark@mastodon.fixermark.com]

@msbellows @ocean It's a hypothesis, but I don't think the evidence supports the hypothesis. It ignores the fundamental idea that if Bing offers better search results than Google, people will stop using Google.

[msbellows@c.im]

@mark @ocean Except Betamax was better than VHS, and there's no good reason why we're not all carrying phones by Palm Pilot. The point isn't that Google is the best search service; It's that they've achieved such market dominance that they can still get away with being profitably bad.

[mcslibinas@mastodon.social]

@StellaFoxxie @ocean search in aliexpress is a good example of AI nightmare site. Search not working, descriptions is just bad poetry, the key features are hidden.
Oh, also things are made crappy just to sell on that crap site, like multimode flashlights. No one use multimode, everyone hates it, yet there all of them are like that
Crap site grows crap items.

[mark@mastodon.fixermark.com]

@msbellows @ocean I always have to smile a little when I hear Betamax was better than VHS because my family owned both.

Picture quality: not noticeably better on the TVs of the time, which sucked.

Hardware fidelity: Betamax tapes could melt to the read drum, ruining the machine and requiring a significant rebuild. My dad's Beta player melted down twice in the years he owned it. Never had that problem with VHS.

Not the point though, because I can't think of anything about Bing that would be the equivalent to melting tape to the read drum.

(Also, I owned Palm Pilots. The batteries killed them; two or three generations of them with unreliable power was enough to sour the platform).

[feedmd@mastodon.social]

@ocean That’s why I’m paying kagi 5 a month. I get results. No ads. Cheers

[rez@defcon.social]

@ocean @kagihq is worth the money

[fishidwardrobe@mastodon.me.uk]

@ocean the weird part of this is: they do have actual competition. Other search engines exist.

[lillyfinch@mstdn.social]

@ocean I hate google

[freetar@freesoftwareextremist.com]

@ocean
It became unusable since it demands the execution of proprietary malware. While you can elude this requirement, it is advisable to use 4get to access this and other search engines.

[gsuberland@chaos.social]

@osman @seq @morgunkorn hmm. the first email floats the idea of reducing search quality to get more queries, with a caveat of being uncomfortable about it. the rest looks like the results of projects and efforts that were ongoing at the time. am I missing a detail in that email chain that demonstrates that they actually followed through? don't get me wrong, it's gross that they even floated the idea, but if this is intended to be evidentiary proof of committal then I'm not seeing a smoking gun.

[powerpath@mastodon.social]

@CatsWhoCode @ocean @aetios

ddg.co !

[gsuberland@chaos.social]

@osman @seq @morgunkorn obviously we all anecdotally feel like the search quality dropped, and their email discussion is at least circumstantially suggestive of intent, but I would feel better if I knew what the specific evidentiary purpose of the document was.

[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