Are We Seeing the End of the Googleverse? (theverge.com) 133
The Verge argues we're seeing "the end of the Googleverse. For two decades, Google Search was the invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content.
"Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question... all around us are signs that the era of 'peak Google' is ending or, possibly, already over." There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was. The rise of massive closed algorithmic social networks like Meta's Facebook and Instagram began eating the web in the 2010s. More recently, there's been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users...
Google Reader shut down in 2013, taking with it the last vestiges of the blogosphere. Search inside of Google Groups has repeatedly broken over the years. Blogger still works, but without Google Reader as a hub for aggregating it, most publishers started making native content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and, more recently, TikTok. Discoverability of the open web has suffered. Pinterest has been accused of eating Google Image Search results. And the recent protests over third-party API access at Reddit revealed how popular Google has become as a search engine not for Google's results but for Reddit content. Google's place in the hierarchy of Big Tech is slipping enough that some are even admitting that Apple Maps is worth giving another chance, something unthinkable even a few years ago. On top of it all, OpenAI's massively successful ChatGPT has dragged Google into a race against Microsoft to build a completely different kind of search, one that uses a chatbot interface supported by generative AI.
Their article quotes the founder of the long-ago Google-watching blog, "Google Blogoscoped," who remembers that when Google first came along, "they were ad-free with actually relevant results in a minimalistic kind of design. If we fast-forward to now, it's kind of inverted now. The results are kind of spammy and keyword-built and SEO stuff. And so it might be hard to understand for people looking at Google now how useful it was back then."
The question, of course, is when did it all go wrong? How did a site that captured the imagination of the internet and fundamentally changed the way we communicate turn into a burned-out Walmart at the edge of town? Well, if you ask Anil Dash, it was all the way back in 2003 — when the company turned on its AdSense program. "Prior to 2003-2004, you could have an open comment box on the internet. And nobody would pretty much type in it unless they wanted to leave a comment. No authentication. Nothing. And the reason why was because who the fuck cares what you comment on there. And then instantly, overnight, what happened?" Dash said. "Every single comment thread on the internet was instantly spammed. And it happened overnight...."
As he sees it, Google's advertising tools gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform. From that moment forward, Google cared more about the health of its own network than the health of the wider internet. "At that point it was really clear where the next 20 years were going to go," he said.
"Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question... all around us are signs that the era of 'peak Google' is ending or, possibly, already over." There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was. The rise of massive closed algorithmic social networks like Meta's Facebook and Instagram began eating the web in the 2010s. More recently, there's been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users...
Google Reader shut down in 2013, taking with it the last vestiges of the blogosphere. Search inside of Google Groups has repeatedly broken over the years. Blogger still works, but without Google Reader as a hub for aggregating it, most publishers started making native content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and, more recently, TikTok. Discoverability of the open web has suffered. Pinterest has been accused of eating Google Image Search results. And the recent protests over third-party API access at Reddit revealed how popular Google has become as a search engine not for Google's results but for Reddit content. Google's place in the hierarchy of Big Tech is slipping enough that some are even admitting that Apple Maps is worth giving another chance, something unthinkable even a few years ago. On top of it all, OpenAI's massively successful ChatGPT has dragged Google into a race against Microsoft to build a completely different kind of search, one that uses a chatbot interface supported by generative AI.
Their article quotes the founder of the long-ago Google-watching blog, "Google Blogoscoped," who remembers that when Google first came along, "they were ad-free with actually relevant results in a minimalistic kind of design. If we fast-forward to now, it's kind of inverted now. The results are kind of spammy and keyword-built and SEO stuff. And so it might be hard to understand for people looking at Google now how useful it was back then."
The question, of course, is when did it all go wrong? How did a site that captured the imagination of the internet and fundamentally changed the way we communicate turn into a burned-out Walmart at the edge of town? Well, if you ask Anil Dash, it was all the way back in 2003 — when the company turned on its AdSense program. "Prior to 2003-2004, you could have an open comment box on the internet. And nobody would pretty much type in it unless they wanted to leave a comment. No authentication. Nothing. And the reason why was because who the fuck cares what you comment on there. And then instantly, overnight, what happened?" Dash said. "Every single comment thread on the internet was instantly spammed. And it happened overnight...."
As he sees it, Google's advertising tools gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform. From that moment forward, Google cared more about the health of its own network than the health of the wider internet. "At that point it was really clear where the next 20 years were going to go," he said.
What tripe (Score:1, Flamebait)
>>As he sees it, Google's advertising tools gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform.
So, the money that sustains it is inherently bad?
What is next, asking me to burn my paycheck because getting paid for work devalues me as a human?
imo, google is successful because they produce a superior product _and_ they know how to monetize it. How many times have we seen a superior tech company fail simply because they could not market their product?
That was the ultimate failure of Alt
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Re: What tripe (Score:3)
Even when they made a good "product".... you weren't the customer.
Re:What tripe (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What tripe (Score:5, Interesting)
I still find Google Search to be superior to all the others for the quality of results, but they have been declining everywhere because the Web is changing.
Social media is one problem, but also things like Discord lock information away and make it difficult to search. If you see some software where the support is "join our discord channel" you know it's going to be a pile of crap.
Re:What tripe (Score:5, Interesting)
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What other search engine do you find to be approaching the quality of Google search results? It's certainly not Bing, or Yahoo, or Duck Duck Go, or Brave. All these sites do OK for normal stuff, but if you're looking off the beaten path, it's still Google all the way.
Aggregate Now!!! (was Re:What tripe) (Score:5, Informative)
Use one of the many SearxNG engines. Like:
https://searx.org/ [searx.org]
They aggregate the results of multiple engines, strip out the tracking of Google and the rest, and each user CAN tune what search engines are used. And you can optionally install it locally on your own system.
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As many of us learned when AltaVista was king, more results is not necessarily *better* results.
And company info for SearX is difficult to come by. This page https://tracxn.com/d/companies... [tracxn.com] says that the company is "deadpooled." That's not very encouraging. Can we actually trust them not to track or market our data? How do we know, given that it's basically run anonymously?
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It is not a company. It is Open Source search engine aggregation software. That users can tune.
And if you are concerned about privacy, "roll your own."
In many cases in life, the lack of company backing is a significant advantage.
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In many cases in life, the lack of company backing is a significant advantage.
Only if you know the character of the person you're dealing with.
It's a good thing I'm *not* really worried about Google having my data. Not because I love Google so much, but because I believe privacy is a mirage. No one really has it, no matter what precautions they take. All those users of the An0m phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and EncroChat https://apnews.com/article/enc... [apnews.com] found that out the hard way.
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In many cases in life, the lack of company backing is a significant advantage.
Only if you know the character of the person you're dealing with.
It's a good thing I'm *not* really worried about Google having my data. Not because I love Google so much, but because I believe privacy is a mirage. No one really has it, no matter what precautions they take. All those users of the An0m phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and EncroChat https://apnews.com/article/enc... [apnews.com] found that out the hard way.
The examples you presented were both companies in the form of service providers where users used un-auditible binary code in products that spied upon their subscribers. Which makes my point pretty well.
I have not heard of similar issues with the open source Signal code: https://github.com/signalapp [github.com]
If you have the knowledge you can examine the code or hire someone you trust to do so.
And even with binary only code you can sniff the network the code is running on to see what it is doing and who it is reportin
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You can "audit" Signal code that you yourself install, but you can't audit the code used by others you may communicate with. You don't know the chain of custody of the source code that *they* used, or if it's been compromised in some way.
On the other hand, can you *really* audit Signal code? The Heartbleed bug was lurking in OpenSSL for years before it was discovered and used as an exploit.
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You can "audit" Signal code that you yourself install, but you can't audit the code used by others you may communicate with. You don't know the chain of custody of the source code that *they* used, or if it's been compromised in some way.
On the other hand, can you *really* audit Signal code? The Heartbleed bug was lurking in OpenSSL for years before it was discovered and used as an exploit.
You can audit the code and then create your own binary version to distribute to your group. You could even minorly alter or add an initial handshake to make sure only your audited version was being used in your group's communications. Heartbleed was a typical reuse of uncleared buffered memory bug. It only shows that the code and binaries were not well tested as security components. Also, Heartbleed was found via a code audit:
https://www.smh.com.au/technol... [smh.com.au]
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Heartbleed was introduced into OpenSSL in 2012, and not discovered until 2014. I think you give too much credit to the ability of code reviews to detect serious vulnerabilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
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After reading Kagi's site https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why... [kagi.com], I would agree they offer more search privacy, but they never claim to offer a "better" search. Yes, they offer "personalization" but you have to actively personalize it.
If privacy is your thing, certainly use Kagi. But the moment you click through to a web site, your privacy is out the window. Your IP and all kinds of other information is collected and aggregated and correlated across all the web properties, through advertisers and marketers and G
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While Google search clearly has a lot of life left in it, I would argue that the product is far less superior than it used to me
I'll second that. Google's mandating of infinite scroll for anonymous users as made be stop using it entirely. It's completely useless if the result you're looking for isn't in the first "page" of results. As there's no easy way to keep track of where you are in the results list. Nor any easy way to resume a search on another machine from where you left off.
Sure you can login to google to get some of that functionality back, but not all of it. (Like the privacy of not handing over a known ID. No I don't
Re: What tripe (Score:2)
Alta vista didnâ(TM)t âoelesâ to google, and monetizing search they way it was done led to the entire internet being built around fooling people that search, or organizing the worlds content as a giant QA scam. The fact every little thing you search becomes part of secret dossiers accessed by advertisers or those that can profit in questionable ways is also another bonus. Google has done enormous contributions in many fronts, and while Microsoft has always been extremely profitable at monetiz
Re: What tripe (Score:4, Informative)
I used to do IT for a blood banking/research organization
At some point I read about google grants, reached out to them and got free advertising, along with analytics tools
It was fantastic, and it even helped us identify the source of a hacking attempt from overseas
Training was kind of thin, and you had to teach yourself how to fish
As far as I can tell it is still in place, for nearly two decades now, with an annual valuation of nearly $100k
imo, google does not suck, and the pettiness of the complaints demonstrate how "fringe" this anti-google movement is
Re: What tripe (Score:4, Insightful)
imo, google does not suck, and the pettiness of the complaints demonstrate how "fringe" this anti-google movement is
Like any large corp, some parts of them suck and some don't.
Dupont and Eli Lilly and Dow Chemical all do some good things (like your experience with Google), but they also do some truly terrible things and there's no getting away from that.
In the end, the good they do never seems to outweigh the harm they cause.
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At some point I read about google grants, reached out to them and got free advertising, along with analytics tools
imo, google does not suck, and the pettiness of the complaints demonstrate how "fringe" this anti-google movement is
On the one hand, I admire and respect your honesty.
On the other, claiming that Google doesn't suck and that people claiming otherwise is petty and "fringe", after taking money from them isn't exactly the most convincing statement.....
Re: What tripe (Score:3)
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Re: What tripe (Score:2, Troll)
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I think there's widespread misunderstanding of how ad targeting works. The "dossier" is internal to Google (or Meta, or...). That doesn't get sold. What gets sold is ad views to a broad category of customer. Then Google makes sure that users who fit a given category see the corresponding ads. The advertisers don't get your PII in most cases.
Not certain what misunderstanding there is. I do a lot of research on the intertoobz, and I don't wan't their ads derived from their knowledge of my surfing to show up as ads.
The ads that used to show up were always pointless and bandwidth consuming for things I'd already bought, and Google is also used on some sketchy sites. Any ads shown to me would be just plain weird. SO I block all things Google
By the way - download a good script blocker, and take a trip to the dark side of town. Google is loggi
Re: What tripe (Score:2)
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Certainly use care where you log in, and where you accept cookies.
You aren't kidding. If you want a real kick, install Wireshark, and look at the results.
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The shittification of the internet.
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You are more than welcome to go back to that level playing field that was Gopher for that unstained wonder in ASCII
The heights of human endeavor seem to require some motivation, and in our current society, humans use money for that motivation
If a company is successful in a capitalist manner, in a capitalist society, then change the society and stop wasting time carping about the company, it is irritating and does nothing to reach your goal
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My goal is to have a search engine with useful results and without all of the crap.
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The fundamental problem with your worldview is that people are not rational actors. Companies know this, and when given a choice between making a better product or changing society, they will choose to change society if its the more profitable option, to the detriment of everyone else.
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Corporations have certainly worked to change society in their favor, just look at the the Citizens United case [brennancenter.org]
Incidently, almost every google result that comes up for Citizens United (corporations are people dammit!), leads to a politically active organization that wants your donation to fight the forces of Corporatism
This is not my world view, this is reality
What follows is my word view
Past generations have risen up and fought for level playing fields. In the past this involved unions, and it was a long ha
Re:What tripe (Score:4, Insightful)
You are more than welcome to go back to that level playing field that was Gopher for that unstained wonder in ASCII
The heights of human endeavor seem to require some motivation, and in our current society, humans use money for that motivation
If a company is successful in a capitalist manner, in a capitalist society, then change the society and stop wasting time carping about the company, it is irritating and does nothing to reach your goal
It's a plain black and white world for some people - like you.
Your version of capitalism is bordering on pimping out your daughters, or selling meth for fun and profit. There's money to be made!
Having concerns about Google's surveillance does not make one a socialist or communist. It's just concerns, like people had about companies like Enron or Theranos a scam, and Enron a politically motivated ripoff.
So relax a bit, and don't go about claiming that people wiht a concern are commies.
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Dude, you sure read a lot into what I wrote, and got most of it wrong
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Dude, you sure read a lot into what I wrote, and got most of it wrong
Uh huh. I'm always wrong. Makes you look like a genius.
You're welcome.
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um, thanks
I always enjoy your posts, hope your summer is going well
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um, thanks
I always enjoy your posts, hope your summer is going well
I try. Or is that I'm very trying? 8^)
Re:What tripe (Score:4, Interesting)
I suppose it depends on when you think the "shitification of the Internet" began
From the topics opined so far, it appears to coincide with the monetization, or introduction of grotty capitalism
Gopher was a university project, that along with Archie and Veronica allowed for relatively widespread access to the nascent Internet
After that came Mosaic, and I would even say AltaVista which was not a university project, but a research project by Digital Equipment Corporation
Initially Altavista had a clean interface, and was a superior search engine to it's (monetized) competitors like Magellan or Yahoo!
So, please let me know your list of non-monetized Internet tools that are not x = -infinity
You really are not as smart as you think you are, unfortunately they do not make a pill for Dunning-Kruger
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It coincides with AOL letting their users on the net and those lawyer scumbags spamming USENET.
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It coincides with AOL letting their users on the net and those lawyer scumbags spamming USENET.
That more or less sums it up really.
The arrival of AOL (was Re:What tripe) (Score:2)
I would give the parent points if I currently had them.
The arrival of AOL onto the general internet brought a huge decline in the quality of general information in the 90s.
And that was about the time when I had to start writing anti-spam software...
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I think that's kind of the point the TFS is making with Google. They are ripe for a Google 2.0 to come along an
Re:What tripe (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the money that sustains it. They passed that line long ago.
The old quote isn't, "Money is the root of all evil"
The old quote is, "For the love of money is the root of all evil"
As a google user, sometime in the last 10 years, I realized that money had *corrupted* google search results. They were no longer giving me the answers I wanted. In some cases, egregiously so. During the last few years, even google foo could no longer get me good results.
They no longer produce a superior product. And as a result, I use google less and less. It hasn't been my primary search engine for a few years now and I *do not trust* the results. I have a strong feeling they are *advertising* instead of search results. They produce *actively* bad results.
Because of their love for money. Billions in profit were not enough. They happily butchered the golden goose for 5% more so many times that the goose is dying the death of a thousand cuts.
You see this in many products. Each manager cuts quality by 2% to increase profits by 5%. No one notices a 2% reduction in quality. But after enough iterations, the quality is way down and the customers don't want it and don't trust the company to fix the problem. Everything from microwave ovens, to refrigerators, to dishwashers, to washer dryers last 1/2 to 1/3 as long as they used to last.
Google's excessive greed has seriously damaged their brand.
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>>As he sees it, Google's advertising tools gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform.
So, the money that sustains it is inherently bad?
What is next, asking me to burn my paycheck because getting paid for work devalues me as a human?
Read the story. It isn't specifically about the money. It is that Google transcended from a company that wished to do good, to a company that sells your private information, that introduces products, then strands people by pulling them, to having their primary focus is making money, and anything is is a distant second at best.
Now between you and me, making money is a good thing, and being rich is a good thing. But for better or worse, Google seems to be actively stomping on their moral compass.
But wit
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Support for business accounts is horrific (Score:3, Interesting)
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Are you buying advertising? Because if not, you're not the customer.
If you're trying to make your search results on Google more accurate... they don't care nearly as much. Barely at all, even.
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Corporate entities and organizations that are paying for corporate Google Suite are legally customers in the traditional sense, not just product. I'm sure Google's standard contract for GSuite is thick with disclaimers about the support service level being 0.000001% coverage and response time within 43,800 hours, but nonetheless they are actual customers.
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I doubt Google can manage to support a true paying customer in only 43800 hours.
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And their practice have become so abusive to me that your advertising dollars are *much* less effective at reaching me than they were a decade ago. I don't trust Google to give me reasonable search results. So I'm using them less.
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Trying to look up troubleshooting info on Google for anything that has a price tag is like 1/3rd ads and links to storefronts at a min.
Re: Support for business accounts is horrific (Score:2)
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Large scale support is multi tiered with highly technical people at tier 3 only available if tier 1 & 2 can't resolve.
A few hundred is a lot of potential tier 3.
None of that. (Score:1)
The Verge. Yes and I'm sure they're qualified to opine when they say Facebook is the new resource and up and coming is Tik Tok.
That's likely where they got their entire article from, if not from the 12 year old FB addict next door.
Google - what you need, when you need it.
Yt - A five minute vide on the two CLI commands you could type.
FB - A ten people discussion on that video
TT - A 30 second review of that same discussion. Oh no you din't.
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The Verge
indeed, and of course /. is happy to promote this nonsense for the regular fee.
funny thing is that this crap article is signed by some "Ryan Broderick" who has been publishing on the verge since 2021.
could that be the same "Ryan Broderick" who ... "In June 2020, Broderick was fired from BuzzFeed for direct plagiarism in authored articles spanning over the course of his entire employment as a journalist there." ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
wow, fired from buzzfeed. for plagiarism!!! that's a really low
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And then you find the answer on Reddit from 9 years ago, if you're lucky.
If you think Google is bad... (Score:3)
... try finding what you want on Amazon. There's so much featured Chinese junk on the first few pages that I've just stopped using them. If I want that rubbish I'll go to Alibaba and pay half the price.
At the moment Google usually has what I'm looking for hiding among the featured links on the first two pages. If it gets to the point where the ads exceed the useful content I'll try a different search engine. There's plenty out there.
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Worse, even assuming you're OK with cheap Chinese junk, search results are so far from matching what you typed, that it's pretty much useless.
Today I tried looking for a Toyota remote key fob with remote start. Yeah good luck. It showed lots of key fobs for all kinds of car makes, none of which had remote start. When I found a key fob that worked for Toyota, it offered to show me results "similar to this." Clicking that made the search even less useful, showing all kinds of random car parts, that again didn
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If I want that rubbish I'll go to Alibaba and pay half the price.
Assuming the "seller" doesn't cancel your order and increase the price like what happened with my last aliexpress order, sure.
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I only buy unbreakables from Ali express. Cables, power packs, other random solid objects. Don't buy a crystal vase from Ali and expect to see anything but a pile of broken shards at your door. :-)
Bing (Score:3)
How do people use Bing for fuck's sake?
This search engine completely ignores words in your search query willy-nilly, it often shows results which are 100% unrelated to your request (when nothing is found), how do people even use it when not searching for something terribly trivial?
I've been hearing about Google search' doom and gloom for years, yet no search engine comes even close to it. Yeah, there's ChatGPT4 which is confidently hallucinating and making stuff up. You must always check its answers for correctness or you will be royally fucked up as evidenced by numerous stories even here on /.
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Re: Bing (Score:2)
Me too, although I use Duckduckgo. I see the problems that the parent commenter reported, and the lack of some features, like eliminating some words from the search (the site claims that there is a way to *reduce* the occurrence of a expression in the results, but it doesn't actually work). But that is the trade-off of some privacy.
However, unless I am writing a research paper, Wikipedia is good enough.
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Your experience with Bing is my daily google experience. Wrap words with quotes and they still get ignored.
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And yet it will still ignore those quotes and give you random stuff half the time.
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Fits my experience perfectly, and from now on this will be my go-to description of what is an AI language model: It is a computer program that hallucinates and makes stuff up. Perfect!
Re: Bing (Score:2)
Greedy $ for sure (Score:3)
In the early years (which lasted over a decade) it was always "...and then one day we will aggregate the data and sell targeted ads!" This always sounded suspicious.
I have a client who looked at G Search results for their company - they usually have an ad blocker, but they turned it off. All their competitors were there, buying their company name as an adword. The way the ads look makes it very difficult to tell they are ads. Google's suggested solution is to try to outbid competitors on your own company name.
We spent $1500/month on this. After a year or so, we turned it off. No difference in traffic. All of G's advice, documentation, way of thinking about the web and the Internet, are geared toward the idea of you giving them money, if not right now, then later. This attitude has seeped into the deepest corners of everything they do. Even their explanations of technologies are all tainted.
People, even the people who don't know enough to have an ad blocker, realize that all the G search results are designed to be in the interests of Google only. We all try to eek out our own little bit of value from them, but we know we are in for a a few seconds of pain each time we do a G search, no matter how benign.
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Google bought Applied Semantics in 2003 and Doubleclick in 2007, and then 20 more PII-stealing, I mean online advertising, firms from 2007-2015. Anyone who knew what Doubleclick was and what they did knew what was coming back then - and it has.
When "Don't be evil" died at Google... (Score:2)
... Google died.
"Don't be evil" [wikipedia.org]
What is interesting is that nobody beat google (Score:4, Interesting)
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The fascinating one to me is Google Labs and Google Research, where they hired hundreds of top-level computer people and research PhDs from all over the world, gave them free rein to investigate and create, and got basically nothing out of what is probably hundreds of millions of dollars invested.
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I've wondered about this as well. It might be a couple things. The first is their own commercial income as the GP states, and the second is that they need to run just to stay in place in the battle against all the SEOs also competing for commercial income. Though I'm not so sure they're able to stay in place. I was recently frustrated with a Google search on a technical subject and tried Bing which indeed gave better resul
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Not true. I have a friend who works as a "scientist" for Google. He is paid a salary, and has a discretionary budget for staff/equipment/offices and lab space.
He has come up with several things that they have patented and licensed/sold for many times more than his total cost -each. There is definitely return on investment even if the researchers are not creating things that you see Google using.
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I would even argue that the death of it was core to Google's downfall in the same way that Bell labs deaths brought down ATT.
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If Google is destroying themselves, why do they still have 91% of worldwide market share, with the next closest competitor, Bing, at 3%?
https://gs.statcounter.com/sea... [statcounter.com]
It seems like an interesting definition for "destroying themselves."
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You kind of reinforced my point. If people aren't loyal and can move en masse, but they haven't done so, Google certainly hasn't destroyed themselves (yet). And they aren't sitting still while ChatGPT encroaches on their turf. Bard is nowhere near the quality of ChatGPT, but they are putting a lot of money into it, and it is improving. And when it comes to voice assistants, Google has an advantage, they can (and are working to) incorporate Bard. ChatGPT will have a hard time incorporating Google's other sea
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You said, search is a commodity, that people can easily leave for another product.
So why haven't they left? What keeps them using Google?
I'd suggest they haven't left because there isn't an alternative yet that beats Google.
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OK sure, and what act of destruction is being observed?
The article certainly didn't point to one. It pointed to deterioration or loss of Google Groups, Blogger, and Reader, and Google's inability to play the social media game. We've always known Google wasn't good at social media, and that it's second-tier products were generally short-lived.
So yes, if the "act of destruction" refers to social media or second-tier products, then yes, I grant your point.
But the author seems to be extrapolating these failures
My personal favorite search engine (Score:2)
Example search for my personal hero [slashdot.org]
Video killed the radio star, err A.i. killed the.. (Score:2)
Yes, in short that's what happened.
Google became more and more infested with ADs as prime search results, and you'd search for hours through endless of people trying to sell you something you can easily service and fix yourself, in the heydays of Google you could find relevant info in an instant.
Now A.i. does that, like when you ask a question on ChatGPT (especially version 4), if you don't need data from 2021 and onwards, ChatGPT is an awesome "search" engine in a way, and also narrows down information and
Re: Video killed the radio star, err A.i. killed t (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
And it won't be until they manage to subvert the AI to serve advertising.
It's getting harder (Score:2)
... to find anything useful with the google
It takes a LOT more work to sift through the crap
Useful information still exists, it's just buried under a mountain of crap
Other Problems With Google Search (Score:4, Interesting)
The TFS did not touch on how Google rewrites your search. It deletes terms, and brings up results that do not contain all the terms you searched on without marking it as "term X deleted" (it sometimes does that also, in tiny letter at the bottom) often at the top of your results as "most relevant". I unbundles quoted term sets to bring up lots more irrelevant content. It adds "synonyms" you did not search on. All this is to homogenize the results for some "general public" that does not understand search and Google knows better than you what you want.
For most searching I need to use the semi-hidden advanced search these days (odd that the Google Search page provides no hint that it exists isn't it?). Still has all those featured ads given premium placement though.
Everything on the web has a lifespan (Score:2)
As per the title, for better or worse everything on the web has a lifespan.
Pixel-stained (Score:2)
I am but a pixel-stained techno-peasant. May the Blessed Algorithm favor me in all it's Glory.
It's getting harder (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm frequently searching for things and needing to make sure a word doesn't show up in the results. The old time standard operators for excluding words not only don't work anymore but are now seen as something you are explicitly searching for, not against. Doesn't matter if you use Google or DuckDuckGo, the result is the same. It's adding lots of time to my efforts. I know part of this is because sites game the SEO by including the things you are trying to avoid which would exclude them from the results even if it is exactly what you are looking for but that's not the whole problem.
Idiotic (Score:1)
Google has a history of killing 2nd tier products (Score:2)
The summary describes how Google killed or failed to maintain Groups, Blogger, and Reader. That should surprise no one, they've been killing off second-tier products for years. Remember Google Plus? Here's a nice list... https://killedbygoogle.com/ [killedbygoogle.com]
In the end, Google has certain core products that it depends on: Search, Gmail, Maps, Chrome, Ads, and Docs, plus YouTube. These aren't going anywhere, and aren't really losing market share.
So to say that Google is in decline, is focusing on the wrong products.
htt [statcounter.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: GO WOKE go BROKE (Score:2)