At a recent all-hands meeting, Google search head Prabhakar Raghavan told employees that the world is changing and they have to adjust.
Things definitely changed. 15-20 years ago you actually got good search results instead of unusable crap we get today.
OTOH 20 years ago half of the sites on the internet were not yet made of copy-pasta SEO optimized copies or stolen content designed to get search engine clicks. Maybe the enshitification of the web itself has something to do with it.
I remember it already was, but everybody knew it was, so search engines were the brute force approach. The intelligent way was to use web directories and to ask friends.
The enshittification of the web is just one aspect of the enshittification of humanity.
True their competition is actually getting much better whereas they just throw BS at you nowadays. It’s unfortunate but Google is no longer my go-to for searching.
The issue is that there are 1000 spam sites heavily optimized specifically to exploit Google’s algorithm for every legitimate site. Merely by not being the primary focus of SEO, alternatives have a pretty hefty advantage.
I was getting decent results up until about a month ago (though partly because I have an extension to block sponsored links and arranges the page as it used to appear around 2010). It was like they just flipped a switch from “good” to “shitty.” Can’t even find images I would grab off the first page when repeating a search from history, now. It seemed to correlate almost exactly with when it started to generate blurbs through AI at the top instead of just summarizing one of the pages in the top links.
i wonder what will replace it… maybe some way of AI to figure out which websites are deemed good in the eyes of actual human users, and then human users opting into sharing such score charts with each other?
Gen AI is a net negative for the moment, since the deluge of generated low-quality content outweighs convenience of topical results generated by LLMs with natural language queries.
Used to get about 200+ pages of search results. Now it’s about 30 actual results and half of them are fake / malicious / useless. Google as a company was once an innovator, but is now mostly a barrier to any kind of progress or improvement.
Wearing a hoodie with the words “We use Math” on the front, Google search boss Prabhakar Raghavan had an important message for employees at an all-hands meeting last month. But he first wanted them to settle in and get comfortable.
…
Raghavan said Google’s digital ad business had become “the envy of the world.” He noted that over the last three years, annual revenue has grown by more than $100 billion, exceeding Starbucks, Mazda and TikTok combined.
Does this mean you’ll be using math to pay them more for producing more? (have to add /s)
I feel like anyone who envies an advertising business should probably be avoided, lol
Mazda is such a weird name to drop there. They must have started with Starbucks and tiktok and had to find a third company that made the total come in just under their number.
He’s got a ‘we use pizza’ hat for them
Funny running across this article after reading https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Spoiler: the author does not have a high opinion of Raghavan.
that’s for that link.
Until we have a world that recognises that the internet is now a right and governments should be subsidising search and other services so that they don’t turn into useless ad delivery systems - I’m ok paying for Kagi.
Thoughts on a self-hosted SearXNG instance?
Or one of the public ones like this (by 1&1 I believe):
I haven’t really looked into searXNG, but it also seems like a good alternative
It’s so bad that I actively try to avoid certain top sites in google search results, especially when I am searching for review on product
There are uBlock Origin filters that exist purely to filter out certain SEO spam sites from search results. I’ve been using this one to filter out sites that basically copy/paste answers from popular dev sites that just completely clutter Google search results. I used to have one that included things like W3 Schools and Quora but I can’t find it anymore, unfortunately.
Kagi has domain filtering built in
I only use maps and youtube from google nowadays. The rest are shit
YouTube is shit too, they’re just the only game in town
True
I’m worried that Maps will be hit by the enshittification next. We need a good quality maps alternative. OpenStreetMap seems ok, but it lacks a few features, including trip planning.
Coming from the same guy who killed Google search according to this article.
Coincidentally just published yesterday…
Which contains an almost identical quote from Nick Fox (Google VP of search in 2019)
Fox added that all three of them were responsible for search, that search was “the revenue engine of the company,” and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was potentially “the new reality of their jobs.”
Sounds like somebody needs a short tenure.
They are just trying to squeeze the last few drops out of it. Its the endgame now. The new yahoo!
remember all those adorable puff piece articles about the adult playgrounds for google employees?
100 hour weeks to 120 hour weeks.
I hope those engineers are getting double bonus equity or something. 100 hour weeks is “you live in the office and all you do is work”. I’ve done 100 hour weeks in my game crunch days. It’s impossible to maintain a personal life.
I cannot imagine anyone being productive at 120 hour weeks. WTF is this? North Korea?!
100 hour weeks are not productive either. That’s a mean 14 hours 7 days a week. You cannot stay productive that long and even less so without a single day off. You’ll produce shit 4 hours per day and use the first hour of the next just to clean it up.
Oh 100%. 100 hour work weeks are absolutely insane and clear productivity theatre. To then pretend that adding an extra 20 hours will do more. Man what a waste.
Google now: Finding good food on Indian streets.
I like Gemini. It’s easily the best AI for rewriting things for social media that reflects my intent while sounding somewhat like me.
Reads like Irrelevant spam
Ok…just saying, they may be fretting about competition, particularly in the AI business, and I’m just sharing 2 cents about what they’re doing. It really is better than ChatGPT/Co-pilot for this kind of thing imo.
But people can’t have opinions without others getting rude or butthurt about something. 🤣
