I guess we all kinda knew that, but it’s always nice to have a study backing your opinions.
It’s time for Google to die. They are a truly awful company now so it’s time to take her down to the shed like ol’ blockbuster
How are you supposed to self-host a web crawler and indexer without getting a giant server bill?
Having this service at least slightly centralised makes sense ressource-wise - but assuming crawling and indexing is free is just foolish. I’d choose something like kagi but I guess many people will rather cheap out and go for the next free service not realising that that company has to make money another way to make up for the high cost of running a search engine
Before we had Google, we had Altavista and before that we had indexes like Yahoo. Maybe we should consider going back. With the help of AI (I know…) it seems feasible to keep up with the ever growing content.
Maybe we should consider going back.
You can’t really go back. Those old engines worked on more naive algorithms against a significantly smaller pool of websites.
The more modern iteration of Altavista/AOL/Yahoo has been the aggregation sites like Reddit, where people still post and interact with the site to establish relevancy. Even that’s been enshittified, but its a far better source than some basic web crawler that just scans website text and metadata for the word “Horse” and returns a big listical of results based on a hash weighted by number of link-backs.
That system was gamed decades ago and is almost trivial to undermine in the modern moment. Nevermind how hard you’d need to work to recreate the original baseline hash tables that these old engines built up over their own decades of operation.
Arent they trying to make their search worse so you have to search multiple times, showing you more ads?
Google’s relevance of search has gone extremely downhill in the last few years even before the surge of AI articles, so it’s no surprise the keyword-injected articles are all that’s winning now.
But holy shit does it piss me off how many of these first page results have literally incorrect information now too. Want to learn how to do something in software? See a release date? Find accurate information? Good fucking luck.
For all people complain about the decline in ad revenue, there’s still clearly a strong incentive to get click-bait responses.
I honestly wonder if the solution isn’t to fight the SEO wars forever, but to just cut this shit off at the root and screen out sites that host ads, period. Obviously, Google can’t limit its search by screening out folks that use AdSense because… that’s half their business model. But perhaps a search engine that does bias itself against sites that monetize click-throughs could dramatically improve results.
I switched to DDG merely to get rid of Google’s irrelevant paid results up top.
If I’m searching for brand model manual I don’t need every competitor’s marketing detritus.
Likewise contact details etc… it’s maddening.
IMHO, the problem with Google isn’t SEO. It’s Google. When Google was great, it would find exactly what you were searching for. The whole point was to get you off of Google and on to whatever site you were looking for as quickly as possible. Over the last several years, their search has increasingly been drinking the ‘engagement algorithm’ Kool-Aid. Now Google doesn’t search for what you ask, it searches for what it thinks you are trying to find. Which is fucking useless because I know exactly what I’m trying to find and that’s exactly what I typed in. Selecting verbatim search and putting things in quotes helps. But it’s still displays tons of irrelevant stuff that doesn’t include what I searched for.
It’s actually easy to point to exactly when the downfall started. Years ago Google was trying to make a social network called Google+ that would compete with Facebook. Before this, a + operator in the search field meant only show results that contain that particular term. But they wanted people to search for Google+, so they changed it so the plus sign became a searchable term and quotes were necessary to include a term or phrase. That was the moment Google decided that search wasn’t their most important product. And it’s been slow downhill ever since.
Okay, sure that was bad. But consider all the value that we’ve gained by having a lively and competitive alternative to Facebook! I mean, who do you know that doesn’t treat Google+ as their first point of contact with the internet?
Lol Don’t know anybody that does that, not since they closed in 2019 :P Amusingly, double quotes are still the standard ‘must include’ operator on Google search.
Google has also completely blown a very good opportunity to make a ubiquitous chat system. Several iterations of Google talk and Google meet and the like, only one of which federated outside of Google, none of which are compatible with each other, all of which seem to get remade or rebranded every few years.
Competitor to Facebook would have been a great idea. I had actually planned to join Google+. But shortly after it launched they started pushing it so fucking hard, like almost sneakly signing up people for it and making it damn near required to do anything, that made me say hell no. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone in that regard.
I don’t know what the hell is going on at Big G HQ, but it doesn’t seem like they have much of any real mission these days. Haven’t really since ‘don’t be evil’ stopped being part of their mission statement.
I don’t know what the hell is going on at Big G HQ, but it doesn’t seem like they have much of any real mission these days.
The company is increasingly compelled by Wall Street pressures
The latest round of layoffs was practically dictated by activist investors like Christopher Hohn.
