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Tracking. Tied to use account, length of stay, how many reclixks, etc for marketing by/ads and surveillance.
But what’s stopping Google from doing this already?
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They are forcing my further and further towards kagi. I do hope the fawning on here is at least partly justified.
Kagi is what I settled on a couple of years ago. I do think sometimes the fawning is over the top, but it is a solid search engine and tended to give me a bit better results than Google out of the box. The real win, though, is that you can give various sites a weight, so the search results will prefer or avoid sites according to your desires. Once I had that going, my search results tended to be much better than Goog…
Google's actual search results are a waste of time visiting, both for the mindless CEO content and the ad-laden, analytics-happy, javascript-heavy websites.
So I tend to use the AI overview. But plugging myself into the all-seeing corporate oracle, that grew on all the web's content, and now seeks to supplant it seems unseemly.
It's just sad that kagi will likely only be a fringe thing, and google will continue to promote these foul, foul, mindless websites and then supplant them with its AI.
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Personalized search results are not ipso facto unreliable.
It means they're capable of burying news stories that would contradict your worldview and pushing news stories that support your pre-existing biases, leading to more engagement from you (a win from their point of view) but also burying you in an echo chamber. And unless you were in the habit of doing the occasional search in Incognito Mode, you wouldn't know. (And even then, they probably would be able to put togethe…
I've been using the 'ClearURLs' FF addon for quite a while now, and it gives you the URLs back in the results. https://docs.clearurls.xyz/
The article also suggests that it cannot be decoded.
The enshittification continues. Nothing good ever comes from businesses desperately trying to protect their moats rather than making their products better so they don't need to.
Thank Prabhakar Raghavan for that. After destroying Yahoo’s search product he failed up and did the same at Google. In reward for making Google Search materially worse in every way except ad revenue, he failed up again and was promoted to a cushy do-nothing role. Everything wrong with the tech industry, embodied in a single person.
Maybe Google is observing this?
I use ChatGPT for almost all my searches now. I’m not joking.
e.g. I'm just now looking for the menu for a local restaurant. "restaurantname menu" in Kagi (Google would presumably be similar) returns a link to the menu as the first result in about a second. Or "restaurantname menu !" goes directly to the menu in about a second.
Meanwhile, searching "restaurantname menu" in chatgpt takes about 5 seconds to return an embedded map from mapbox showing the location of the restaurant. If I click the restaurant pin on the map, there's no menu link, the 667 reviews have no link or way to view, and the restaurant description literally says "I don't have enough information to identify which local business refers to."
Below the map there's some text: "If you mean in , here’s the current menu. ". The link just opens the same card as clicking the pin on the map.
After that there's a bullet point list of the menu that ommits a ton of detail and options.
After that there's finally a link... that I can click to open up a popup at the bottom of the page with an actual link to the menu.
This was literally the first thing that popped into my head, I didn't have to put any effort into finding a query where chatgpt falls on its face.