I am starting to wonder more if Google search died or if the web did. You read a lot of comments about how in the past you could find a lot more information, but the reality is that no one is posting that information outside of the walled gardens. It's no wonder Google search sucks, if they don't have direct access to these walled gardens the information is locked behind the door...
Google search's death by a thousand cuts
241–250 of 332 posts
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#242I feel that Google search has been slowly dying for many years now. Where in the past I could find documentation, forum-posts, wikis - concise information - these days I find SEO-optimised marketing fluff, link-farms, clickbait, long-form articles with thousands of words that ultimately say nothing, political tirades that don't make sense for any non-U.S.-citizen, and ads - tons and tons of ads. It would seem that it…
The other day I searched for "canned cabbage soup". The mobile website locked into a mode I've never seen before. It would only provide blogspamish recipes for canning your own cabbage soup linked through the tiled suggestion interface. Not a single text-style link was returned and none of the results were pre-canned soups. I scanned though page after page without getting anything else. Oddly, when I searched "canned…
This bothers me so much. I’ve run into it a few times, exclusively on mobile, and it is completely useless and completely frustrating.
I actually thought some of the “google is dying” handwringing was overwrought until I experienced this. It was just, bad.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#243Google has sucked as a company from the very beginning. Not necessarily the technology, but the founders and the culture. How many of you remember back in 2005 or so, when the first lawsuit for delisting was brought against Google by a small business owner? The Google attorney showed up with a complete history of this person's searches and proceeded to demean him in court. Probably not many of you, because Google bur…
Well at least link the book
I believe it's "Search & Destroy: Why You Can't Trust Google" by Scott Cleland but I haven't read the book in years (and I'm not about to buy another one).
The reason I remember this is because I wrote three books about Google, and I was sorely tempted to include the story but my publisher decided it would wiser to not include it.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia has assets north of 100MM last I read about it. They don’t need donations to run the core wiki media products for a real long time. Their appeal for donations is absolutely distasteful and misleading. All the money they get they use for projects a lot of folks might not necessarily agree with. Such disingenuous behavior from supposedly the “best of us” is why public loose trust in all of modern progressive…
Honest question: What projects are potentially disagreeable? Are you suggesting that: "free knowledge, open source and open data, transparency, privacy, and collaboration" are ideas that "a lot of folks might not necessarily agree with?" (I fully admit that I may be missing something from the few minutes of research) I am interested in this because I believe that the users of social platforms are far better served by…
When most people see the Wikipedia donation banners, they think they're barely surviving, and that their donation goes towards running the site.
That's very far from reality. The money goes to Wikimedia Foundation, which is swimming in cash and reserves only a fraction of the money to run actual Wikipedia. That organization now has hundreds of highly paid administrators. Not a cent goes to any Wikipedia contributor nor does this staff directly contribute to Wikipedia itself at all.
Out of this Wikimedia Foundation, they created some spin-off organization that answers to nobody and gives away grants. To what a conservative commenter might call "woke" projects without any tangible return on investment.
But the point isn't whether you agree with that label or not, the point is that the organization is incredibly misleading in what it asks donations for, how their financial state is, how their organization really works, etc.
It's quite similar to Mozilla. You want to support Firefox development but instead the money goes to a foundation which spends it on lots of well-intended but generally useless projects.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#245I feel that Google search has been slowly dying for many years now. Where in the past I could find documentation, forum-posts, wikis - concise information - these days I find SEO-optimised marketing fluff, link-farms, clickbait, long-form articles with thousands of words that ultimately say nothing, political tirades that don't make sense for any non-U.S.-citizen, and ads - tons and tons of ads. It would seem that it…
They very much killed the golden goose. It's a real failure to think in terms of systems. Google relies on a healthy open web, yet as arguably the biggest single influencer of the web it has completely failed to maintain that let alone improve it.
As commercial enterprises currently are set up, they have no incentive whatsoever to preserve the ecosystem they are thriving on. Worse, they profit more when harming it. As seen here with Google, that is true irrespective of the nature of the affected system.
It's not just the quality of websites that is negatively hit either. The real victims are us, civil society and our future.
The information realm that is the internet should provide not only some basic tidbits, it should inform to the full extent of human knowledge. Even more than that, it should provide us with the freedom to discuss among ourselves and reflect on ourselves, humans and humanity, about the future of society.
Without such self-reflection, there is only stagnation and retardation. We cannot change what we do not understand and we understand ourselves the least.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google had LLMs before OpenAI. It also produced the core techniques for making it happen. My take is that it was taken by its own weight. The government fines & incorporation that started to fear those fines slowed down the progress. How difficult is to launch a change in that environment? Same for the baseline -- people react to changes. You consider the baseline to be the Golden standard. How difficult is to launch…
Are… are you blaming the government for Google’s enshittification? Because that’s the only factor related to its size you cite as causally connected to its decline.
Two parts. The government & organic size issues. Both contributing xx%.
Any high churn change is difficult to get out at that scale. Now add all corp-fear because you are under lense of all governments. You can't keep the startup mentality with that kind of environment.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
They very much killed the golden goose. It's a real failure to think in terms of systems. Google relies on a healthy open web, yet as arguably the biggest single influencer of the web it has completely failed to maintain that let alone improve it.
As commercial enterprises currently are set up, they have no incentive whatsoever to preserve the ecosystem they are thriving on. Worse, they profit more when harming it. As seen here with Google, that is true irrespective of the nature of the affected system. It's not just the quality of websites that is negatively hit either. The real victims are us, civil society and our future. The information realm that is the i…
I don't get why this is supposed to be Google's fault. I mean it doesn't matter of course: this is happening, and the only real question is if it will continue, maybe if something can be done. Who's fault it is ... Google is doing a lot to preserve the web. It's not enough, perhaps. Probably. But it's quite unclear to me what they could do to reverse this.
Plus we've all seen what this has lead to in meat-space. Information is one sided. BBC is supposed to be the paragon of neutrality, for example, and while it is pretty neutral on the situation in many places, it's not exactly neutral on UK and Australia political issues for example. And it suffers from the same problem as pretty much every other meat-space information source outside of libraries: the only information you can get from it is really quite superfluous.
Their recent "is AI evil?" series, for example, is neither neutral nor does it give enough information for people, even if someone wanted to go really in-depth on the issue, and have a really well-considered opinion, the only place where you could collect enough information to do that would be Youtube imho. With some blogs and maybe a scientific paper or two. Oh wait 3 out of those three work with a lot of help from Google (just try finding scientific papers without Google scholar)
I agree the situation is bad. But frankly, while Google perhaps has some blame in this, I'm very sure the situation would be 10x worse without Google.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#248I use DuckDuckGo now almost exclusively for search. It's the default in all my browsers. A few years ago Google still did better for some searches but now I don't feel that to be the case.
I’ve used DDG regularly for over a decade now, but unfortunately it’s gotten noticeably worse in the past couple years too.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#249Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They also didn't come up with ChatGPT, arguably the first LLM good enough that can perform non trivial tasks of data recall and organization. Not only did Google make the main breakthroughs that all LLMs still rely on today (mainly attention architecture, and large scale training of DNNs), but they had a chatbot similar to ChatGPT (Meena [1]) way before ChatGPT was a thing. Granted: they didn't release it to the pu…
Innovating is "easy", getting it in production is though. If the Google models are so genius and perfect, and nobody can use or see them, it's like if they don't exist.
That should be very strong quotation marks. I would say that it is the other way around. We should be glad that not everything is immediately turned into a product.