Google search's death by a thousand cuts
matt-rickard.com
Google search's death by a thousand cuts
1–10 of 332 posts
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#2Many years ago, Google was very useful without Reddit. There is a reason why they are such a behemoth: they actually used to create very usable tools and services. People wanted to use them, because their products were good. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate (etc)... all of them are (were) gems.
Don't know if they let search rot or they broke it intentionally. But it got broken regardless of Reddit. Reddit has a lot of info I guess, but it is far from being the only website on the internet. However seemingly google stopped indexing more than the top 150-200 websites on the internet (and even those results are often lacking the searched words).
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#3Many years ago, Google was very useful without Reddit. There is a reason why they are such a behemoth: they actually used to create very usable tools and services. People wanted to use them, because their products were good. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate (etc)... all of them are (were) gems. Don't know if they let search rot or they broke it intentionally. But it got broken regardless of Reddit. Reddit has a lot of…
I believe it was also caused by the silo-ing of the internet and that a lot of the « public space » is now behind a login.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#4Many years ago, Google was very useful without Reddit. There is a reason why they are such a behemoth: they actually used to create very usable tools and services. People wanted to use them, because their products were good. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate (etc)... all of them are (were) gems. Don't know if they let search rot or they broke it intentionally. But it got broken regardless of Reddit. Reddit has a lot of…
I believe it was also caused by the silo-ing of the internet and that a lot of the « public space » is now behind a login.
that makes a lotta sense even to my ignorant mind. so everyone got login'd prompted since companies make the most money data gatherin or what have you, plus reducing bots, stuff like that, it all makes individual sense and then amounts to search engines not working good anymore. Plus real blogs or websites with real human writing get buried or never shown because of bot or that SEO thing I tried to understand?
I'm just trying to wrap my head around it but I think I'm making sense of it now and it's kinda like that race to the bottom I see sometimes mentioned here? Do I got it right?
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#5They need to stop trying to so heavily curate what users are allowed to see in their searches. Since 2020, Google's attempts to operate as the internet's ideological censor have had a noticeable negative impact on the quality of their search results.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#6[dead]
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#7Many years ago, Google was very useful without Reddit. There is a reason why they are such a behemoth: they actually used to create very usable tools and services. People wanted to use them, because their products were good. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate (etc)... all of them are (were) gems. Don't know if they let search rot or they broke it intentionally. But it got broken regardless of Reddit. Reddit has a lot of…
They broke it intentionally for money.
The second they paid people to game their search engine (ie adsense), the entire thing was on the road to uselessness. There always would have been that incentive, but Google turbocharged it, with $33B of incentive in 2022.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#8Many years ago, Google was very useful without Reddit. There is a reason why they are such a behemoth: they actually used to create very usable tools and services. People wanted to use them, because their products were good. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate (etc)... all of them are (were) gems. Don't know if they let search rot or they broke it intentionally. But it got broken regardless of Reddit. Reddit has a lot of…
I believe it was also caused by the silo-ing of the internet and that a lot of the « public space » is now behind a login.
I disagree. The large sites which are charged with facilitating this breakdown have been around (and commanding a large portion of internet traffic) since before Google began degrading in-earnest. So did "effective" SEO, in fact. Google used to care about, and was still effective at, returning useful links well into the period that other entities were trying to undermine it. The first time that I noticed a reduction in Google Search efficacy was when they introduced Instant Search (or whatever they called the feature that presented results as users typed, rather than waiting for users to submit a full query). Even when they got rid of it, they never backtracked on whatever back-end changes enabled it (and degraded results in the service of presenting them faster).
My suspicion is that this was the beginning of the public presentation of corporate infighting, where what the public saw from Google began to be less about good products and more about the products that particular execs, managers, and developers needed to "win" in order to bolster their careers (or what they perceive as such). This is why Google has developed a reputation for killing useful products, often replacing them with flashier and more frustrating alternatives (if at all).
I don't like putting this on external factors. I think Google is doing this to themselves. It's a more private and stretched-out version of what's happening very publicly with Twitter right now.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#9Many years ago, Google was very useful without Reddit. There is a reason why they are such a behemoth: they actually used to create very usable tools and services. People wanted to use them, because their products were good. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate (etc)... all of them are (were) gems. Don't know if they let search rot or they broke it intentionally. But it got broken regardless of Reddit. Reddit has a lot of…
I believe it was also caused by the silo-ing of the internet and that a lot of the « public space » is now behind a login.
It’s easy to be mad at Facebook, newspapers, Pinterest, Discord, etc. for locking the internet away behind a login or paywall. But it’s also the result of Google capturing all the value from the free internet.
The end result is companies trying to capture more of that value for themselves and not letting Google eat their lunch, which required moving content and communities behind closed doors.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#10Doing planetary science, I used to be in the habit of searching for image IDs on google. Usually particular orbital images of the moon which had been mentioned in a paper. There are of course specific archives to search for this stuff, but google used to give surprisingly good results. Now I get literally zero results when I search an image ID. What changed? Did they remove their index of the Planetary Data System? Did they remove the indexes of planetary science papers?