Transcript.
If you tell someone to “Google it” at this point you’re telling them to look up five ads and some AI-generated bs instead of the actual thing they want to know.
old guy takes long hit on the bong
“Back in my day, search engines used to find things besides the wreckage of late-stage capitalism.”
Google was a “disrupter”
Which means they burnt investor money for years to deliver a great product while not making any profit.
Once they gain market share and are the default, enshitification begins and people eventually wonder why they’re still using it.
Haven’t used Google in months and haven’t felt any loss in my quality of life. Protonmail and DuckDuckGo, easy peasy
The one Google product that I still use is Google maps. Openstreetmaps just isn’t as good in my area and only Google maps, Waze, and Apple maps have accurate traffic data here.
PageRank was a huge deal, and drastically increased the quality of the results over previous approaches. They absolutely disrupted search.
Google was founded in 1998. AdWords came out in 2000 and the company had its first profitable quarter in 2001. Three years isn’t bad to build a tech company that can turn a profit.
They are an ad company first and foremost. Search, Android, Chromebooks, browsers and Cloud hosting all just feed their machine.
The search engine wasn’t disruptive in the sense that it was subsidized, it was disruptive in the sense that it didn’t try to be the portal to everything in the internet (as opposed to, say, Yahoo) but offered a clean page.
More that SEO won.
Except that I wouldn’t use Google Search as an example of enshittification.
It isn’t like Google tried to break search to increase profits. Instead, the industry around Google changed to adapt to Google’s search algorithms.
No, they most certainly broke it. Instead of just searching for what you type in, it now “interprets” your query and the interpretation is always whatever has more ads. If you switch to Verbatim mode, the results are noticeably better.
You can switch to verbatim mode?
Tools -> dropdown “All results” and select “Verbatim”
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It also sucks that all information is now hidden away in a youtube tutorial or on a reddit thread full of dead links and deleted comments. I don’t want to watch your shit YouTube video, I never did.
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Butterfly meme:
Literally everything bad vaguely related to tech
Lemmy users: “Is this enshittification?”
What’s an example of Lemmy complaining about something you would say isn’t enshittification, but the Lemmy users do say is enshittification?
This. Google is losing the fight against SEO (and now AI), they’re not intentionally giving you bad search results. Bing, DDG, etc. are all facing the same struggles.