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.”
They’re going to use the year chatGPT came out as an equivalent to how 1945 is used to calibrate radiometric tests. These days I don’t trust any search result published 2022, as 95% of those first page results are ai generated garbage.
I Bing stuff and like to Edge so hard at work, that I dont even miss Google.
Back in my day, we had to hit Borders, Barnes & Noble, or Books-A-Million to find tech books to help us figure out what to do. Dot-com cubicle shelves always had a mini library.
O’Reilly made so much money.
I learned C++ from a book I borrowed from the library.
So many goddamn oreilly perl books. Where did they all go?
Oh Borders, how I miss you
They were the only company that made price stickers that could be easily removed. Nobody else can figure it out.
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.
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.
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.
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”
They absolutely did break it. Without even getting into all of the convoluted shenanigans they pull now, their advanced search operators are dog shit now. They completely ignore negative search terms whenever they have a bunch of ads to show you with that term, or when there’s an abundance of agenda-rich propaganda articles with that term. They’re fucking poopoopcacca now.
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.
Right? I never understood why people would rather watch some over sensationalized YouTube video that is full of fluff, rather than just quickly reading an article. I can get information I need from an article before a YouTuber even finishes their stupid intro. I guess the average person is pretty bad at reading.
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.
Searx is your friend
This goes straight into my Hall of Fame (aka the vault i’ll give to my grandsons, the ones I’ll never have)
Don’t put yourself down like that. Your time will come.
If you’re not using adblock, you’re doing it wrong anyway.
That’s crazy, I love Kevin Hearne I didn’t know he was on bluesky. The Iron Druid books are great
I lucked into having dinner with him once and he is every bit as genuine, smart, thoughtful, caring, and funny as you could hope. Kevin’s the real deal.
And he’s an excellent writer, too!
Back in my day if you Googled failure the Whitehouse.gov webpage about George W. Bush would appear.
I remember when whitehouse.com was a porn site
My favorite is googling something, the first result is a reddit post asking the exact question I need answered. There is only one reply telling the OP that they could easily Google it instead of asking on Reddit.
I used to necro those old posts by replying “this is what your fucking bullshit response gets us. I googled it and ended up here reading your arrogant response instead of finding an answer.”
Thank you for your service.
True, but try to tell someone to “DuckDuckGo it”… :-D
I think at this point ‘Google it’ means pretty much the same thing as ‘Photoshopped.’ There’s a good chance that whoever made the meme or whatever is not paying Adobe for it or pirating it and just using something like GIMP or some web-based image editor. But we still call it Photoshopped.
Google has always kinda been shit… you just needed to know how to sort through it, still applies here. I don’t see the issue.
Bullshit. Google was fantastic before 2014.
