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.
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.
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.
I can’t stop using that and Google photos. Instant backup of all photos, and more importantly, great search. It even recognizes my two dogs.
While live traffic might be a hurdle (even though Magic Earth, despite not being FOSS, has good enough data, at least for me), why not contribute to OSM yourself?
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.
I wonder if there is a new term to use to target secondary or tertiary entshittification. I mean Google did participate in entshittification with the increase in ads but they are also a big victim of the same entshittification. Like maybe the entshittification is rolling downhill.
I feel like they did break search to profit, though possibly through inaction. It doesn’t feel like they’re even trying to deliver good content over seo garbage anymore.
Hard to distinguish malice from incompetence with Google, though.
Not really true.
Googles stance on protecting net neutrality totally changed over the years with the cell phone internet browsing, and them getting in bed with Verizon. Google=Verizon
Obama fought off the end of net neutrality his entire presidency.
Now they have a large financial reasonability to direct you to specific content and companies
I’m not defending Google itself, just noting that the declining quality of its search is based less on a malicious decision on Google’s part and more a result of SEO.
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.
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.
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.
