At a recent all-hands meeting, Google search head Prabhakar Raghavan told employees that the world is changing and they have to adjust.
Things definitely changed. 15-20 years ago you actually got good search results instead of unusable crap we get today.
True their competition is actually getting much better whereas they just throw BS at you nowadays. It’s unfortunate but Google is no longer my go-to for searching.
I was getting decent results up until about a month ago (though partly because I have an extension to block sponsored links and arranges the page as it used to appear around 2010). It was like they just flipped a switch from “good” to “shitty.” Can’t even find images I would grab off the first page when repeating a search from history, now. It seemed to correlate almost exactly with when it started to generate blurbs through AI at the top instead of just summarizing one of the pages in the top links.
i wonder what will replace it… maybe some way of AI to figure out which websites are deemed good in the eyes of actual human users, and then human users opting into sharing such score charts with each other?
Used to get about 200+ pages of search results. Now it’s about 30 actual results and half of them are fake / malicious / useless. Google as a company was once an innovator, but is now mostly a barrier to any kind of progress or improvement.
Wearing a hoodie with the words “We use Math” on the front, Google search boss Prabhakar Raghavan had an important message for employees at an all-hands meeting last month. But he first wanted them to settle in and get comfortable.
…
Raghavan said Google’s digital ad business had become “the envy of the world.” He noted that over the last three years, annual revenue has grown by more than $100 billion, exceeding Starbucks, Mazda and TikTok combined.
Does this mean you’ll be using math to pay them more for producing more? (have to add /s)
Funny running across this article after reading https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Spoiler: the author does not have a high opinion of Raghavan.
Came here to post it too. That article was savage, and I believe it.
Until we have a world that recognises that the internet is now a right and governments should be subsidising search and other services so that they don’t turn into useless ad delivery systems - I’m ok paying for Kagi.
Thoughts on a self-hosted SearXNG instance?
Or one of the public ones like this (by 1&1 I believe):
