Google is devolving into pre-Bing Yahoo
Yeah Alphabet is uh really really really stupid for losing their user loyalty when competitors in the search field like Kagi exist.
It’s truly shocking how a tiny company of a few people can outperform one of the largest companies in the world with search. Google is full of ads though, so it’s more profitable for them if you have to spend more time on their page to see more ads.
That’s exactly why Google Search has gone so far downhill that it’s pushing people elsewhere. Searches are supposed to be fast at giving you the answer you’re looking for. But that is antithetical to advertising. It’s why Google has been scraping data for years to build their own internal responses to easy queries like simple calculations, definitions, basic wiki results, etc. since you never even need to leave their site. Can’t get faster than that, until those results can no longer be trusted.
Now those quick results can’t be trusted, thanks largely to their blind AI fixation. That trust can never be earned back, it is lost permanently. Many users will instead start looking for alternatives that don’t feed them bullshit responses and instead just give them the links to good info, like Google used to.
Searches are supposed to be fast at giving you the answer you’re looking for. But that is antithetical to advertising.
And we have evidence that this is exactly why it happened, too:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
While I’d highly recommend giving either the article a read or the companion podcast a listen because Ed Zitron did some fantastic reporting on this, the tl;dr is that a couple of years ago, there was direct conflict between the search and advertising wings of Google over search query metrics.
The advertising teams wanted the metrics to go up to help juice ad numbers. The search team rightly understood that there were plenty of ways they could do so, but that it would make for a worse user experience. The advertising team won.
The head of the advertising team during this was a man named Prabhakar Raghavan. Roughly a year later, he became the head of Google Search. And the timing of all this lines up with when people started noting Google just getting worse and worse to actually use.
Oh, and the icing on the cake? Raghavan’s previous job? Head of Yahoo Search just before that business cratered to the point that Yahoo decided to just become a bing frontend.
Zitron is fond of saying that these people have names and it’s important that we know who’s making the decisions that are actively making the world of tech worse for everyone; I tend to agree.
I don’t know, it kind of makes sense, since Kagi can tailor itself to a specific audience, whereas something big like Google will just make a generalised slop that is able to be used by anyone, but isn’t to anyone’s particular tastes.
While Kagi does have a very specific audience in mind, I’m not convinced specialization vs generalization is a reason for a difference. Google also tailors ads for the audience, using information they have collected on you, people similar to you, as well as general time of day, current events, etc. It’s more that google wants you on their site for longer, Kagi wants you to find your result and move on, since the more you search the more it costs them.
Kagi isn’t a competitor to Google because search engine isn’t Google’s product.
Collecting user data and monetizing it is Google’s business product, and they are far and away ahead of any other “competition”.
They don’t even need the search engine anymore to collect user data. They have millions of people using Chrome, watching YouTube, using Gmail, using an Android phone…etc
I’ve seen people commenting on other articles about how Google Search sucks now. I finally get what you mean. I want you to know I feel your pain.
Been using searx a bit recently and it often is the 1 thing I’m looking for as the top result.
