Search engines have been becoming increasingly useless for years at this point as SEO gentrification runs rampant and more content moves behind walled gardens like Discord and anything that requires a subscription. Not to mention that Google enshittifies just like everything else. The amount of overly verbose garbage I have to trek through just to not get an answer to my query is far too high. God fucking help us now that AI can generate content, which will be even more garbage to sift through.
You know, that was a good article until the author took a completely unnecessary and irrelevant swipe at Biden; at which point I completely lost interest in anything the author had to say.
I'm really fucking tired of political bullshit being embedded into every-goddamned-thing I read.
Thank goodness someone is here to defend the reactionary fuck who was literally creating a Disinformation Governance Board as part of the ever-expanding police state and its fascist DHS organization. /s
When Google first started making a name for itself, it actually returned links to shit where the content literally had the search terms in the visible text. Ah, the good ol' days before the fuckin' search engine decided it was smarter than its users.
Agree. I also feel like the monetization behind use of Google tools, user information, etc just further complicates it.
I think back on when the internet was first getting started and how everyone was so excited by the prospect of have an essentially "living library" at their fingertips, full of potential to share information and learn in what was perceived by many to be a more open source type model --- initially. It didn't take long to see it succumb to all the same practices that have plagued free exchange of ideas in the real world since forever.
Add to this the stand by the "free press" of the world, which is no longer free, bent as they are with guarding information access behind paywalls since they continue to decry loss of paper readership and revenue from it as the reason for doing this; that may be true in part but it's only a fraction of the issues at stake.
I remember using the internet before smartphones were ubiquitous. At the time, I was thinking that we would be entering a period of unprecedented enlightenment with all the easy access to all the information a person could want. Lol. Lmao.
It feels like AI wrote it already. Try googling a windows error now. Instead of getting forums or a blog you get 10 shitty websites with lists of generic fixes that end with them recommending their shitty software that will absolutely not fix your issue.
“Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that’s iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy,” Raghavan reportedly said.
Their search has been getting worse and worse for a long time before the Reddit protest.
IIRC, they cited google as a reason not to work on their own search, since that's what most of their userbase had got used to searching reddit with anyway by that point.
"Many of us may wonder," yep. Some of us are pretty sure it's because Google is now optimizing searches for profitability rather than relevance. They're very careful to avoid fully explaining how the algorithm arranges search results, but I think the algorithm now has more financial subroutines than software behind it.