You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago

[elsactivitypub@goto.freakstic.fr]

@ocean so Google search results are bad intentionally

ok, annoying but why not

but then how is DDG even worse

[jackracc@furry.engineer]

@ocean Wendell of Level1Techs spoke about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vMKm44ypFY

[jcolag@mastodon.social]

@ocean Even better, if you go back to the PageRank paper, they call it out in the appendix, pointing out that advertising definitionally means that you want to provide worse search results to get people to look at the result page again.

[lep0le@piaille.fr]

@ocean
Now it's possible to move... Duckduckgo gives pretty good results

[furby@towns.gay]

@ocean what is the origin of this?

[teeceegee@mastodon.nz]

@ocean This strategy was pushed by the cretin that Google hired, after he completely tanked Yahoo's search engine.

[anildash@me.dm]

@roooooland @ocean thanks for this link!

[heptasean@social.tchncs.de]

@lispi314 I usually search programming, Linux, politics, and science stuff and then strongly prefer sites I know – Wikipedia, StackOverflow, universities, well-known publications, …. That works quite well even without adblocker and is not overrun by LLM-generated garbage up to now.

But I just tested searching "Steak Medium Rare" and you might be right with the language thing. Google's AI summary isn't even that bad as far as I can tell. The first few German articles I get are ad-infested, but the content is at least quite informative. There, of course, is the Wikipedia article on “Doneness”.

But the first English article is just *awful*. Even more ad-infested than the German ones. And it just promises that it *will* tell me how to cook a steak, but *never* actually starts. @Paradox

[charlag@birb.site]

@ocean sorry what's the source?

[nullnowhere@sakurajima.social]

@furby@towns.gay @ocean@raru.re https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search-worse-to-sell-more-ads/ seems to be the source.

[motofix@mamot.fr]

@ocean one more reason to switch to @kagihq

[mudri@mathstodon.xyz]

@Galamadryade @ocean DuckDuckGo is probably prone to the same tendency in the fullness of time. Its results come from Bing, which has basically the same business model as Google. While Bing is not a monopoly overall, it does derive a lot of its use from being the default search engine on some Microsoft products, rather than from being in any way better than the alternatives. That means that Bing can probably also profit from degrading its results, and bring DuckDuckGo down with it.

[westerninfidels@mefi.social]

@ocean

I think that pull quote is from:

Is Google making search worse to sell more ads?

A study finds Google’s search quality is declining—possibly by design—just as a court rules the tech giant maintained an illegal search monopoly.

The Journal Record (journalrecord.com)

[lp0_on_fire@social.linux.pizza]

@ity @ocean, I'll use Youtube (anonymously) right up to the point at which it suddenly and annoyingly shoves an advertising interruption in halfway through somebody's speech in whatever I happen to be watching.

At that point, yt-dlp.

[marsfield@mastodon.social]

@ocean And, Ford decided to keep its Edsell model car on the road despite it being known to Ford that design faults were killing people. Ford also projected that insurance payouts would be less costly to shareholders than a recall. An earlier instance of capitalism defining profit regardlessly as moral.

[dotmavriq@social.dotmavriq.life]

@ocean This really challenges the predominant explanations that "it's a consequence of the decline of Web 1.0 as it were and that as the internet has grown in mainstream popularity more demands have been placed on data protection et. c." ... I'm not quite sure how to feel about it... I'm usually cynical but even then like...

[sterophonick@wetdry.world]

@ocean my conspiracy theory was true

[suedioh@mastodon.social]

@ocean It was always only about the clicks.

[kinnison@social.flarn.net]

@ocean it's this like this which reinforce my view that blocking adverts is not only desirable from a user experience perspective, but it's in fact a moral obligation

[drkylara@sfba.social]

@ocean
Now someone please tell my students. They are shocked by what I can find on the internet that Google never showed them.