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

[msbellows@c.im]

@ocean Holy shzt, that's evil:

""Since Google doesn't have any real competition, it can make the best information hard to find, forcing users to stay on Google for longer and interact with more ads....' The strategy appears to be working from a business perspective. The study suggests that poor organic search results actually benefit Google's bottom line in two ways: they make paid advertisements more valuable to users seeking accurate information, and they force users to refine their searches multiple
times, exposing them to more advertising in the process."

[aetherfox@mastodon.social]

@ocean Google has been in a downward spiral towards ever greater evil since they dropped "Don't be evil" as the company motto.

[maxfenton@mas.to]

@ocean Source?

[que@mastodon.au]

@raktheundead @ocean amazing article (also horrible)..
thanks for sharing.

[buds_always@mstdn.ca]

@ocean
I’m old enough to remember when people used to say “Google is your friend”. Enshittification is real and it’s on purpose.

[stellafoxxie@oldbytes.space]

@ocean i'm convinced this happened to the search on aliexpress too

[mark@mastodon.fixermark.com]

@ocean Source appears to be "The Journal Record?"

Is Google making search worse to sell more ads? - NewsBreak

As Google faces the prospect of a court-ordered breakup following a recent monopoly ruling, new research suggests the tech giant's declining search quality

NewsBreak (www.newsbreak.com)

I'm not sure this is a topic I'm going to take WalletHub's CEO's word on. And unfortunately, the article doesn't link down to which court documents so I don't have a primary source to form an opinion on.

[hellomiakoda@pdx.social]

@ocean Their monopoly is so bad, "alterntives" are often just putting a privacy layer (hopefully) between you and the shitty Google results

[hawaii@mastodon.world]

@itamarst @ocean
Search goes the way of modern news media.

[mark@mastodon.fixermark.com]

@msbellows @ocean It's a hypothesis, but I don't think the evidence supports the hypothesis. It ignores the fundamental idea that if Bing offers better search results than Google, people will stop using Google.

[msbellows@c.im]

@mark @ocean Except Betamax was better than VHS, and there's no good reason why we're not all carrying phones by Palm Pilot. The point isn't that Google is the best search service; It's that they've achieved such market dominance that they can still get away with being profitably bad.

[mcslibinas@mastodon.social]

@StellaFoxxie @ocean search in aliexpress is a good example of AI nightmare site. Search not working, descriptions is just bad poetry, the key features are hidden.
Oh, also things are made crappy just to sell on that crap site, like multimode flashlights. No one use multimode, everyone hates it, yet there all of them are like that
Crap site grows crap items.

[mark@mastodon.fixermark.com]

@msbellows @ocean I always have to smile a little when I hear Betamax was better than VHS because my family owned both.

Picture quality: not noticeably better on the TVs of the time, which sucked.

Hardware fidelity: Betamax tapes could melt to the read drum, ruining the machine and requiring a significant rebuild. My dad's Beta player melted down twice in the years he owned it. Never had that problem with VHS.

Not the point though, because I can't think of anything about Bing that would be the equivalent to melting tape to the read drum.

(Also, I owned Palm Pilots. The batteries killed them; two or three generations of them with unreliable power was enough to sour the platform).

[feedmd@mastodon.social]

@ocean That’s why I’m paying kagi 5 a month. I get results. No ads. Cheers

[fishidwardrobe@mastodon.me.uk]

@ocean the weird part of this is: they do have actual competition. Other search engines exist.

[lillyfinch@mstdn.social]

@ocean I hate google

[gsuberland@chaos.social]

@osman @seq @morgunkorn hmm. the first email floats the idea of reducing search quality to get more queries, with a caveat of being uncomfortable about it. the rest looks like the results of projects and efforts that were ongoing at the time. am I missing a detail in that email chain that demonstrates that they actually followed through? don't get me wrong, it's gross that they even floated the idea, but if this is intended to be evidentiary proof of committal then I'm not seeing a smoking gun.

[powerpath@mastodon.social]

@CatsWhoCode @ocean @aetios

ddg.co !

[gsuberland@chaos.social]

@osman @seq @morgunkorn obviously we all anecdotally feel like the search quality dropped, and their email discussion is at least circumstantially suggestive of intent, but I would feel better if I knew what the specific evidentiary purpose of the document was.

[dgodon@mastodon.online]

@ocean I suspect it’s not so much that they want to make quality worse, it’s that quality is just very low priority. Not that it matters much. Like other big tech monopolies, they still knowingly do deprioritize quality. I think many employees try to mitigate, but their power is also getting deliberately smashed