You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago
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ddg.co !
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@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.
@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.
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You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@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
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@WandererUber@poa.st @ocean@raru.re
Yes, exactly! Even in its inception it was better and same as with search it got worse recently. I used to have a tab with SimplyTranslate open, it was a great tool to access Google Translate — not anymore, with languages I somewhat understand it's barely useful, I might as well use Reverso to translate some words, and with other languages — I'm not even sure the result has anything to do with original text. Even a year ago you could pull an article through it, fix a few sentences here and there and be done with it — it was good enough. Right now I'm giving it a few well-formed sentences in English — not even complex ones where it might get lost, to translate into my native language and… the result is gibberish. It can't handle passive voice at all, it's incorrect tenses, incorrect cases all over the place — this isn't a translation even, this is some word soup! A schoolkid with a dictionary translating word-for-word would do a much better job than this!
The motive? It gives you slightly better results if you use it directly, not via API as SimplyTranslate does — here the motive is obvious, but otherwise… no, same as with search. Do they have ads in Google Translate? I don't know because I have those blocked. Does it give you better results in Google Chrome? I don't know, they might be incentivising me to use it in a way they could serve me more ads or harvest more data. I didn't do a thorough research — just sharing my observation and for me, the way I used to use it, it got noticeably worse.
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You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean What I don't understand is how one can argue that Google is violating antitrust laws while also making itself less competitive.
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You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean sufficiently advanced capital extraction is indistinguishable from infinite rent-seeking. every
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@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.
@gsuberland @osman @seq @morgunkorn nah it's people jumping to conspiratorial conclusions as usual if you read the source. The email is pretty clear that it's a stupid proposal (of course you can increase queries by making the UX worse) to illustrate that query numbers are a stupid metric ("The nature of how you would easily increase queries is a key reason I don't like queries as an end metric." - can hardly be clearer).
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You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean literally the head of advertising got the head of search fired
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@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.
@gsuberland @osman @seq @morgunkorn Pretty obvious that they kept the metric that keeps users on their website.
Also logical they are doing this. Now they are tuning it so it's just shit, but not shit enough that users will leave.Important stuff like web search shouldn't be free.
I'm really eyeballing to get @kagihq it's a bit expensive atm. -
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean I was literally just wondering about this. Gemini works amazing compared to search, and so they could get users to embrace AI simply by making search worse
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You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean I've noticed that whenever I use google, I instinctively ignore the first 5 results because I know they will not be what I want.
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You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose -
@ocean Least surprising revelation of the year to be honest.
I think the exact same thing is true of YouTube, which is so dominant that they can make it shittier every day and people will still use it.
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You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean Glad I've already ditched Google in favour of Qwant
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You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purposeenshittification explained again
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You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose -
You noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose@ocean "interact with more ads"? I don't think I've never interacted with any ads except right-click to block them.
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@ocean: Ed Zitron wrote comprehensively on the people responsible.
The Man Who Killed Google Search
Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. UPDATE: Prabhakar has now been deposed as head of search, read here for more details. This is the story
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At (www.wheresyoured.at)
@raktheundead @ocean It appears their "code yellow" has left them in the code brown.
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@gsuberland @osman @seq @morgunkorn Pretty obvious that they kept the metric that keeps users on their website.
Also logical they are doing this. Now they are tuning it so it's just shit, but not shit enough that users will leave.Important stuff like web search shouldn't be free.
I'm really eyeballing to get @kagihq it's a bit expensive atm.@MisterMaker @gsuberland @osman @seq @morgunkorn @kagihq I subscribed for a few months. It seemed like a good idea, and occasionally did produce better results. However, it was also very US centric in its results and the quality was patchy, for my use.
I’m unconvinced “paying” is a panacea. Many of the best things in this world are not due to payment. People care about things for many reasons. Payment is frequently the mechanism to compensate people do things they don’t otherwise care to do. And stay alive, of course.
Competition, and ideally not using single search providers as a model, would help.
