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

[alper@sfba.social]

@virtualbri @ocean how all drug dealers work.

[pthane@toot.wales]

@ocean
I have a horrible feeling that business schools will be using this as an example of a successful strategy. It's like suggesting aircraft manufacturers ignore safety concerns because every one that falls out of the sky is a business opportunity. Oh.

[idoclosecuts@mstdn.ca]

@ocean have you read this article?

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)

[tasket@infosec.exchange]

@adavid @ocean The actual article quoted is here: https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search-worse-to-sell-more-ads/

[mjdxp@labyrinth.zone]

@ocean and now they can more easily force us to engage with the stupid chatbot because it's the only one getting the good results

[ari@fedi.arimelody.space]

@ocean i've heard people asserting this for years but it's nice to have an actual court document validating what we already believed :]

[leo@60228.dev]

@mjdxp@labyrinth.zone i will note that this is kind of distant extrapolation from the actual court documents that the original author went on social media to flatly deny

[rainbowpink@snug.moe]

@ocean no one at google is free from sin

[spdrnl@sigmoid.social]

@ocean Yes, and it was noticeable. I stopped using Google for that reason. The amount of work that I had to do became tiring; it was noticeable in a day. All the weeding.

[riggbeck@mastodon.social]

@ocean

From 'don't be evil' to 'let's see just how evil we can be'. Glad I closed my Google account a while ago.

[simon@procrastodon.net]

@ocean @yessie Joke's on them, I pay for a proper search engine now.

[virkon42@det.social]

@ocean i hardly use Google anymore. If ever then only udm14

[vampirdaddy@chaos.social]

@ocean
Plus it de-lists entries that are older than 5-7 years.

You can check that on a(ny) older/continuing forum, i.e. the same server, even the same board/thread. Older entries are de-listed from the search index.

[m1rk0@social.defcon42.net]

@ocean If you are still using Google as your main search engine in 2026, maybe you should stop using the internet at all. You are a threat to yourself and humanity.

[paeiro@mastodon.gal]

@ocean actually, my friends and me were talking that google was returning poor answers and also competition apps were not providing better results. We were considering that www was becoming intelectually poor and boring.

Anyway, can you provide the source of your text.

[starluna@mastodon.social]

@ocean Can you link to the document that this came from?

[v_mags_fox@meow.social]

@ocean So the same basic concept as constantly rearranging the grocery store. Make being there as time consuming as possible without being so inconvenient that everyone stops going.

[mason@partychickens.net]

@ocean I heard people talking about it, but I haven't seen a drop in quality myself thanks to my simply not using Google.

I went from AltaVista to Raging (which was also AltaVista) to DuckDuckGo. I may have used Google a little prior to DDG existing, but I don't remember. It took a while for Google to show their true colours. Remember that Android didn't come out until 2008 and GMail only was forming up around then too.

I still miss my BlackBerry. I'm using an AOSP derivative now, but I'm hoping Linux phones become usable.