James GleickJun 10, 2023

An astonishing fact about the present moment in technology:

Google—which began by doing one thing, and did it better than anyone else, and used that one thing to become a giant company, richer and more powerful than almost any other entity on earth—has lost its ability to do that one thing.

#Google https://hachyderm.io/@confluency/110491848831123193

Adrianna Pińska (@[email protected])

Content farms have basically eaten the first two to three pages of a typical Google search. This morning I was trying to find information about the relative safety of different space heater designs, and 95% of the results were long, rambly bullshit posts written by Jim Smith the Extremely Real Engineer Man for AllAboutSpaceHeaters.com and filled with Amazon affiliate links. Wow, AI is going great. I can't wait to see how this amazing technology will help humanity next.

Hachyderm.io
Show threadGeoff Winkless

@JamesGleick Google never did search the best: Altavista was far better.

Google had tech bros telling us that they were the Good Guys, and then Compaq (av's owner) decided inexplicably that they should try to compete with yahoo (who were their main customer for AltaVista search) in web portal, which was a market that was already failing. With the exit of AltaVista from the market, Google never bothered to improve their search, they instead spent their r&d finding ways to monetise what they had.

Jun 11, 2023 at 12:05pmWeb