Cory DoctorowMar 4, 2024

Hard to overstate how enshittified and botshitted Google Maps has become. Went looking for my local locksmith on Gmaps. Maps shows 20+ fake locksmith referral scam outlets and doesn't even register the real locksmith, despite it being fully visible in Street View.

Instead, a red pin on the shop identifies it as a fake locksmith scammer. The real locksmith - which has been there SINCE 1942 (!!) and is a verified merchant - doesn't even show up.

Show threadPrincess Unikitty
@pluralistic
It's too bad Google sucks now. For a while it was nice having an index of most of the web.
Mar 4, 2024 at 5:54pmWeb
Show threadC.Suthorn Mar 4, 2024

@unikitty @pluralistic

It probably was never "most of the web". It was the tiny part of the web most people were expecting to see.

Show threadPrincess UnikittyMar 4, 2024
@Life_is @pluralistic I wondered about this as I typed it. If anyone has info on how much of the web went into PageRank, I would love to edit my post above with that.
Show threadLonMMar 4, 2024

@unikitty @pluralistic The actual indexes, (if I'm remembering correctly, yahoo had one?), that categorised and listed websites might be due for a comeback now that searching has failed.

Things like the curated "awesome lists" on GitHub seem to learn in that direction, and reddit in its prime also seemed to be kind of heading in that direction with voting on links grouped by topic.

Show threadJack Yan (甄爵恩)Mar 4, 2024
@LonM @unikitty @pluralistic I agree. The remnants of the Open Directory Project, which was meant to be a human-curated version, still exist at curlie.org. Some pages are still updated.
Show threadChiaraMar 4, 2024
@LonM @unikitty @pluralistic Yes! I’ve been saying for a while that we need a search engine that lets us upvote and downvote results.
Show threadPrincess UnikittyMar 4, 2024
@LonM @pluralistic
Google's most useful feature for finding information is that you can use it to search reddit. 🙃🙃🙃