Seb_aus_d
oshyYou noticed how google search became unusably shit a few years ago?
Turns out that was on purpose
Turns out that was on purpose
MSG APOLOGIST@ocean no way this is what my conspiracy wheory was
@ocean NO WAY
@aetios Because Google is so synonymous with web search for Normies and they don't have any actual competition they can just do whatever and they won't lose users, knowing that, it just makes sense to keep users on your site longer and thus get served more ads
Cats Who Code (cursed)
PowerPathddg.co !
TerrorBite đŚ
Luna Lactea@TerrorBite @aetios @ocean I've already found a new one & it has quickly become my favorite. My current conspiracy theory is that everything will be ok.
Siegfried.@jackemled @TerrorBite @aetios @ocean Whoooh! You will not have to wait long to find followers of that theory. Highly realistic! đ¤Ą
Taz the pika
gkrnours
Supremely eepy ěěŹëš@ocean WHO COULD'VE GUESSED (literally everyone)
Brian Tatosky@ocean How all monopolies work
RAK@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
que :verifried:
Luke Morey@raktheundead @ocean and he had a related podcast episode about it in April 2024, see https://linktr.ee/betteroffline
Dr. Juande Santander-Vela@raktheundead @ocean @villares ÂŤPrabhakar Raghavan is a manager, and his career, from what I can tell, is mostly made up of âdid some stuff at IBM, failed to make Yahoo anything of note, and fucked up Google so badly that every news outlet has run a story about how bad it is.âÂť
Mark Harris@raktheundead @ocean It appears their "code yellow" has left them in the code brown.
S@ocean Not too surprised unfortunately. :/ You happen to have the source handy? I'd love to read more about it.
morgunkorn@seq those 3 paragraphs appear here: https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search-worse-to-sell-more-ads/
@morgunkorn Thank you kindly!
Femme Malheureuse@morgunkorn @seq Thank you, much appreciated.
Stellar đŤđˇ (
era)@ocean i'm not surprised, but i didn't noticed since i use alternatives from google since a long time â
â
â
prisixia
LisPi
TheMagicalC@Stellar @prisixia @cwg1231 @ocean Inconvenient things to duplicate, it was an actual job for a reason.
Difficult to access remotely as well. Rather problematic with a pandemic (to say nothing of unrelated logistical hurdles). It wouldn't be so bad if institutional ageism didn't make so many libraries age-gate postal loaning & returns behind being elderly or disabled with papers to prove it (accessibility challenges? What's that? đ), when they provide it at all.
All the things I name have solutions yes, but they also are not applied for reasons unknown to me.
Difficult to access remotely as well. Rather problematic with a pandemic (to say nothing of unrelated logistical hurdles). It wouldn't be so bad if institutional ageism didn't make so many libraries age-gate postal loaning & returns behind being elderly or disabled with papers to prove it (accessibility challenges? What's that? đ), when they provide it at all.
All the things I name have solutions yes, but they also are not applied for reasons unknown to me.
@prisixia@mk.absturztau.be @cwg1231 @ocean @lispi314@udongein.xyz if the library doesn't have a book you want to borrow or copy anna's archive probably has it
@prisixia @ocean @Stellar No libraries anymore, at least not in the USA. Libraries are also much slower to update information & don't have the obscure topics alot of people look up, such as how to install pyssnshit (everyone's favorite python script), or the history of the use of sewing machines in Australia. Any libraries that are still operational are going to be horrifically underfunded & not even have a card index to search them with, & with certain governments restricting access to certain written knowledge (Germany 1940s, USA 2020s), alot of very important things that libraries have are about to disappear. Libraries may have been the backup plan when the Internet failed at one point, but now the Internet is the backup plan for libraries failing, but the most important parts of the Internet are failing at the same time. I have not heard well of libraries in other countries either. For most places in the world it may be fine, but for many they aren't a solution.
Acin â@jackemled @prisixia @ocean @Stellar
The US has one of the strongest network of public library systems in the world.
There have been forced closures and reduced funding around the country, yeah; but thousands of public libraries in the US continue to exist. Some with increased local support to keep up with rising costs. Almost all libraries in this century use digital catalogs based off database matching for searches and have staff that will pick up a phone to call contacts for obscure resources like for specialty books at universities. Many have suscriptions to journals and teaching services. Visiting a library regularly increases knowledge sharing as the staff, patrons, and event hosts swap info from shared interests.
I get the feeling, tho, that you're talking about a near future where the federal government has taken over the state goverments and its companies have corrupted all digital systems? Or, what are you describing?
@shadowfals @prisixia @ocean @Stellar Maybe I'm not seeing it because I'm in a very conservative area & constantly hearing about threats to city & state libraries in other places. In my home town too our libraries weren't great & never got anything digital besides one desktop computer meant for accessing one state research paper library & nothing else. I haven't been home for a few years so I'm unsure how they're doing now, but I doubt any books about gender or sexuality are still there with the local politics. Libraries will always be important resources, but books are fundamentally fragile devices that can't be easily duplicated & distributed out of control like digital information.
@shadowfals @prisixia @ocean @Stellar It's more like the present & my worries for the very near future. The Library of Alexandria was burned by the Romans, & I don't see why it can't happen again to any library, especially since it has happened again numerous times.
Cassandrich
Alan Campbell@ocean bunch...of...f**kers.
âlucidiot
â
Itamar Turner-Trauring@ocean As predicted by Brin and Page: "we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998 - http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)
Sven Jacobs 
Khleedril@khleedril @ocean They started adding advertising pretty early on, honestly, I think it's just amusing (and sad) to see the path they went down.
Aaron Brick â ×××¨× ×ר×ק
Tofu Musubi
Samuel Hautamäki@ocean Just as expected, Google the company who abandoned "don't be evil", is evil. By the way can you link the source?
@samuel found the 3 paragraphs on this webpage: https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search-worse-to-sell-more-ads/
Wilfried Klaebe@ocean If that is not enshittification as defined by @pluralistic...
John McChesney-Young@wonka @ocean @pluralistic And in fact @pluralistic has an excellent series about this at: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-understood/episode/16142603-introducing-understood-who-broke-the-internet (or what I'm sure will be excellent - I've only listened to the first so far)
Introducing Understood: Who Broke the Internet? | Understood | CBC Podcasts | CBC Listen
It's not you â the internet really does suck. Novelist, blogger and noted internet commentator Cory Doctorow explains what happened to the internet and why you're tormented by ads, bots, algorithms, AI slop and so many pop-ups. Spoiler alert: it wasn't an accident. In a four-part series, Doctorow gets into the decisions made by powerful people that got us here, and most importantly, how we fix it. New episodes released weekly starting on Monday, May 5, 2025.
Sean Fenian@ocean Active enshittification.
ity@ocean figured
It was still somewhat usable a few years ago but it really stopped being usable around the AI boom, like, whenever it was that M$ bought OpenAI is around even I started noticing Google search results no longer being competent anymore
It's a wild choice, does Google think that folks won't stop using it ?
@ocean Like their choice of the stuff they did with YouTube made me get rid of my Google acc since that is all I was using it for anyway, and pretty much just avoid YouTube now besides stuff that is sent to me which is usually a webm uploaded to archive.org fetched with youtube-dlp.
And their choice with making the search engine unusably bad is like, even making me consider paying for a search engine now.
lp0 on fire 
Cairo Braga [gts]@ocean reinforcing what a lot of people have been saying: Google is an advertisement company. (do you have the link to the full text, please?)
@cairobraga here's the source apparently: https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search-worse-to-sell-more-ads/
Rob299@ocean Not surprised, I actually figured that a few years prior.
Because #Youtube is always talking about keeping users on a platform longer. Even when it means sacrificing quality.
All they have to say is, "oh, well that's just how the #algorithm works." gaslighting the fact they they are the ones making it work that way when it wasn't always like this.
Willow Brook đ@ocean I need to understand what people are searching for and why the first page doesn't help them.
Cuz the only time I can't find something is because I don't really expect to find anything. Either cuz it's a very niche question or earlier when I tried to get a pdf/ebook of Harold and the Purple Crayon (still copyrighted I think, no straightforward download).
Like I believe people are having a hard time. I just can't tell from my experience.
Benjamin Braatz@Paradox @ocean Same! I *can* somehow tell it getting less good over the years â some paid results to ignore here, some only seldomly helpful AI result there, ⌠â but all in all it is still useful enough for me to this day. Do I include enough keywords in my searches? Do I only research topics that are not *that* prone to bad results? Don't know. đ¤ˇââď¸
(It's not always on the first page, though. I tend to ignore quite a lot of results based on the preview.)
Urban Hermit@HeptaSean @Paradox @ocean I use a search engine in two ways: 1.) basic information like how to spell a word (auto correct on my phone is crap now - ef Google). For that even the Google AI answer is good enough. Or, 2.) Very specific information on a specific thing that is uncommon. For that Google is crap and ignores specific words in your search so it can produce more common results that it has sold more advertising for. Now even if I use quotes results still favor the 'common' answer.