Well AI is destroying search, one of the main points of AI is to design an architecture where ads and Not Bullshit can come together in an organic, inseparable union that regulators can’t figure out how to reasonably demand be artificially severed.
The cardinal sin for Google with search engines is it is too obvious when something is a manipulated advertisement vs. actual search result and A.I. perfectly “solves” that problem.
Google needs to be broken up.
Number of search queries is such a bad metric for quality of your product. If your search is trash then the user is going to need more queries to get a satisfactory answer. That is, until they stop using your service of course.
yah, that’s the point. They go for queries because each query, theoretically, means more ad views and more ad views means more money. So they made the search worse to increase query count.
Like, this was intentional and understood internally. Not saying the people who actually carried it out liked what they were doing, but management said to make number go up, so they did.
I would hope that any competent person can see that this can not end well.
Google must know that they are not a monopoly in search.
The personal incentives for leadership does not align with long term well being of the company.
Executive compensation is derived from quarterly or yearly metrics, if it loses the company influence and success long term, so be it. The board choose those incentives because it served their goals, and likely because it’s what shareholders have asked for, perhaps because the shareholders are largely similar institutions with similar incentive structures.
Ultimately they answer to pension funds and other such retirement focused clients, IE those who will not be here long enough to suffer from the consequences 10 or 20 years out. Or at least where the predominance of the clientele are such.
Google search was good 20 years ago. It sucks now.
They over capitalized it.
Plus they’re evil af
I don’t disagree with your conclusion, but I think part of why it sucks now is all the Search Engine Optimization, of people trying to game Google into showing you their website, and only necessarily the one most pertinent to your search
There have been former Google employees saying they had solutions to deal with SEO, but they were vetoed by the ads side of business, since better results reduce “engagement”.
That’s part of it. The other part is that Google, and other search engines, assume you’re clueless and try to “fix” your query for you, and you can’t stop it because they’ve been removing support for searching exact words or using boolean expressions or excluding words.
sus of them to drop the slogan “don’t be evil”
The thing is though, despite Google not being my primary search, shout-out SearXNG, it doesn’t suck now for me.
If I’m looking for information, Google is great and the AI summaries provide everything I want.
If I’m looking for a song or artist discography, Google again is great.
It’s only when I’m looking for sites that I tend to not even bother with Google.
I’ve been running my own searxng instance for a while now. It is very good 99% of the time. Miles better than the garbage that google generally returns.
Switched to ecosia for private use and qwant for professional use. Much better than google and they’re creating their own search index now
Sadly qwant isn’t available in my country :(
Too bad, I’d suggest Ecosia next or if that is not an option something like startpage
There’s a few thing ecosia still gets wrong or offers the wrong answer. But 80% of the time it is correct.
Using it on all my devices.
I personally don’t really have any issues with that anymore. Used to be like that years ago but has improved massively. Mainly their image search thats a bit meh
