Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.
The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation
The amount sadness for the loss of Google Search accuracy due to ad infiltration the author writes here shows how much of a corporate brand dick rider a lot of people are.
These corporations do not give a fuck about you, so mourning their loss is so pathetic.
No one cares Google sucks now. If you do, go get a fucking life. Move on and use something else for fucks sake. They won’t care if you’re dead, why do you cry when these corporations die?
it’s not that the company died, it’s that collective progress was sacrificed for greed.
Not everyone’s got the capability to make up for the lost utility in the tool themselves. Should they just go fuck themselves?
Yes, SloppySol, they should indeed go fuck themselves.
Ah. Well.
There it tis.
Maybe because it’s hard to find stuff now? I don’t care about the company.
I’m not sad that Google turned out to be evil because I care about Google. I don’t care about Google. I’m disappointed in no longer being able to search for and find the things online on any search engine.
Right, so with all me very specific troubleshooting questions I should go where exactly?
Ecosia? Very limited search results
Yandex? More obscure results, probably not what I’m looking for
Bing? Ok on general stuff, not great on very specific questions
Yahoo? Never tried it, heard the enshittification has become bad
Duckduckgo and similar? Proxying Google
Edit: apparently it’s proxying Bing and not Google. Idk if that’s better but I got that wrong.
There is no way to get around Google. Everything else is either highly specialized, very limited or unusable in general.
Also feel free to chime in with your experience, I’m so down to hear what everyone has to say.
I’m pretty sure Duckduckgo proxies Bing, not Google.
I’ve been enjoying Kagi, although it also proxies google and others, and you have to pay for it, and I was dismayed to read on Lemmy recently that the CEO may be a sea lion. So yeah, the search for good search continues I suppose
https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
For folks not understanding the sealioning reference.
https://d-shoot.net/files/kagiemails.txt
The author is probably weren’t aware that their blog post get a huge engagement on hacker news and the ceo got a lot of flak there, which was probably why he felt the need to reach out and “correct” the author.
As a concept, paid search engines is actually a good idea. It incentivize the company to produce great result so their users won’t search over and over (which reduce their profit), unlike google which incentivized to reduce search quality so their users have to search over and over and see more ads (per the article). If it’s not kagi, I hope other paid search engines start to appear in this space. Indexing the web is expensive, and after seeing what happened with google, it’s clear that free ad-suported search engine is not the way to go now.
There’s an awful lot of things where if the incentives were to keep paying users happy instead of keeping advertisers happy we would see very different results from the service. Unfortunately, for an awful lot of these services people don’t want to pay for them, or at least don’t want to pay what it costs to make them financially viable.
The high cost of housing is squeezing people all over the globe and we’re seeing a spike in homelessness in first-world countries from USA to Australia, where the affordability of housing is out of control, on top of explosive inflation of food costs.
It may not be that they “don’t want to pay” but simply not enough people have enough discretionary income to pay enough to make the business financially viable.
I mean, that’s what happened to Beeper and while I was a very early on their sign up list I decided to never give them any money. When it became clear they weren’t able to keep things going on how much money they were making from paying users: Micigovsky sold to a larger company.
I think it’s an issue that the services they’re offering actually cost more than the market is actually effectively able to bear and they’re trying to hide that fact with advertising and data sales to cover operating costs.
More simply put: Consumers don’t actually have enough money anymore to be able to support a business, and businesses essentially now must rely on other businesses as customers to be able to functionally exist financially. Only other businesses have the finances to support new business.
Searx exists and is decentralized although as for the quality of results that’s up in the air
DDG proxies Bing you silly fuck
Use SearXNG
It’s not just google that sucks. All of the rest have tanked/sucked ass to begin with.
It used to help me greatly at my job (software development). I’m using mostly DDG as a replacement but it just isn’t even close to what Google used to be years ago.
Dude, no. Having good search results matter. People are directly influenced by what comes out at the top of search results. Finding a good reference makes the difference between a well sourced claim and just talking out of your ass. It absolutely has an effect on public discourse at large.
It doesn’t have to be Google, but Google was so good at it for so long that we’re now kinda lost.
Then either adapt or die. Move on to another search engine, host your own, use an AI LLM or go to the fucking library.
Complaining to a corporation doesn’t do shit unless you affect their bottom line. And so far all these articles and message boards with losers complaining about this have done nothing to slow it down or reverse Google’s trajectory.
You say that because it’s clear you have no fucking clue how difficult a problem this is. This isn’t something you can do overnight, and I’m not even sure a self-hosted solution is possible.
You say that, but it’s clear you have no fucking clue how easy a solution is.
https://yacy.net/
Commercial options:
https://solr.apache.org/
https://www.meilisearch.com/
No, you just haven’t thought through the implications more than a single step.
The real trick is SEO. These systems will be gamed. Google used to handle this by using its monopoly on search to enforce rules. It wasn’t perfect, but it kept the worst spam from being in the top five results for the most part. Doing this self-hosted would mean a million users having to agree to do the same thing to punish spam results, and that does not work.
And then there’s the problem of crawling and storing the entire web. Doing this for specific topics is doable. The entire web is not. Not for a home user with limited budget. YaCy’s P2P mode might be a way around that, but it’s also not really “self-hosted” anymore.
Microsoft dumped tons of money into making the second best search engine, and it’s a bit of a joke. This is not an easy problem.