Pseudo-monopolies are great at extinguishing imagination like that, and tbh Google search (as I understand its basic setup) was only as good as it was thanks to timing and few really good competitors.

  • Brkdncr@artemis.camp
    30·
    1 年前

    Did you sleep through the search engine wars? Not a single search engine was good. There were sites dedicated to sending your search to all of the search engines at once.

    Google showed up and it was game over. Their ad sales took off, and then they came out with gmail with 1gb of free storage and everyone went nuts for it since trying to stay under 15mb for your local isp was a pain in the ass.

    Google disrupted very hard and continued to do so in many ways for a long time.

    • realitista@lemm.ee
      10·
      1 年前

      Yea but it’s not the case today. I get as good or better results out of duck duck go, and bing is good too now. The only reason to continue using Google is if you love ads.

      • Elle@lemmy.worldOP
        5·
        1 年前

        Yep. Some of the replies here are getting tied up in Google/search engine history, which doesn’t matter as much with how the space is now and how Google’s being better in the past wasn’t necessarily entirely good given that it destroyed competition and/or has deterred much competition.

        Ideally there would have been some check to address the rise of their pseudo-monopoly on search to ensure the service it provided remained decent so we wouldn’t be having this discussion, but “free” markets go brrr.

      • sheogorath@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 年前

        For me it’s still hit or miss when you’re searching for specific troubleshooting error codes or programming. Sometimes Bing or DDG will miss the point entirely and show me things with no relation for my search query at all.

        • realitista@lemm.ee
          1·
          1 年前

          Interesting. There was a time when I noticed that DDG didn’t scan as often and so wouldn’t have the very latest news, but now they are functionally identical to me. If I don’t find something on one, I’m pretty surprised how I don’t find it in more or less the same way on the others