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- cross-posted to:
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It would be nice if they’d make “web” search the good old keyword search we used to have that made Google good, now that normies will just use the AI search and it doesn’t have to care about natural language anymore.
Keyword searches stopped being useful years ago. Every site owner stuffed every single word they could think of into that field making the whole thing effectively useless.
It’s like how they’re now returning results stuffed to the brim with AI-written crap. Google can only show what’s on the web and that’s all the web is now.
They could attempt to quantify how gamed the result is and reduce its ranking. Also punishing domains with lower ranking the more they return SEO optimised pages. They could also increase the ranking of older pages.
This doesn’t really help google, it only really improves their search results. Google wants these hyper SEO optimised results with lots of advertising. Additionally, the less relevant the result is the more searches a person does. Each search is an additional set of ad impressions.
Google search is better than ever. Because it generates more advertising opportunities for google. Google isn’t in the business of returning good search results, they are in the business of displaying ads.
They could attempt to quantify how gamed the result is and reduce its ranking.
A day later, Gomes emailed Fox and Thakur an email he intended to send to Raghavan. He led by saying he was “annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.” in a long email, he explained how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically added that they could “increase queries quite easily in the short term in user negative ways,” like turning off spell correction, turning off ranking improvements, or placing refinements — effectively labels — all over the page, adding that it was “possible that there are trade offs here between different kinds of user negativity caused by engagement hacking,” and that he was “deeply deeply uncomfortable with this.” He also added that this was the reason he didn’t believe that queries were a good metric to measure search and that the best defense about the weakness of queries was to create “compelling user experiences that make users want to come back.”
Google’s Execs have been degrading the quality of search to increase engagement with ads.
Google wants these hyper SEO optimised results with lots of advertising
Its a bit worse than that, because the goal is to get you to scroll around and look at multiple search result pages trying to find what you want. Every new page you visit contains new ads. So Google doesn’t want you to click the first thing you see. The goal is to show you a bunch of bad results and force you to test more and more links, hunting around for what you used to find easily.
hear hear
I’ve been becoming irritated lately with search in other apps being taken over by their flavor of AI. I use the Microsoft Swift keyboard on my phone and it’s now trying to inject their AI search results over my Google searches in Firefox and the results take me to Bing.
Then today I was watching a video on Instagram and the screen went off. I lost of the video as the app refreshed when I turned on the screen again. I tried to search for it but now IG search has been turned into a Meta AI search. It offers AI answers instead of the videos I was looking and it seems like it’s the only option.
WTF are they messing up search across the platforms? Get off my lawn!
They‘re turning the internet into a mutated form of free TV. You only get to see what they want you to see and there are ads around every corner.
Of course the goal is to make you switch to a mutated form of pay TV. You still only get to see what they want you to see but there‘s a bigger pool of crap now.
To put it bluntly: After they cornered the market, they‘re killing the internet.
a mutated form of free TV.
Fantastic description!
Similarly, Casey Newton described it as “Managed decline”, on which I riffed “big tech is moving on from the internet”.
But yea, something relatively drastic is happening here. The big-tech end of the internet is no longer the internet we used to have. As you say: Mutated Broadcast TV.
the absolute state of capitalism-driven internet in the year 2024: you have to choose a specific option on an internet search engine website in order to search the internet.
Google isn’t just a search engine any more and hasn’t been for nearly a decade. Over the years it has slowly become humanity’s general-purpose information indexer. That includes the Web but it’s restricted to it. Add in some advertising and that’s Google.
I’ve already opted out… of Google
Can I opt out of the LLM bullshit “articles” in the results? Let me also opt out of the SEO bullshit “articles” and I’ll start using Google again.
Can I opt out of the LLM bullshit “articles” in the results?
Of course not. Hell, the entire “AI Opt-Out” is pure pastiche. Just the illusion of choice, in a system that exists to maximize the number of ads you see no matter what you do.
I want to go back 20yrs in time and confuse people by showing them this headline
You know the ads have gotten ridiculous when the advertising company says “hey, maybe we ought to cool it a little.”
How long until they kill this because they see that they could potentially make even a penny more per user by shoving AI down your throat completely?
Where’s the button?
You need to input “duck.com” on the search bar. /s
We’ll see how long this one lasts.
The duck used to be pretty good but now it seems like a jumble of crap.
What is good now? (And free)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But independent websites like HouseFresh and Retro Dodo have pointed out how their businesses have gotten “buried deep beneath sponsored posts, Quora advice from 2016, best-of lists from big media sites, and no less than 64 Google Shopping product listings,” in the words of HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro.
Search for “best home arcade cabinets,” one of Retro Dodo’s bread-and-butter queries, and it’s no longer buried — it appears on page 1.
HouseFresh still doesn’t get page 1 billing for “best budget air purifiers” — but it’s higher up, and you’re no longer assaulted by an eye-popping number of Google Shopping results as you scroll:
As far as I can tell, the order of Google’s search results seem to be the same regardless of whether you pick “web” or “all.” It doesn’t block links to YouTube videos or Reddit posts or SEO factories… and I still saw (smaller!)
But it is a giant opt-out button for people who’ve been aggravated by some of the company’s seemingly self-serving moves, and a way to preserve the spirit of the 10 blue links even as Google’s AI efforts try to leave them behind.
Right now, the company warns that it may not always appear in the primary carousel on desktop at all — you may need to click “More” first and then select “Web.”
The original article contains 616 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
There’s also the Verbatim search found under Tools -> All Results. The URL parameters are
&udm=14for web search and&tbs=li:1for verbatim.
Combine the two and you get a very clean page with search results that actually have all the terms you were looking for.On my Android’s Firefox, I have always gotten this style of “web” result in addition to the instant answers. There’s a plugin to “fix” it, but I think it’s a downgrade
I like my Kagi investment more every day.
edit: why the duck am I getting down voted for that? If you disagree with me spending my money however the fuck I want (forma search engine for example), at least drop a sentence or two as to why…
I don’t know why people would downvote someone who is just explaining how they spent their own money. I’m a fellow who buys Coke because it is a very refreshing beverage that tastes great.
Kagi is controversial, had something to do with politics if I remember correctly
Oh, dear… tell me that this is not about the audacity they had in daring to query the brave search API as one of many search engines! The argument here is beyond petty in my eyes, downvoting and not engaging in a conversation is even more petty….
