At a recent all-hands meeting, Google search head Prabhakar Raghavan told employees that the world is changing and they have to adjust.

  • eleitl@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    Things definitely changed. 15-20 years ago you actually got good search results instead of unusable crap we get today.

    • mesamune@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      True their competition is actually getting much better whereas they just throw BS at you nowadays. It’s unfortunate but Google is no longer my go-to for searching.

      • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        The issue is that there are 1000 spam sites heavily optimized specifically to exploit Google’s algorithm for every legitimate site. Merely by not being the primary focus of SEO, alternatives have a pretty hefty advantage.

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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      7 months ago

      I was getting decent results up until about a month ago (though partly because I have an extension to block sponsored links and arranges the page as it used to appear around 2010. It was like they just flipped a switch from “good” to “shitty.” Can’t even find images I would grab off the first page when repeating a search from history, now.

    • Num10ck@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      i wonder what will replace it… maybe some way of AI to figure out which websites are deemed good in the eyes of actual human users, and then human users opting into sharing such score charts with each other?

      • eleitl@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        Gen AI is a net negative for the moment, since the deluge of generated low-quality content outweighs convenience of topical results generated by LLMs with natural language queries.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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        7 months ago

        I remember it already was, but everybody knew it was, so search engines were the brute force approach. The intelligent way was to use web directories and to ask friends.

        The enshittification of the web is just one aspect of the enshittification of humanity.