IMHO Google has been in decline since ~2010 or so, but it's only recently that the dive in quality became very noticeable. Try searching for anything even mildly technical outside of software, and you are presented with pages upon pages of completely irrelevant SEO spam. Automotive repair manuals (for very old cars) are one example; it used to be that you could easily find a link to a PDF, and the results were otherwise mostly relevant; but now you get only sites claiming to sell it to you, and more SEO spam.<p>Two more examples are error messages and IC part markings --- searches are flooded with results that <i>do not even contain all the words in the query</i>. I didn't put those words there for no reason, ignoring them is absolutely unacceptable. This becomes ridiculous when you search for error numbers, where a search containing the exact number and the word "error" gets flooded with plenty of useless results about <i>other</i> errors.
In my opinion, "the Feed" ruined the internet. The news feed, the Twitter feed, the Reddit feed, etc. The addictive nature of the Feed, and the tendency to reward dramatic or outrageous or ridiculous content leads to the herd mentality and mindless dogpiling that occurs on these platforms. And then, because expression is compressed into short form soundbites, pics and videos, the platforms actively inhibit constructive, complex discussion. This is one reason I like podcasts and why, for example, Joe Rogan has become popular. The demand for long form, complex discussion is higher than the supply the internet currently provides.
> Search for "GM" and the Gmail homepage ranks prominently. Is Google pushing its own products on people? Well, yes, but not here. This is an example of a query refinement algorithm at work. Google is altering its results in recognition of the fact that many people who search "gm" subsequently search for "gmail."<p>I tried this and there are three news articles about General Motors, an infobox for General Motors, 4 search results for General Motors (their web page, another of their pages, a New York Times article about them, and the Wikipedia article about them), a box containing tweets from General Motors, two more news articles about General motors, and finally a link to GMail. Then the other "GMs" start, including GraphicsMagick for node.js. I think they did a pretty good job interpreting "GM" here, and I don't think the Internet is exactly ruined.
Every complaint in the article is about the behavior of the website named google dot com. Google dot com is not the internet. If the complaints were about how Google is changing the behavior of other websites I could maybe somewhat get behind that. But in light of the content of the article the title makes no sense whatsoever.<p>"Google sometimes gets things wrong" would be a more accurate title. It wouldn't get any upvotes, nor deserve any (surely it's obvious that a website trying to be as many things as Google does will sometimes be inaccurate). But it would be more truthful.
Have to be honest, I'm surprised the article wasn't about SEO. That gets a lot of blame for ruining the internet, especially on tech sites.<p>But Google's propensity to reward sites/pages that are popular or new rather than those which are actually more accurate/better in terms of quality is definitely an issue.
One example I came across recently: if you search for "Amiga floppy disk capacity" (<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=amiga+floppy+disk+capacity" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=amiga+floppy+disk+capacity</a>), you get "1.76 MB", which is completely wrong. Of course, the Wikipedia article which Google's algorithm chose to extract this information from doesn't mention the actual capacity of "standard" Amiga floppies (880 KB): "Most Amiga programs were distributed on double-density floppy disks. There are also 3.5-inch high-density floppy disks, which hold up to 1.76 MB of data, but these are uncommon." - so Google picked the first number it found (the "uncommon" one) and ran with it. I'm just wondering which executive thought having this "feature" would be a good idea?!
> Google has become a card catalog that is constantly being reordered by an angry, misinformed mob.<p>Ever heard of PageRank? Google was literally founded on an algorithm that uses the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob" to determine importance/relevancy. Obviously this is only one factor in search results (and may not even be used anymore), but this approach is what has made Google successful.<p>I don't disagree with the general point that the amount of content in today's Web makes the job of a search engine much harder. Perhaps some of Google's techniques lower the result quality for some users, for some queries. That's a much more boring title for a blog post, I guess.
We've rewritten the linkbait title, as the site guidelines ask. I used what seems to be the first netural and representative phrase from the article itself. If someone can suggest language that's more neutral and representative, we can change it again.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>
When I first starting making websites in 1996 I would market them by going to other similar websites and we would link to each other. Also, there were webrings and directories. Now if you link to each other Google thinks you are gaming their search engine and will demote your link and possibly your entire site.
Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a search engine.<p>It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.
Some years ago when i wanted to search for something, my only concern was to guess how it may be written dont on a page, so Google can find it for me.<p>I could click next as long as i needed. I could refine query to get better results.<p>But now result list is extremely limited. Refining query gives the same result.<p>Google was once a search engine that allowed to discover content. Now, it is not.<p>You could write an article and Google indexed it and showed it if people searched for it. Now it does not work that way. If your audience visits other pages than yours, it will show irrelevant info from these pages rather than perfect match from yours.<p>And also Patelisms. Once, a short post was enought for Google to index it. Now it has to be essencially a book. It does not need to answer any question, as long as it has a length of a book and thousands of illustrations.<p>I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching query, not guessing answers. Giving the freedom to explore rather than giving cheap crappy answers.
> The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and push back, like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you say you are.<p>What does this even mean?<p>The web wasn't "supposed to" be anything. Though I'm not sure what magic search engine OP actually has in mind and how it's supposed to work.<p>Besides, one of the modern mysteries is that we're in the age of instant information yet you'll notice how many people will write up an entire comment online or bicker IRL instead of doing a cursory search. I don't think it's the internet creating human stupidity / laziness. Unfortunately we had that long before, and search engines simply try to show the best results with minimal context.<p>Also, I think discussion around tech would be much improved if we tried to come up with a better idea whenever we go through the trouble of complaining about something. Anyone can enumerate why things are suboptimal, and usually when you try to come up with alternatives, you find out it's just trade-offs with no ideal solution.<p>Trying to pitch an alternative solution (like how a search engine should work) helps drill down into real conversational bedrock that's much more interesting.
What a bizarre piece.<p>We have low-quality content generation not because of Google but because of the low cost of publishing (which the author even mentions). It's exactly why we have email spam: it costs nothing to send. To repurpose a Chris Rock bit, "if sending an email cost $5,000 you'd have no more spam email".<p>What's the alternative being touted here? No Google? Making things harder to find? Seriously?<p>I'd say a far bigger issue is people sharing content from and to people who think the same, creating these myopic echo chambers of self-reinforcing beliefs.<p>Google may do a questionable job at filtering out provably false content but people are way worse at that.<p>Within such a system it's too easy to foster fear, anger and hate and to propagate provably false information. Anti-vaxxers are just one such group that seem to thrive in this informationless world.
As an experiment, I have taken the habit in the past year to write down search queries I'm making along with a short explanation of what I expect to find (and sometimes even comments on the results) as I was also starting to wonder if I'm the problem given results seemed to get less and less relevant for a while.<p>With the benefit of hindsight, I'd highly recommend it and confirmed my suspicion that my queries weren't the problem, unfortunately.<p>It also showed queries are usually only advanced topics as one of my other habits (writing down summarized information in my wiki) lets me usually skip searching online for low-hanging fruits or information I already encountered.
I really wish there still existed a search engine which would absolutely, without reservation of any sort, simply respect the quote and minus operators. I searched both DDG and Google this morning for something with a minus operator, and the search results for both included the unwanted keyword in the bloody page title. And no, quotes never ever meant "search for similar terms", but the big players now just ignore all the syntax the power users have been used to for decades. Luckily the "site:" prefix still seems to work, but for how long?
The real problem that happened to Internet and is more or less predestined to happen to anything popular enough:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September</a>
Google was designed to prioritize popularity from the very beginning: that's what their original PageRank algorithm did. Their algorithm has no way of knowing a concept like "accurate". If almost all of the links on a given topic go to BlatantlyWrong.com, and when everyone clicks on the BlatantlyWrong.com link and not the AccurateButBoring.org result that is #2 on the page, the users will reinforce the wrong answer.
Alternative thread:<p>Google shapes the Internet and that shape leaves many things in ruins.<p>Google shapes the Internet by motivating so many people to produce content to make money through advertising. Most people make virtually nothing, a few people make a lot. There is an enormous amount of content on the internet whose driving purpose of making money is secondary to that of sharing something with the world.<p>Google shapes the Internet through it's algorithm. Ever read or angrily scroll through pages of BS when trying to find a recipe? The only reason anyone does that is for google. My grandmother's recipe for deviled eggs was stored on an index card in a box on the stove. I bet it didn't have 200 bytes of data. A search algorithm can't do much with that so everybody has to add a grand story about their grandmother, her toenails, and how nice a vacation to the Balkans was which nobody ever actually took. It also has to be on top to force people to spend more time on the site, so they're more "engaged".<p>I just want to know a good amount of time to hard boil eggs in an instant pot, but fuck me for wanting to know the number of minutes. "Organizing information" became being as much of an impediment as possible and directing me to the winner of the SEO race.<p>Before Internet advertising was so popular people would put things out there much more just because they wanted to, not for some profit motive. Now everybody doing that is doing it on somebody else's platform, making somebody else money, and often tracking everybody who comes past.<p>Much of the ruins are "caused" by Google, because Google won the race, next in line would have done the same thing. Probably.<p>It occasionally brings up the question of how to fix it. That probably requires new transport layers, new browsers, and well chosen limitations. Doubtful it would get off the ground. Decentralized solutions tend to get overwhelmed with extremely unsavory things. A new "browser" based on an entirely different stack would be hard to compete, especially if your goal was eliminating ads and tracking and general money-grubbing.
Google didn't stop there. It ruined the internet even at protocols level. Google engineers didn't understand the beauty and simplicity of the original internet protocols, and were in a position to trace the evolution path of such algorithms without any of the elegance and equilibrium the original designers had. Now if you want to make an HTTP query you have to understand an incredible amount of details. Before that with adsense Google forced the web to evolve into a clickbait arena. Google is the worst thing that ever happened to the internet.
A lesson in optimizing the wrong cost function. The internet set information free. And like the millennia before, the masses congregated to gossip, laugh, fight, and whatever else helps pass the time.
Can anyone suggest alternative search engines, please? I research the following two areas (1) history and (2) website maintenance and SEO info. Thanks in advance.
I tryed to search an article / press release, I saw about Corona in january. But it seems I can't search for "just from january" there is now so much news about Corona out there, there is no chance to find this article. And much worse, even I know some key words, Google does present most of the search results by totaly ignoring the half of my keywords.
There's actually a person named Henry Beard.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Beard" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Beard</a><p>(I have several of his humorous Latin phrasebooks.)
I think I am much more likely to find the truth about a question I have with Google than asking on a BBS forum or browsing through a curated list of links on Yahoo.<p>That's like saying Gutenberg ruined books because now I can find books full of BS.
Speaking of popularity over accuracy:<p>> <i>Instead, Google has become like the pampering robots in WALL-E, giving us what we want at the expense of what we need.</i><p>I'm guessing this is referring to "WALL-E shows how the technology will make us lazy and fat" meme. I've watched WALL-E for the first time quite recently, and I notice little details, and I can say that WALL-E is <i>not</i> showing that message. It's actually explained quite explicitly in the movie that the fatness of people is the side effect of prolonged stay in space, and not of their dependence on technology.
The worst is when you search for important information and you get flooded with SEO crap.<p>Try searching for 'retirement for French people leaving in the UK'... It is close to impossible to find anything relevant.
My thesis is that smart phones ruined the internet with the rise of Apps and a different, less text-based interaction with the internet.<p>In general, I think we would all be better off if phones just supported calling and texting.
Google has been emphasizing click-baity results for years now. A moderately complex query for X will usually be filled with "Top 10 X" or ignores the context. Their results (on web search as well as YouTube) also seem to be biased against Apple and Microsoft which feels a bit scummy.
100% correct. I am right now doing an experiment and observing that posting everyday some low quality text spinned articles amplified the high quality articles at the point where some obscure high quality articles with ZERO organic traffic for months suddenly received organic traffic.
It's all perspective.<p>Google didn't ruined the internet. In fact, the internet isn't in ruin. Perhaps the author should reconsider treating Google, or any search engine, as sources of truth.<p>And if Google ruined the internet, then why give them more power by using Gmail?
Rubbish! I just searched for `gm` no capitalization, nothing and got a page full of results for General Motors, from news articles to the wikipedia page.<p>I searched for `dentist pulled ex boyfriends teeth`<p>You do see the excerpt, but right underneath that you see the Snopes link.<p>I don't think Google should be in the business of debunking articles written years ago. As long as it's relevance algorithms can brings up contrasting sources, in this case the ABC news article and the Snopes stories. It's bad journalism from ABC that they haven't marked that article as redacted even though it's been proven false.<p>Recently I remember, seeing that the google card UI for the news marked an article as Satire, because in-fact it was a Satire article. I'm not sure if that's because the original article embedded some information that helped Google discover this.<p>They do a pretty good job at organizing information and making it available.
It also emphasizes liberal media over conservative media. It's often more challenging then it needs to be to find conservative content even when you know what you're looking for and you're trying to find it again.
which are some interesting search engines, do ya folks recommend. I recently ran into dogpile.com. really relevant results. please don't recommend ddg | bing as ddg simply mirrors bing.
google has never been good. Sheeple just jumped on the band wagon and started using it despite it never being any better than the compition. People are dumb and instead of trying to learn they would rather just follow.
tldr; (don't shoot me i'm just the messenger): if google says it's true it must be. This is bad because people are dumb so they will just look at what one search engine says without checking sources and believe that to be the truth.
The author had a few bad queries and chalks the whole thing up to "Google Ruined the Internet". This is akin to having a bad experience with airline food and declaring that flying has ruined travel. It is absurd, it reeks of the stallman-esque style of negative, borderline luddite spew. Instead of offering a solution, this person just rants.<p>Google has been a pivotal center of the internet - information has never been easier to find! Ease of access to information does not, however, alleviate the need placed upon the reader to sift out fact from fiction.<p>As a thought experiment, would our luddite-esque author friend prefer that Google was the arbiter of truth, rather than trends? I certainly would not.