Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain

> A company that can't figure out the difference between a scam like Better Homes and Gardens and a rigorous review site like Housefresh should be pouring every spare dime it brings in into fixing this problem. Not buying default search status on every platform so that we never try another search engine: they should be fixing their shit.

It&#x27;s the very definition of selling out. This seems to be a very common trend with the vast majority of all previously respected institutions (at least in the USA). They have all sold out (literally sold the company, in many cases) and have now abandoned all principles (or pretenses) of decency and provision of value to customers. Now they are just trading on past integrity that is no longer reality. They will coast on their dwindling reputations for as long as they can get away with it.<p>The attitude is &quot;Fuck you, pay me.&quot; but wrapped in massive amounts of PR spin in an attempt to obfuscate the realty and deflect the blame.

The framing of this as a Google issue would suggest that other search engines wouldn’t have this issue, but I’m not sure that’s true? The “air purifier” search on DDG seems to give the same set of blogspam results: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?t=h_&amp;q=best+air+purifier+for+pet+hair&amp;ia=web" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?t=h_&amp;q=best+air+purifier+for+pet+hai...</a><p>Can someone with Kagi check to see if Kagi does better here?

The abstract thesis here is that if you have a near-monopoly in some domain, where the product&#x27;s quality is dependent on someone else, for example,<p>* links and content on pages that Google search engine ranks<p>* reviews on the Amazon market<p>then everyone is going to use every trick in the book to come out on top, and that will just constantly degrade your product.<p>If there was competition in the domain, then the tricks used for one search engine might not work for other search engines. So the situation might be better in the long run.

I feel like there is another big point being hinted at in these articles but not quite stated: Better Homes and Gardens is committing fraud and lying to website visitors.

Amazingly written, hilarious, but I figured out what’s frustrating me: the focus on being a consumer. If you’re using words like “enshittocene” I feel you should think a little more about writing a post focusing on why Google isn’t helpful for product reviews. Google n co are destroying <i>democracy</i> and <i>the planet itself</i>, and to spend our final days complaining that sometimes people buy bad products seems out of touch.<p><pre><code> Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it. The deal we made with Google was, &quot;You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information. </code></pre> I don’t think it’s fair to say Google has “one job”, and I think this is the core example of the status-quo bias mentioned above. We didn’t agree to a deal with Google! We never had a chance. Maybe this author did, but 99% of people think of Google like Walmart IMO: a fact of life.

Maybe it&#x27;s legitimate, but this story got ramped off the front page of HN faster than I could send it to a few folks.

While it seems google is partly to blame for SEO garbage they should be filtering, they can’t really be responsible for the fact that the internet is mostly overwhelmed by machine generated garbage. Copies of copies of garbage that google simply wasn’t designed to handle.

So... the problem isn&#x27;t that Google search isn&#x27;t good but that (1) the ads sold are many and to some people who are scammers, and (2) enough of how the search engine algorithm works has become common knowledge and exploited by SEO experts seeking to inflate the relevance of sites by using what they know of how Google ranks search results.<p>But for this to become a problem Google first had to come up with a system better than everyone else&#x27;s.<p>Sounds like a classic dilemma to me.

It’s sad that a product that I used as a North Star has lost so much momentum. Search has only had incremental updates but nothing major. ChatGPT has been the biggest development in search…<p>It’s one of the reasons why I started AskPandi as a side project. It’s an answer engine that gives answers without fluff. No link sifting, no ads, no popups, no cookie consents.<p>It’s making browsing the web fun again.

&gt; Last year, Google did a $70b stock buyback. They also laid off 12,000 staffers (whose salaries could have been funded for 27 years by that stock buyback). They just laid off thousands more employees<p>Presumably 12,000 google employees working for 27 years could deliver more benefit to google (and to the world, and probably to google&#x27;s shareholders as well) than a stock buyback?

I&#x27;m guessing what&#x27;s happening is that Google doesn&#x27;t really care and is not really incentivised (in the short term) to provide high quality search results. It wouldn&#x27;t make enough profit to work on that. And if any competitors become threatening enough they have ways of bringing them down that are cheaper than maintaining product or technical supremacy.

Bummer optimizing hiring devs on leetcode skills doesn&#x27;t lead to better search result engineering.

I don’t think this problem is news to anyone anymore.<p>But what I’ve still yet to hear anyone share are good solutions?<p>The situation with Google’s search results is basically identical to the one with Amazon and cheap crappy products. In both cases people seem to have just given up.

Mr. Doctoro is right about goggle being shit.<p>But in the casse of this article, the repeated reference to a &quot;deal&quot; goggle made with us, is just not correct. There was no deal.<p>Goggle never promised anyone that they wouldn&#x27;t flood their search results with shit.<p>Goggle will do whatever makes it the most money, like laying off 1000s of workers while buying back 10s of billions of $ in stock. I bet those workers thought they had a &quot;deal&quot; too, they didn&#x27;t.<p>The only correction is for us citizens to elect legislators, and demand regulation anad breakup of massive monopolies.<p>Instead some of the poorest trailer park trash in the us south are sending their spare nickels to the cheeto&#x27;s gofundme campain. In spite of the fact that he&#x27;s billionaire brat child from a NYC family slum lord empire.<p>So, don&#x27;t expect any of this to change in the us, except to get worse, because at this point american&#x27;s are just too stupid...

Maybe AI will save us.<p>ChatGPT is this blogspam?

I think it&#x27;s that Google thinks it&#x27;s claws are so deeply embedded in our habits that it no longer matters whether their products are any good.