cross-posted from: https://vlemmy.net/post/317922
Alternate title: Google admits Reddit protests make it harder to find helpful search results
Search engines have been becoming increasingly useless for years at this point as SEO gentrification runs rampant and more content moves behind walled gardens like Discord and anything that requires a subscription. Not to mention that Google enshittifies just like everything else. The amount of overly verbose garbage I have to trek through just to not get an answer to my query is far too high. God fucking help us now that AI can generate content, which will be even more garbage to sift through.
Removed by mod
Sometimes it just straight up ignores my search modifiers to send me shit. I know the tech illiterate need their hands held, but bruh.
Google as a search engine is more or less dead. I was only really using Google to search reddit. Now that I’m done with reddit… There goes Google.
Google removing the “do no evil” from their ethos was a very clear indication of the direction they were heading.
“Don’t be evil” is still in Google’s Code of Conduct, it’s just been at the end of the document rather than the start since 2018.
Google did evil shit before and after the change, it’s not quite the big deal that some people make it out to be!
What’s your preferred alternative? I use DuckDuckGo, and it’s… OK. I still often switch over to Google when I’m having a hard time finding relevant results on DDG.
Presearch
Checked it out, stopped reading at “blockchain”.
“Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that’s iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy,” Raghavan reportedly said.
Their search has been getting worse and worse for a long time before the Reddit protest.
Ironically, reddit’s search feature was also trash. If I wanted to find something on reddit I just went to google and appended “reddit”.
IIRC, they cited google as a reason not to work on their own search, since that’s what most of their userbase had got used to searching reddit with anyway by that point.
Reddit also cited 3rd party apps, bots and extensions as a reason to not develop many of the features on their own… and here we are now.
