Technology

I've said (and read) it before: the concept of a great search engine is exactly at odds with advertising. A good search engine gives accurate results fast, while the purpose of advertising is to show users what advertisers pay to show them. In other words, it's the difference between showing users what they want to see, versus showing users what advertisers want them to see.

Google knows that the more irrelevant results it returns, the longer you spend looking, which translates into more opportunities to show ads.

from the company that now completely ignores all the search syntax they trained us on – when -, +, "..." actually meant something

Google always seems to default to thinking that I am looking to buy something. It's very nauseating. This is what Google shopping was supposed to be for. Search should be completely separated from shopping.

Cory Doctorow’s post this morning – Google’s enshittification memos

“Google search is so bad you might as well ask Jeeves.”

Google‘s ‚auto complete‘ is driving me nuts sometimes and it‘s also prevalent on Youtube. I mean just scrolling through completely unrelated suggestions in Youtube‘s search results tells you how little they care to show you what you actually want and rather something that makes them more money one way or another. But the direct fiddling with actual search quarries is just malpractice for a search engine.

I hate Google

And yet their shopping search engine is still trash. It kind of surprises me that nobody has managed to make a good product search engine in all those years, they are always full of duplicates of the same product, fail to group related products together, missing tons of products, fail to take account of shipping costs, lack advanced search options, lack reviews and whatever. Steam with its user tag and reviews is reasonably good, but obviously just limited to just Steam games itself.

that's part of the reason I rarely use Google anymore

When I first switched off gmail there started to be a ton of stories that talked about Google doing terrible things with gmail. Now that I've recently given up Google search I'm seeing stories like this.

Either I have Spidey-sense for Google's skeletons getting exposed or it's that thing where you buy a car then see the same model everywhere. But in my case it's like I sold a car and now see the same model everywhere, on the side of the road with the engine on fire.

Kagi solves this problem

I dunno about you, but THIS Queerie is trying their best to de-Google.

And the shitification is confirmed.

I use the perplexity app now. It's okay.