The problem is that the internet we remember from when google was good no longer exists. Blogs are dead. Personal websites are dead. Noncommercial, informational or niche interest websites are dead. Search sucks primarily because there’s nothing worth searching for anymore.
Yes, we can most of us name real websites that we still read & rely on. When did those sites start publishing? How many of the creator-controlled, non-commercial websites/blogs you read began less than say 5 years ago? I bet the number rounds down to 0.
Google search sure as hell played their part in creating this world, but fixing search isn’t going to bring back an internet worth searching.
I can't believe 'There's no good content anymore.' There are more people; there's more connectivity; there are more digital cameras.
IMHO, the thing that changed was the signal:noise ratio.
When Google started, it was, what? 1:10? 1:100? Interesting pages : crap.
Now it's... 1:10,000? 1:1,000,000?
That turns a challenging problem into a possibly impossible one.
Granted, Google bears culpability in this, because at some point they realized: we can make as much or more money if we optimize for ad delivery than user search intent. And once they showed those cards with a wink, content optimized to this for its own monetization.
A certain amount of people probably would have taken the time to learn how to do something like host a web page on shared hosting or even github pages, but don't because it's both easier to upload to a platform, and you get infinitely more reach - sometimes facilitated by the platform (e.g. TikTok often promotes <10 view videos to gauge them, and will skyrocket a post from an otherwise new account if enough viewers interact with the video).
However, if these platforms exist, there's no telling how many multitudes more people wouldn't even attempt to put stuff online. Life is busy and spending even an hour setting up an online presence on the "open web" is too much for most people.
Yep. Most of the non-developers probably couldn't set up a HTML page. And the developers can also be too busy.
Many years ago, I wrote my own homepage in PHP. With every version of PHP it needed to be fixed again, so after a few years I gave up. I tried to install some existing software, but you need to update that regularly, too often. So now I am happy that there is Substack I can write on (despite complaining about its functionality all the time), because otherwise I wouldn't have a blog.
This is a feedback loop though. It is a reflection of the moderation wars in some ways: Google’s main job now is to try to keep you away from malicious sites as much as find good ones.
So they prioritize ‘known good’ sites (big platforms, major companies, etc.) over unknown, individual sites. Then, since it’s now harder to be seen as your individual site (and less work), this pushes people to move to higher ranked platforms. This increases the ratio of noise (the ratio of spam/malicious sites increases compared to good ones) making it worthwhile to skew more towards results from platforms, etc.
Platforms also have the benefit in that it’s a lot harder for a YouTube video to be malicious, giving them more freedom to take chances recommending unknown content. It still could be hate mail, but at least it’s not going to ransomware you.
I kind of hope some walled gardens pop up and close off other parts of the internet.
I still reflect when I go back on tours of 70s / 80s / 90s media, and while I get some of the "oldies tour" is also kind of a "greatest hits" effect, but there seemed to be a lot more creativity, especially wacky creativity, in the past.
Some of that is callous mass market media calculations by "big media": multi-hundred million dollar movies/games aren't going to be off the beaten path.
What is strange is the ARMIES of "content producers" and all they do is produce things in basically the same way.
So the "SEO" optimization seems to clip the wings of all grassroots content production. Google should have enabled the long tail. It ... sort of ... has, but man its hard to find it drowned out by all the mediocre crap out there.
People don't seem to be isolated from the internet and let some path of creativity percolate for years or even decades like what used to happen. Internet monoculture really seems to be destroying interesting creativity more than it delivers novel creativity from around the world.
"Comorbidity" with this is the death of patience and attention for wacky stuff, people click away too quickly.
About the only actual evidence I can deliver is the oppressive nature of the cinema sequel. For some reason, I just mark the first Matrix movie (1999) as the death of creativity in Hollywood.
However, of course, that may be the point in the 18-40 demo that I aged out of the great popular culture recycling machine. I think a lot of that 18-40 demographic number comes from the fact that by the time you hit 40, you've seen all the tricks, and the repackaging of the tricks/tropes just seems cheap compared to the "original" experience you had with the trick/trope.
I also noticed that starting about 3-6 months ago, most of the things I Google have actual results for maybe the first 1.5 pages, and the rest are websites with URL’s like poltgabdismrvdusvetw.xyz with an obviously scraped/gpt description that will try to get you to give their latest cryptominer or cryptolocker a try. The ones that claim you have a virus, or worse - try to get you to buy McAfee.
oh, do you have an example for a search phrase? What I see is that google images results are pretty bad: stocks/pinterest first and just a couple of pages of the results (even for searches that should return millions of matches).
It's just more consolidated into hubs that are locked down in comparison to the earlier version. It was like 100,000 countries all with their own language and culture and people's and now it's like a handful of huge countries and a few smaller but the dropoff is quick. We organized the Internet the way we organized the world. Some Conways law thing going on I guess.
The content creators got robbed of any of their value. Reddit, Facebook etc all sucked up and monetized the content and gave creators nothing in return except a bit of limited exposure.
One issue for me (maybe it's my ADHD) is that there is almost TOO much content. I can't decide what to read. I have so many tabs of blog posts and such that look interesting that I never get around to. There is plenty of interesting content. More than ever before.
Until youtube or google’s algo decides to kill your chanel without much recourse or get nearly 0 visits because the algo expects some kind of engaging formula. These abuses are enough to warrant not ‘posting content’ (I highly dislike this term) on their platforms at all.
But at the same time I understand that a large number of people choose convenience over managing their own hosting.
Youtube is different from the web. You can't just be informative you have to be informative and entertaining.
There are lots of channels that manage that, sometimes it's fun to watch a knowledgable person explain something or review a product purely out of entertainment even if you will never buy it.
If people are informative an audience will find them, if they're entertaining and audience will subscribe to them.
Whatever downsides youtube has for a creator is vastly outmatched by the upsides for most creators.
I would still speculate that the content that gets published will depend on the environment it's being published in.
A smaller, tighter knit community will encourage the sharing of more intimate details. If, however, all the action is happening on larger stages that pull people's attention out of the phpbb's and into the tiktok reels, those conversations no longer happen, even if the volume of communication has increased 1000fold
To offer a prominent counter-example, consider the success of Substack, Ghost, Medium, and other blogs-and-newsletter platforms. Blogs are thriving for quality writers (especially those with unique experiences), as evidenced by the ability of certain writers (including some I subscribe to) to make a full-time living through these platforms.
Outside of blogs, I personally know people in non-technology fields who have their own personal website, to make it easier for people to contact them and view their portfolio of work. They made their through page builders to avoid the need to learn how to program, and they personally found some collaboration opportunities due to their personal websites. Searching for someone's name and possibly finding their personal website still has value.
Though I do admit that there are far more heavily commercialized or clickbait articles nowadays (such as padded-out listicle-style articles that bury the important information, which may also have questionable accuracy), I personally believe there are still good websites out there to find and learn from, which I've discovered through personal recommendations or searches on niche topics of interest.
A major source of well-written personal websites for me have been those that focus on the use of specialized software (such as Anki and SuperMemo) in spaced repetition: I've learned a lot from excellent recently-published, non-commercial blogs found directly through Google searches. I've also found similar very high-quality and non-commercial personal websites and blogs when searching about other specialized topics, such as workflows to use the Vim text editor to create technical documents with LaTeX typesetting.
I have a blog, like the early 2000’s! I’m also working on a book, hopefully I’ll have it done by the end of this year. The blog is called supermemoadventures. I’ve been using SuperMemo for 17 years, every single day. If you have any questions, feel free to ask here.
Cool! Yeah, at a certain point I was looking for help in my flashcard routine but realized not many people have used a program like SuperMemo for a few years in a row every single day, and I thought it would be a good idea to write down my experiences and observations.
I really enjoyed physicist Michael Nielsen's "Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics," as the post lets the reader learn about the thought process behind a researcher who is highly accomplished in a mathematics-heavy field, in both academia and industry (2019): https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics
I plan to re-read the post as I gain a better understanding of higher-level mathematics over time, but from my first reads, I could relate and better put to words the idea that using spaced repetition to study technical concepts (though I personally always make sure it's not the main method of study, versus practice exercises) can help you better grasp connections between concepts over time.
A statement from the author's article that I still think about from time to time is: "I can’t emphasize enough the value of finding multiple different ways of thinking about the “same” mathematical ideas."
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From a completely different angle, Nicky Case's "How to remember anything forever-ish" is a fun introductory post for giving an overview of what spaced repetition is, in case a friend or colleague is curious about the study method (2018): https://ncase.me/remember/
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For a much older article that contains the fundamentals of making good elements/items/flashcards, Piotr Wozniak's "20 rules of knowledge formulation" is an article that I've referred to time and time again. I treat the rules more as guidelines, as I personally don't use images or cloze deletion, but I've improved my retention and understanding of topics by avoiding questions that ask for lists, and by always trying to understand a topic before making a flashcard about the subject (though this can be flexible to a certain extent, depending on the subject): https://supermemo.guru/wiki/20_rules_of_knowledge_formulatio...
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As a last one that focuses more on the technical aspects of using the SuperMemo article specifically, I applied the information from this article published in 2010 to create a special Google Sheet to make it easier to import spreadsheets into SuperMemo: https://thesupermemoblog.wordpress.com/2010/05/15/exporting-...
Specifically, to import dozens of vocabulary flashcards at once, I open a spreadsheet file (aka workbook) and begin with a main spreadsheet with the English in column A and the translation in column B. A second spreadsheet then contains a copy of the first spreadsheet's information, but appending "Q: " to the column A entries and "A: " to the column B entries.
I then export this as a .csv file, replace the extension to .txt, and then use Vim (though Sublime Text or another text editor equally works well), to replace each instance of `,A` (that is, each instance of a comma that separates each item) with `\rA` (that is, a line break), to fit the import formatting required by SuperMemo.
This process helps a lot for picking up new phrases from newspaper articles and storing them in my records, and then importing them into my spaced repetition software for review without too much typing. I would guess that Anki's import method is easier and more straightforward, but I still do prefer SuperMemo despite the complexity (and lack of mobile access for the version I use), as I prefer the item scheduling. My impression is that in the long run, I have fewer reviews with the same amount of retention, which anecdotally seems to be true so far.
Although what you say is mostly true, I refuse to live in a world where the open web is dead. I run my own blog that does attract a near-zero amount of daily visitors(except of course the countless robots).
Because what is the alternative? Use the sterile platforms provided by Silicon Valley mega Corps? Fuck that.
I will continue self publishing my half baked thoughts on my personal website like it’s 1998. link is in my profile
Works flawlessly with my reader/feed-combination that I call Really Social Sites. RSS needs a new name that winks at the social opportunities, I think. Thanks!
P.S. Space content, always nice to read!
Blogs are dead but YouTube is thriving. I can find endless high quality content on basically any topic. Even compared to 10 years ago it’s so much better today.
I don’t think there has ever been a better time to learn on the internet than today.
Depends what kind of stuff you are trying to learn. If it's tech related, then you probably want text docs. Most of the stuff I want to learn about is physical like cooking or crafts which make video content vastly superior.
It's also not realistically possible to auto generate spam video content like you can for blog posts.
> It's also not realistically possible to auto generate spam video content like you can for blog posts.
It definitely is. If you look for videos just a bit longer then 10 minutes (something to do with YouTube recommendation algorithm) you will notice how much unnatural en spammy conversation and “information” is being told (backed by meme or stock images or just a talking head) before getting to the point of the video (which often is barely 1min of content). Sure it takes more time to actually speak the text and edit the video. But it really feels like generated garbage to fill time which can be easily churned out. Now with the dawn of AI I can only image this getting worse and worse.
Ugh I hate the "obviously padding time with rambling to meet X minutes long" where X = some arbitrary number the YouTube algorithm is prioritizing this quarter. Some things are worth a deep dive with pitfalls laid out in a methodical way. Most things are not.
> X = some arbitrary number the YouTube algorithm is prioritizing
This thing about video length is mostly a myth. "The algorithm" juggles many variables but I've seen no evidence content length is one of them.
There was a very common pattern of rambling to meet the 10m mark because this was a threshold to add a midroll ad to your video and thus make more money.
So your point still applies, it's just purely out of creator greed and not chasing youtube's heuristics.
If the algorithm preferred long videos, you'd be better off with one 10m video as opposed to two 5m videos as it would be pushed harder. Whereas if it was agnostic to video length, the latter would be OK.
Regardless, you're correct that watch time may be a motivating factor in making them stretch content longer than it needs to be though. I don't think they get paid for watch time (it's all about ad impressions or CPMs) but it would positively impact their channel statistics.
Ah you're right. There was a change a while ago that did seem to favour creators that made longer videos over shorter ones, but it's not as cut and dry as watch time = more money
Because not all content creators pad their videos. They often provide links to documentation. You can easily skip through the video and you have the option to watch them on 2x speed which is what I often do.
I wouldn't say blogs are dead. There are still some good ones(swyx.io, simonwillison.net, eugeneyan.com, etc).
There are also a lot of good content in the form of podcasts and newletters(basically blogs with regular update).
I think naturally practitioners/experts have better insider insight about the industry than full time content creators but they can't dedicate as much time to create content. Lots of youtube channels just try to cater to beginners, abuse clickbait titles, recycle content from other sources, fill the videos with low effort memes.
Videos as a medium are also incentivized to reach certain lengths so they can inject ads into otherwise boring and mundane topics.
As an example, try to look up on YouTube how to replace your car fob’s battery (doesn’t matter what brand) and you will absolutely encounter an 8-10 minute video offered up for what’s probably a 15 second value and something the manufacturer could have provided in a decent 3 panel illustration hosted on a static .html page, but won’t.
>for what’s probably a 15 second value and something the manufacturer could have provided in a decent 3 panel illustration hosted on a static .html page, but won’t.
Right, because you're not supposed to do that yourself. You're supposed to go to your dealership and pay them $50 to change the $0.20 battery in 15 seconds. Do you really think you're qualified to do such a difficult operation by yourself?
I actually got into an argument on Nextdoor once because someone was promoting a battery store that charged "only" $20 for this "service", and felt it was a "good value" and got mad that I was pointing out that you can just buy the battery by itself for less than a dollar and do it yourself.
yes! try to learn anything related to home maintenance and it feels like youtube is your only option. and you are stuck trying to scrub through a 20 minute video to find the 10 second slice on info you’re looking for.
The issue I see with this is while there are myriads of blog hosting services, an equal number of vps providers if you want to have more control, and you can even host your blog yourself in your basement if you are so inclined, there is only one Youtube grabbing much of the money and leaving peanuts for the actual creators.
What happened is that people didn’t want to pay for high quality content. So sites need to rely on ads. Delivering more ads is not aligned with user interests. If we lived in a world where people paid for content, the incentives would have been better aligned.
> What changed is that people want to make money with the web
People always wanted to make money on the web, but the sites of people that didn't still appeared in search results. Now search result positioning depends on the amount of ads you're prepared to host. So, the people who are optimizing for revenue are listed way above the people who aren't optimizing at all and are just creating.
There are times when I've searched for a tumblr page literally by the exact and totally unique name and still not found it on the 3rd page of results, all of which were unrelated garbage.
They've decided that they'd rather piss you off than lose money sending traffic to sites that won't pay to play. It's toxic.
That is true. The initial wave was driven by the sheer excitement of being able to “publish”. I do think that the ad supported model is still responsible for what happened next. Ads encourage optimizing for eyeballs and traffic vs quality. And that’s exactly what happened. The good stuff was buried by the ad optimized garbage everyone is complaining about.
Btw, I’m not dogmatically against ads. I believe they serve a purpose and are necessary. Just pointing out the side effects.
25 years ago, people were happy to post their own personal webpage on Tripod for free and look at how many hits their hit counter got, and get thank-you emails from people who liked whatever they posted.
Now everyone wants to get paid for whatever they produce.
I am not sure about “Blogs are dead. Personal websites are dead.” because I find a wide range of interesting blog articles and personal web sites from people I follow on Mastodon and X.
I broadly agree with your points, and yes we can fight back by spending most of our consumption time on personal web sites and blogs. Long form reading feels better than doom scrolling.
This may feel correct, but it's easy to prove that this is not the primary reason search sucks because searching the commercial internet also sucks. By your logic, finding tech companies relevant to your search should be easy since they by and large still put their general info websites on their own domain. Nope. You still get mostly SEO junk.
If you're still not convinced just look at Youtube search. There's no excuse for that to be terrible, yet it is.
I spend a lot of time on Urbit and there are plenty of blogs and nothing is commercial. They're even working on an Urbit search engine now. Not trying to promote Urbit, just saying that whether the internet is like this depends on how you use it.
Using Google to access the web now, is like using the Yahoo portal to access the internet in the early 2000s.
Google itself is reluctant to reward new sites. They throttle every single site and increase the number of visitors they send you in extremely small increments. They'll do things like shuffle the pages that get traffic on your site without increasing the "daily cap" that you're predisposed to. And when asked about this, their answer is that "no, we don't do this", but all you need to verify this is to create a new site and see it for yourself.
But this is great news for the conglomerates that have been around since early 2010s that can now enjoy being always #1 because Google itself has locked those sites in as "reputable" and "trustworthy". You can only imagine how those sites exploit this for personal gain.
I've been running a low-ish volume site since 2014. It gets a YoY increase in traffic of like 20%. We didn't really do much SEO, at least not consistently enough that it warrants a consistent 20% YoY increase.
Then last year I made a English version of that website. Traffic has been very very slow initially, but slowly and steadily increasing. I suspect if we don't do anything to it for a couple years traffic will just keep increasing just like the original.
I generally have better things to do than to jump onto the cargo cult that is SEO, but the GP's description of how Google throttles web sites is exactly what I observe anecdotally, and is exactly how I hypothesized what Google is actually doing (without doing any SEO research).
Of course, there's not going to be any conclusive "proof" of such claims unless they admit it themselves, or unless you start an antitrust lawsuit against Google.
I definitely agree it's not a good idea to route all traffic to a new site that hasn't "proven" itself through some test of time, but that's more evidence that they're probably doing this throttling.
> Search sucks primarily because there’s nothing worth searching for anymore.
I thought the same until recently. Google doesn't appear to be indexing/prioritizing anything that's old, infrequently updated, or noncompliant with AMP, even if it's an authoritative source.
People blame SEO gaming but I'd sooner accuse them of alignment tweaking (all old/outdated beliefs are purged; my queries were religious and controversial in nature). For some topics, there is still an entire other internet out there they pretend doesn't exist...that starts on page 1 of fucking Yandex.
Not advocating for Yandex specifically (I don't trust them) but...try other options (Kagi, Bing, etc.).
The internet points to useful things, those things are still there. It's just that Google search increasingly prioritises recent over relevant, because recent pays the bills.
Blogs are far from dead. Mass appeal is maybe dead. Niches are alive and well. OSR ttrpg blogs paper wargame blogs (fewer) but still more content than I can keep up with.
And niches have always been the strength, the value of the open web. That you and the 14 other people on the planet with same obscure interest can connect.
A lot of what I liked about the fun quirkiness of the old web can be found on TikTok. Huge variety of things I would not have encountered on my own. Recently: footwear suggestions for the Appalachian trail, an absolutely massive ceramic raku firing, 1x1 meter 3D printer, calisthenics tips, clips of the Twilight Zone, handsfree bareback horseriding, independing one-woman Daily Show-style political commentary, synthesizer tutorials, Chinese underground mall walkthrough (psyops propaganda?), glacial pool swimming, etc. All that with no unskippable ads. There have been some enshittification changes: TikTok live and TikTok shop, but overall, it's still great.
Google was supposed to solve the info overload problem that growing networks produce.
Instead they focused on growing the network and making content creation and broadcast of content free.
So today less than .5% of content produced is consumed according to the UN report on the attention economy.
Whats the fix? Content production needs to be scaled down. A better system is required that decides Who gets to broadcast, how much and when. Bandwith Advertising consumes within such a system must have a cap. Now there is no cap. Ads can be shown on everywhere and all the time. "Scaling things up" should be a political/social decision not a business/technical decision.
The focus must be brought back to solving info overload.
Content targeted / display ads would fix this. By design, they pay sites a premium for quality content, unlike user targeting which pays for quality eyeballs.
If user targeting were banned, we’d be back to economic incentives for content creators that are similar to pre-internet media and publishing.
In particular, you’d be paid for having a consistent measurable audience, which means the money would go to distribution channels that had high quality editors and curation. Today’s ad netwoks funnel that money to clickbait farms.
Only partly cuz Content is easy to copy and duplicate and rebroadcast. All of which the platforms have made free and easy. That has to be addressed.
Cuz One journo surfaces info. 6000 journos copy it and broadcast it and all expect to paid.
The solutions have to built around content reduction cuz right now we are over loaded with millions of people creating nothing new and expecting to be rewarded.
Not true. The 6000 copycat “journalists” aren’t going to be able to find quality advertisers for their chatgpt garbage mill / copyright infringement site.
Today, they get paid the same as the original journalists, specifically because ad auctions are designed to transfer all wealth to the middlemen, and therefore commoditized content creation and distribution.
You can't fix search no more than you can fix social meda because search and social media has grown so big that they are politically important and hence state property.
Once search and social media reached critical mass, the state got involved. The state was probably always involved but they took control when it got 'too big to be independent'. When google and social media showed that they can overthrow governments and affect elections, the party was over.
Even if there was an internet worth searching, google would not showing us that. Google will be showing us what the state wants.
'Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase.' - Dune
In a noncommercial context, "search" and "advertising" are mutually exclusive.
An internet where all ordering of information is done via secret algorithms that are constantly being tweaked behind the scenes, optimised to prioritise popularity and other metrics useful to advertising.
Online advertising services companies formed from high traffic websites calling themselves "tech" companies.
In 1997, the founders announced Google in a paper where they vowed to offer a search engine that could be studied in the "academic realm".
But we soon learned Google lacks integrity. Say one thing, do another. Fast forward. Outside of Google, who actually studies the Google search engine. People without any university education, or at least no need for it, calling themselves "SEO consultants".
When Google publishes academic papers about their internal operations is this done to push search engine technology into the academic realm. No. It's purely commercial, a recruiting tactic; Google is "showing off".[1]
High traffic websites incorporated as so-called "tech" companies have sought to bury noncommercial websites beneath all the advertising-driven garbage and/or to discourage web exploration and development outside their walled gardens.
However, it's still possible to use the internet for noncommercial purposes. High web traffic or market cap does not give any single website the authority to define how the internet can be used.
Arguably it's easier to use the internet today than it ever has been.
The web is not the internet. And the internet is not a handful of gigantic websites calling themselves "tech" companies. In practice, the internet is reliant on non-binding cooperation. As such, no one can own the internet, and no one can control it.
One can try. And that's what large so-called "tech" companies have done. It may have worked in the past and it may continue to work, for now.
But things can change, they will change, and Google could become just like AltaVista.
Contrary to most stories people tell about the mid 90's, I actually liked AltaVista better than Google. When someone first showed me Google I was not interested and I did not switch immediately. I liked comprehensive searching, combing through large numbers of results. Google seemed antithetical to that, focusing only on the "top" results.
One difference between then and today is that no one back then was patiently and desperately waiting for something better to come along, publishing articles such as "The End of the AltaVistaverse". There are people today who really want to get past Google and on to something better. They have been waiting for years. Progress has really stallled.
I still remember the day when I read the Slashdot article announcing this new incredible search engine called Google. I was an AltaVista user at the time, along with most IT professionals, and for those who don't know, it essentially had its own search query language. The claim was Google returned back even better results WITHOUT having to specify all those query parameters.
I tried it - it was unbelievable! A simple search box, type in your keyword(s) you're interested in, no query syntax and - voila! Good, relevant results! It was simply amazing! AltaVista essentially died overnight.
But really, Google's biggest technology was AdSense. It's how they make their money. It's why all their other services, save for gmail and google docs, have come and gone. Search has become less and less relevant in today's world. But there was a time when it seemed magical!
In the Pre-google days of the internet you used to have to play "search engine bingo" to find useful results I remember jumping between Lycos, Metacrawler, Altavista and Infoseek and it was still a coin flip if you would get useful results.
Search engines used to require you to use Boolean operators "+" "AND" "OR" "NOT" to filter search results. My high school library had a laminated card next to the internet connected PC (via dial up modem) explaining how Boolean operators worked and with suggested search engines to use (this was around 1996/1997).
The eye opener to me was my high school class was given an assignment to write about the upcoming "G8 Summit", Russia had just joined the G7 creating the G8 and it was a big news story at the time. I can remember how frustrating it was to find any results searching for things required constructing strings like "G+8+Summit OR Group+of+8+Summit"etc in sites like infoseek and still getting nonsense results. I found the information I needed to complete the assignment by going to public library which had copies of various daily newspapers archived I basically quoted newspaper articles to complete the assignment and concluded the internet was useless for finding information. I complained about my situation at home and my Dad Casually mentioned have you tried "google.com" next ay at school I typed "G8 Summit" into google and immediately got relevant results. I was a convert to google immediately it was so far ahead of every other search engine at the time it was like night and day.
I was pretty fortunate. My Dad was a veterinarian who taught himself to program (in Pascal) he knew a lot about a certain era of computing - early 90's MS-DOS 386 era PC's. His tech skills kind of atrophied and stagnated he never really adopted to the Win 9x gui first era of computing but he still had his ear to the ground enough to tip me off about google.
My father thought computers were tools for secretaries - on which he looked down - and could not fathom why on earth it was interesting to me. Then he babbled about the one Fortran class he had to take at university, how backward those punch cards were and how he basically learned nothing. When a computer finally entered the house, I was so exited. The first thing I did was installing a copy of a programming language I got from a teacher and I was very proud to show my father. My father literally threw a tantrum. I basically had anti-mentorship. For the longest time my dream was to be unlike my father.
When my older sister was an elementary school student, a teacher in the computer lab berated her for using Google instead of AltaVista like the assignment wanted. That was an eye-opening moment for her that she remembers today.
I think I was in a middle school computer lab (could have been high school) when one of the other students said, "hey, you should try this new search engine out, it has millions of sites and works really well". And it did - this comment brings me back.
re: “It's why all their other services, save for gmail and google docs, have come and gone.”
I am still bitter they cancelled Google Wave, and then the cool Apache open source version stopped being supported.
A lot of our digital lives fades away when Google and other companies sunset products. I am mostly OK with that, since new stuff gets developed also. We control our own personal domains and web sites, our own writing, and our code. I can live with enjoying tech Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc. produce, hopefully without having strong dependencies on any of it.
I made fun of Google Wave a lot at the time because it wasn't clear what it was for. (Is it chat? Authoring? Google+?)
Eventually one of my friends forced me to try it and ... it was the coolest thing! It worked so well! I used it for note taking and collaboration but not for long because it was cancelled basically immediately.
Somehow I still remember the moment my mom showed me a little blurb in the computer column of our newspaper that mentioned Google! Same as everyone, I tried it and switched immediately.
Sometimes I feel like I am the only person who dropped Altavista for Northern Lights before Google burst onto the scene. I can't even remember if it's a local thing or where they were located but they always had better results than Altavista (in my memory).
I was using alltheweb after Altavista. I don't actually remember it as google being so much better but it had the short goofy name and I found myself going to it more. Also it had a fast clean homepage. I think the actual improvements came later.
I also remember telling people "No, google is not your friend" before 2007, though I don't remember why now.
Yep, me too- I remember reading about Google (actually a friend read the article and told me I'd like it because they ran on Linux). At the time, AltaVista would often take 30 seconds and then time out, or return pages of spammy results, while Google was super-fast and accurate.
> The word SEO “kind of sounds like spam when you say it today,” said Lenssen, in a slightly affected voice. “But that was not how it started.”
That is not my recollection. I was blogging at the time they're talking about, and I think the first time I heard about SEO was in the context of trying to get your site ranked higher than everybody else. I grant that the techniques for early SEO came out of good, semantic-web intentions, but I feel like the time between them being implemented and the time they were misused for personal gain was like 3 minutes, max.
[..]There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was.[..]
This is always a strange claim for me, because it does not even remotely match my experience. And now we have the rise of Chat-AIs, and people who claim it's so much better than google, which also does not even remotely match my experience. And now I ask myself: am I just too stupid to see it? Or are the people too stupid to not see it? Do I search just too different things from what others search that I can't see it?
And then I also remember the claim that the youth is insanely uneducated about technology and the modern world, even worse than old people, and I wonder whether this is the reason for those claims. Do those claims all come from young people, who live in a very different world and are just very clueless about those things?
So at the end, does Google end, because it's not cool with the youth anymore? Not hipster enough and getting lost in the difference between the culture of the generations?
I myself have found a very clear, objectively measurable, falloff for Google search results when it comes to non-NLP searches.
The quotes operator is designed to search for pages containing exactly the phrase given, however I have found that Google has many times where it yields no results, and then does a “did you mean <no quotes>”, while other search engines can easily find the piece of information that was given.
No matter the reason for why this is happening, it has dampened my usage of Google considerably because Google doesn’t seem to be able to handle the most basic of queries anymore.
I remember a Google search with quotes for which Google implicitly removed the quotes, returning irrelevant results, but suggested that I add some extra pair of quotes… which resulted in the same page but suggesting yet another pair of quotes… and so on.
I was literally unable to perform the search that I wanted, and all Google suggested repeatedly was adding a dozen quotes on each side. Most frustrating search experience I've ever had.
Are you maybe able to provide an example search that does this? I'm pretty sure quotes still always work as intended for me (although I still miss the loss of + a little, which was used for the same purpose).
I just tried to search for "falloff for Google search results", as an example of random quoted string from your comment. Google Search returned one result - your comment.
Then I replaced 'Google' with 'Bing', and Google returned results without the quote which were irrelevant - but that makes total sense to me.
Same observation here. Sometimes I check the "News" tab for a search query, just to find there are 0 (Zero) results, when the regular search returns Millions of pages for the same query. In these situations, I feel like some algorithm has decided to hide these news, from me, for some unknown reason.
There is a way to have Verbatim the default, at least by changing the default search engine settings in the browser. Ctrl-k in my Chrome uses a verbatim search (can't remember exactly how I set it up).
I've certainly found that google results for me are worse than they used to be, and that DuckDuckGo is a lot more competitive and the !g bang gets used less and provides less improvement to results than it formerly did. I've been online since the time when people were moving from Yahoo to Google, so I'm not a gen Zer with different search patterns to Google's historical audiences.
I'm not quite sure of the reason. There's a couple of possibilities:
1. DDG is relying on Bing for a lot of their search data, maybe bing's just got better, or DDG have configured their integration better. I don't feel that DDG's had a significant improvement, it definitely feels like they've caught google on the way down more so.
2. Google losing the SEO war. As it gets easier to run and monetise blogspam sites, more of them exist, and as time goes on, a longer tail of topics get "served" by these sites. Unlike the spam of years past which tried to convince Google that their viagra selling site was really about top ten movie downloads, these sites are nominally about the topic the user searched for, so maybe Google is having a harder time trying to evaluate "quality". LLMs are being given a lot of the blame for this, but this is an older phenomenon than that, there were plenty of sites doing e.g. templated articles fed product spec sheet, or pay a minimum wage intern to rephrase the wikipedia page before that.
3. I've cut down my usage of Google services to basically just YouTube and YouTube Music. I also run ublock origin pretty much universally. Maybe my de-Googling has just been successful to the point that Google doesn't have a accurate profile for me anymore, and this has more of an impact on search than I expected.
What are they losing, though? Isn't this more like a snake eating its own tail? Or the human-centipede of online advertising?
I'm not convinced serving quality results is really in line with Google's incentives. If they trick me into clicking some garbage and have to go back and try again, isn't that another shot at showing me ads?
I don’t know if Google has degraded. I mean I haven’t noticed it. Maybe I just search mostly common stuff. For niche stuff that Google doesn’t know much about, search engines like DDG seem to know even less.
Depends on what you Google. If you search for mundane stuff like recipes, how-to guides, or product suggestions then you just get SEO spam. Google is still fairly good for very technical stuff, but anything of monetary value has been captured by professional advertisers and their affiliate link filled content farms.
Basically, the more popular a topic is, the more its search results are infested with SEO spam.
Even in technical realms this holds true. One of the huge disappointments of learning JavaScript/typescript recently is how terrible and spammy searching for anything on it is. Coming from the golang world where I'm used to search results being highly relevant with few advertising spam blogs among them.
> If you search for mundane stuff like recipes, how-to guides, or product suggestions then you just get SEO spam.
I look for recipes a lot. While what I find matches the "SEO-shaped recipe blog page" template mentioned in TFA, nevertheless the results still have the recipe(s) I'm looking for.
When I need to fix/build/repair stuff, searching just youtube almost always gets me what I need or want.
I've honestly found GPT4 to be fantastic for every recipe I've tried. I list what I own, say generally what I want, and say either use what I have, or minimize the number of new things I need to buy, and tell me how to make the thing. The instructions are far more legible than SEO spam recipe sites.
> And now I ask myself: am I just too stupid to see it? Or are the people too stupid to not see it?
My hypothesis is that it depends on how you search. For me, Google has become unambiguously poor, and I've stopped using it because I get bad results.
But I think that the reason for that is Google's use of AI (not the LLM stuff, but the stuff they started using a number of years ago). Google is clearly trying to interpret "what I really mean" from my queries instead of just taking them at face value, and it's awful at doing that. For me. It's obviously good at it for other people. It may have to do with me actively doing my best to prevent Google from tracking me.
The other thing I don't understand is the idea that Search is somehow becoming less accurate over time.
Google tracks analytics on the quality of its search results, simply by observing which results users click on, how long it takes them, or whether they don't click on anything at all.
The idea that Search is somehow worsening doesn't make any sense.
What has maybe happened is that Search has improved for the population as whole, but gotten worse for certain subsets of users -- but still a net gain overall. Or alternatively, that the web itself has changed -- that Search is doing better than ever, but some users just don't like what the web offers in response. (E.g. nobody writes straight-up recipes without tons of intro anymore -- but that's also so they have tons of space to insert ads, it's not about SEO. It's nothing to do with Google.)
I'll echo this: search, in a purist sense, has definitely improved (just looking back to the mid 90's through to now).
The "search experience" however, has degraded since the mid 2010s, for me at least. I'm in a constant battle to filter through advertising and bad content that is "optimized" for the algorithm to find the information I need. The constant need to monetize the technology more and more has certainly reduced it's usefulness en-masse.
But I don't think chatbots or alternatives (beyond curated indexes) will solve this problem - as you say the web itself has morphed around ways to optimize one search engine's ranking algorithm.
> The idea that Search is somehow worsening doesn't make any sense.
Search is worsening. We've all seen it with our own eyes. I don't care how much analytics Google is gathering, that's irrelevant.
Just take on example: try googling for the release date of an upcoming video game or movie which you know for a fact hasn't had an announced date. Then view the top 5-10 results and let me know if you consider them to be of a high quality.
I just searched for "Elder Scrolls 6 release date" and "GTA VI release date", and the results seem decent. Web pages including words like "prediction" in the title, and the summaries in the search results mention that the predictions are based on things like earnings reports and legal filings.
I did the same search and if you consider these to be decent quality results we should just agree to disagree because we value information differently.
I would expect results from reputable publications and not gpt filled click farms. I expect content that is information dense instead of padded and packed with keywords. I expect results that don't have a pointlessly huge number of redundant headers and subheaders that only exist for SEO purposes. I expect a huge bias towards original sources or sites that directly link original sources. And if I'm searching for information that doesn't exist I expect it to be clear right on the results page that this is the case.
Who exactly is it you're expecting to produce a high quality information dense web page to say Elder Scrolls hasn't been released so that google can rank it higher?
Are you arguing every information void should be filled? If things are not there, there should be no results. Not spam or other inaccurate stuff that doesn't help anyone.
Is it your belief that in the case of asking a question without a clear answer that the quality of the result isn't relevant? Or that all results are of equally high quality? Do you think that the results on the Google SERP are of the highest quality when you ask these questions?
If straight up keyword matching was enough then Google would never have overtaken Alta Vista. Ranking useful high quality information higher is the entire point.
No it isn't. Literally Google's entire initial innovation was a ranking algorithm based on inbound links, weighted by the authority of the linking party. At this point I'm bowing out because you don't even know the basics of the thing you're arguing about.
> that Search is doing better than ever, but some users just don't like what the web offers in response.
The reason that I don't think it's this is because often there are sites that offer exactly what I'm looking for. Google doesn't surface them in my results, but other engines do.
> The idea that Search is somehow worsening doesn't make any sense.
What analytics are you thinking of that would show search is somehow MORE accurate? Because if it's just searches and click throughs and traffic and revenue...
More people with internet = more people searching for stuff.
More mobile phones = more people searching for stuff out in the world.
Worse results = user goes back to google and does ANOTHER search and search revenue just doubled again. Huzzah bonuses and vacations to Disneyland all around this year!
I think by any measure, growth and clicks and revenue are going to go up no matter what they do so I'm not sure exactly what metric you'd be tracking to see whether Google search results are actually qualitatively better? Short of the site going down entirely, there's probably nothing they can do to slow growth. But nowhere in that compounding money farm is the quality of results relevant.
> The other thing I don't understand is the idea that Search is somehow becoming less accurate over time.
The search is probably fine, but it's relegated to the bottom half of the page. It could also get worse if Google isn't able to keep up with the SEO and scammers. Personally I feel like Google has lost interest in providing a good search experience, they still have, what, 90% of the market. There's zero incentive to ensure it's a good experience and they can keep milking the advertisers.
Meanwhile the competitors have been forced to do better and especially Bing has. Any search engine that rely on Bing has become really good in the past five years. That might also be part of it, those of us who went to Bing, DuckDuckGo or other search engines for other reasons have learned to use those and when we then go back to Google it's worse, because we haven't used it for ten years.
But you're probably right, the search bit is fine, it finds the same results as Bing, so it's down to presentation and Google used to be the best and now they are the worst.
This echoes my experience as well. I switched to DDG some years back, in part because I could always compare with Google easily by appending !g. I still use !g (perhaps 1 in 50 searches), usually when I'm willing to trade worse presentation and degraded privacy for better long-tail results.
Try Kagi Search if you're willing to pay for a better search experience!
I've been using it for over a year, 100% of the time, and love it. Great results and awesome functionality like weighting certain sites, AI summarization, etc.
Yes, and Amazon has improved the shopping experience as they have gained these insights as well. As someone who went away from the world for 5 years so wasn't in the pot as it slowly started to boil, Google and Amazon are both significantly worse and less user friendly than they used to be.
Just look at Google Assistant. It has gotten significantly worse the last two years. Strangely, the only time it asks me for feedback is when it happens to work. Shouldn't be hard for it to detect when it craps out I talk frustrated at it, but they don't seem interested in getting feedback at that point. Ah, but it happens to turn one light on once (versus the 20 something went wrong times), prompt for feedback on that specific one time it worked.
You’re hiding huge swaths of unforeseen consequences.
Do you honestly think that when Google is presented with an improvement in search results that would reduce its revenue that they choose the improvement?
The majority of users may not understand the are looking at a low quality result. Clicking through to canned SEO websites that fill the front page for many queries is enough for them to get what they want.
Enough of course until someone shows them better results and then they will switch search engines just as we switched from altavista to google all those years back.
…then search is no longer fit for the valuable segments of the population, unless you measure "value" strictly by numbers of eyeballs without ad blockers.
The proliferation of LLM spam websites has made it completely impossible to search for any video game related information. Every search returns hundreds of sites with the same garbage chat GPT articles derived from Reddit or game wikis. Ironically, this makes the source material impossible to find. It’s really dire.
I’ve been playing Divinity2 Original Sin and have googled maybe 30 terms. And get good results. Even on ddg. Almost always in the top five results always first page.
Try that for baldurs gate 3. The trash results that are returned might have what you're looking for, after scrolling past the SEO highschool essay style intro and after closing the mid page JavaScript embedded nag window.
It's not that Google search has necessarily gotten worse, but it's lagging behind the shitiffication of the web caused by SEO and the new features (People Also Ask QA synopses) have absolutely horrible accuracy.
ChatGPT and other LLMs are also absolutely horrible on accuracy, don't get me wrong.
But, here's an example of what's wrong with Google.
I search something like "Can mangoes grow in Washington state?" and at the top of my results is the condensed "People Also Ask" question answer result. These attempt to read and condense a webpage (of questionable accuracy) into an answer for my query, but they are often full of shit.
For example expanding "Where are mangoes grown in WA" shows an answer about Western Australia rather than Washington. Another answer tells me "yes" but when I read the actual article it clearly says "no, they won't survive".
Google has been fighting against SEO basically from the beginning. For many years, you could see the difference with other search engines that had worse tech. In general, google used to do very well against SEO bots, for well over a decade.
Today, I think they are losing. Quality primary sources are often crushed by unusable websites, which understand google's analytics very well. If I make it hard to find the information, but I make it seem that it's the next paragraph down, my search results will improve!
Google itself is causing the enshitification of third party websites, many of which have paragraphs and paragraphs that are obvious spam. I'd take any videogame guide website from 2005 over the first page of google today
Google understood a long time ago that they could not beat SEO, and have been fighting a losing battle ever since. I remember a research presentation from them (might have been late 00s or early 10s) in which they wanted to know: we have an adversary with unlimited resources who can create as many webpages and servers as they want. How do we detect pages in "their" internet as opposed to pages in the "real" internet. The basic answer at the end of the seminar was - you can't. There is no information-theoretic way to do it on the structure of the graph. Instead you need to follow chains of trust, which means that you need roots of trust, which means .... look at the web today, dominated by a handful of known platforms.
I find it interesting that people write Google queries in correct, often polite English as if there is something intelligent on the other side. When I try this query: "where mango grow washington" I seem to get decent results, but the human-sounding query does return garbage.
Perhaps the problem with Google is that it's trying too hard to convince people that it's smarter than it really is. I treat it as a stupid, mindless computer and it works fine most of the time.
Yupe, keywords is still how I search most of the time unless I’m literally looking for a question (or something close to it) hoping to hit a Stack Overflow and clones / Reddit post asking that question.
You can tell who all the old people are that were using search engines since back in the day. LOL
All I ever expect from a search engine is it find pages with the words in my query (and maybe exclude certain words as specified), anything else is just gravy.
I think people much prefer thinking they know something with a superficial overview (see things like the popularity of TED talks). Responses from LLMs are great for this: they look like a cohesive summary but they often end up being total bullshit.
Digging through search results to find what you need is work. Having something confident make you believe an alternate truth is not.
People who actually try to use code output from chatbots quickly realize it just only _looks_ like code of the right shape and quality. There have been many blog posts and comments here touting how great the code ChatGPT generated is while the given example response is complete nonsense once you look a little deeper.
In my recent experience, Google search is totally broken for anything that is hard to find or uncommon.
I recently search for "raspberry pi uart hat" and Google responds with the following:
Not many results include the word "uart" so we eliminated it from your search terms. Here are thousands of irrelevant results about random raspberry pi hats you aren't interested in.
Google is good when you know what you're looking for like a specific local business but it's awful when you're trying to find a recipe all you get are wordy life stories. ChatGPT can give me a concise recipe in my preferred units (metric) everything by weight, substitute x for y and tell me the calories. Phind.com is great for programming queries.
I run a fairly popular web game (Redactle https://redactle.net). Thousands of people play it and there are thousands of links on social media which Google doesn't seem to care about. When you search 'redactle' you should be getting my site or a clone of the original setup by a fan; This is how it works on Bing and DDG. But on Google the top results are ad-infested link-farm game sites, a domain squatter page at redactle .com and crap like that. They simply don't recognize the social proof that is out there. A thousand https://spammygames{1..N}.com sites linking to each other beats out all those people linking from reddit,fb,x etc.
Yeah quite the opposite for me - I have to use Google to search YouTube because YouTube's search is completely unusable now. If I want to search for a video I go to Google and click the Videos tab instead of going to YouTube. YouTube's search
gives you like three possible matches but then pollutes the page with "you might like" and "people also watched" videos, all of which are simply invalid results.
I was discussing this recently on a hike and I joked, "SEO broke the Gen Z brain".
In my own personal experience, I think the younger generations care less about search. They just don't use it much, nor do they value the information & cultural pipeline in which search is valuable.
It has either gotten worse or there is just more crap websites out there to clog things up. They also have made it harder to search for "exact" terms (you now have to use quotes and check a box).
I still find Google to be fine but I recently I was searching for an exact phrase that I knew was on a website and got nothing. I tried DuckDuckGo and got the one exact page that I was looking for.
There have been recent discussions about Google pruning their indexes and I think that might be part of it - I've noticed in Google Webmaster Tools for some of personal sites that previously indexed pages have become unindexed with no given reason.
> And then I also remember the claim that the youth is insanely uneducated about technology and the modern world, even worse than old people
Yeah that claim doesn’t get made in any sort of widespread way. There are variants of it that do (“kids only know how to use their phones not keyboards”) but your specific wording here makes me think this claim came from some hyper specific bubble or from your own subconscious.
Those claims mainly come from people in schools, universities, youth orgs and companies. So the ones who should know it best I would think, as they work with young people all the time. This does not seem to be a particular hyper specific bubble. Of course, complaints about youth are not new, the young people are by nature lacking experience and knowledge, that's a given, and so are complaints about those lacks. But lately, there is a new type of complaints, which is about technology and specifically computers. This is atypically, as for the last decades, young people usually had the benefit of being more competent with new technologies, as they grew up with them. This was a defining difference between the generations for a long time. And now this seems to disappear, or at least change.
And after thinking about, it makes sense. Technology today has reached a plateau of quality and comfort, has removed the struggles of the past, and is now cheap and widely used in society. That's very different from the previous decades, where tech was an uphill-battle, where computers were expensive and only used by those who had demand for it. Tech today has saturated society, and this also changed perception.
Now more people can evaluate the actual ability of people. And old people today have legit reasons to learn and use technology. And the most notable change is: the old people today, are the middle-aged and young people from decades ago, meaning they are the ones who had already in the past reasons to learn technologies. So comparing old with young today in those aspects, is very different from 20, 30 years ago. And it seems, the young people today have finally lost their benefit of early access to technology, and now they compete again with experience and knowledge.
So regarding Googles search this means, maybe the youth is just lacking good google-fu, which older users with more experience have. Or they generally have a difference stance on how the search should work, because they have no deeper understanding on what the Search is, what it should deliver and can deliver, and what not. Some of the comments here go very strong in that direction, that people have a very different approach on what they expect from Google. So again, it's a difference in perception.
Their fall from grace, at least when it comes to the tech community, has been quite a sight. Has any other big tech company seen such a change in opinion? I’m not sure Microsoft was ever beloved and even though Apple might have lost some of its sheen, there are definitely a lot of fans left.
Every publicly traded company will eventually go through this character arc. They scale as big as possible then the need for share price increases will make them increasingly exploitative and force them to offer lower value to users until they fall into disgrace and are replaced.
There is no "need for share price increases" and none of this is necessary or inevitable. A publicly traded company can run at a steady pace and pay a nice dividend without the growth hacking and enshittification we see in tech. This is an industry problem.
Any entity that obtains the throne is doomed to fall soon after.
Happened to the Greeks, the Roman Empire, Imperial China, the British Empire, IBM, Intel and AMD back and forth, Toyota, Boeing, Yahoo, Google, MySpace, Facebook...
Also presumably soon to happen for the United States, Nvidia, Mysterious Twitter X, TSMC, and others currently reigning as kings in their respective corners of the world.
Note that falling doesn't mean they will disappear into the history books, but they will all fall sooner or later.
If an entity wants to stick around into perpetuity, never go higher than #2 and maybe never go higher than #3 so when #1 falls you don't end up becoming the new #1 out of nowhere.
I vaguely remember all those PageRank revisions, when some sites would get penalized for being slow or not well written. These days I'm not even sure if some sites are indeed gone or they just "fell off" Google search...
It may have certainly been friendly to a lot of users, yet it did not ring friendly to a lot of useful content.
Then also comes the geo segmentation. There was a time when quite a few results would be from foreign language sites or other countries. Sure, it created noise when the language was very much foreign, though later there often was a link to Google? translate.
I guess there may still be a way to have all that in the mix, but, generally the results are being streamlined.
I tried searching for something obscure recently - I knew the exact phrase and was confident it was only on one site. Google gave me nothing so I almost assumed the site was dead until I tried DuckDuckGo. I assume Google purged it because it wasn't using SSL.
Microsoft was pretty loved back "in the day" (80s to 90s). Maybe not as much as an enterprise OS company but their developer support was pretty awesome before most people had access to "everything" via the Internet.
I'm not sure anyone else really qualifies as a big very consumer-facing tech company in the modern sense from that era or before though, of course, there were many once popular companies like MySpace that just flamed out. Yahoo! might be an example.
Microsoft was one of the most hated companies by both IT people and users in the 80s - 90s. About the only thing people liked was the developer support (which I give them credit for; Visual Studio is great). Computers running their software needed daily reboots and quarterly re-installs. Every single thing they did was to force people to get locked-in to them. They single-handedly slowed web progress by close to a decade (IE11). Anti-competitive that eventually resulted in government prosecution.
The only thing that was ever revered about them was Bill Gates, who was more loved by business schools as a case study in how to run an extremely aggressive company.
Microsoft's developer experience was great. MSDN CDs were full of valuable info, utilities, and pre-release APIs you won't find elsewhere. MS Visual Studio was (and still is) an exemplar of well-though-out, super-powerful IDE. MS developer docs were pretty thorough.
OTOH Microsoft software's operation experience was far from happy. Bugs, crashes, byzantine installation and update procedures were all the daily reality.
To say the truth, few things were significantly better. And if they were (say, VMS, which was rock solid), they were also significantly more expensive.
Commercial Unix wasn't a hugely better; I personally crashed Solaris software, and the OS proper once. Bizarre installation and update procedures applied to it equally well.
MS started having a hit after a hit to its reputation in the tech community when it started to try to do something about the internet. They tried to muck with Web technologies so as to create its own silo, not compatible with Netscape's: custom HTML and CSS, JScript vs Javascript, etc. They also started to talk trash about competition, never a good sign. Eventually they won, partly via business pressure, partly via good technology, and many a web developer cursed the MSIE5 chokehold since then, for a decade at least.
Windows 95 was a target of many techie jokes, but, to my mind, MS have done a tremendously successful rework of desktop experience and its visual language, which was and still is widely emulated as "the common standard". Writing an OS as a DOS extender was a cool hack, which allowed to launch DirectX, and make windows a prime gaming platform.
Though what didn't suck in the 80s/90s from a computer user experience perspective?
Terminals connected to minicomputers--which is what I used at work through most of that period? DOS-based word processing and spreadsheets were pretty nice by comparson.
Macs? They were fine in the mid-80s although I didn't use them in school unless my group was using them for some project.
Unix workstations were getting pretty nice by the mid-90s but those weren't something for a home user.
Amiga is famous for being loved by it's users in the 80s. I think Apple II users and Commodore 64 users kind of loved them too.
But expectations were much lower then, computers were expected to be a thing for a 'hobbyist' to tinker with, and those who did generally did it because they loved it.
(I still don't think what were then called "PCs" running MS-DOS or (beginning in 1985) Windows were as beloved as Amiga or Commodore 64 though, Microsoft-OS PCs were for "business", and nobody really loved them).
(Macintosh was first sold in 1984, so mid-80s was the first Macintosh).
Visual studio was very not great around 2010. I especially hated the widespread divergence from language specifications and the choice to use a different compiler front end for GUI feedback vs generating code, so you'd get errors in one and not the other. My colleagues claimed it used to be worse.
This is shocking for me to hear because it is the exact opposite of my experience/memory. I recall Microsoft briefly being the cool place for geniuses to work before it quickly became the big bad evil monopolist. Maybe this perception was exacerbated by my hanging out in more open-source-friendly corners of the internet.
I know they’ve changed their tune on open source but it’s really hard for me to break from my 20+-year perception that they are the evil company that makes awful software.
In the 90's and aughts there was very little love for Microsoft among IT professionals.
It's a little embarrassing to think about right now when you realize that Microsoft has never poisoned a river or sent thugs with billy clubs to bust a union, and so all of us had bigger fish to fry. But there was never love.
I don't think you're wrong but it's also fair to say that Microsoft was actively trying to destroy Linux and open source in general. They were literally funding legal attacks open source software. They were also engaged in a ton of anti-competitive behavior. Gates was a very smart guy and was absolutely a ruthless corporate terminator which is easy to forget given how he acts and spends his time/money today. And the Microsoft of today still engages in questionable or shitty behavior but regulators are even softer now than they were then. So Teams gets bundled for free with 365 after Slack proves there's a market.
Microsoft represented an existential threat to many, many parts of the IT ecosystem every bit as real as dumping toxic waste into salmon breeding grounds.
Microsoft was one of the most ruthless orgs in tech history. They destroyed anyone within eyesight of their goals with wild abandon. To this day I have a hard time trusting/believing anything coming out of that org. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to wake tomorrow to GitHub being accessible only from the most expensive visual studio license available (and required to be running on the most expensive Windows license available).
But that's what software cost. If you weren't paying Microsoft hundreds of dollars for a compiler you were paying Green Hills. Or you were paying a Unix vendor thousands of dollars for an operating system on expensive proprietary hardware. Etc.
I was only a child in that era but it seems to me that Sun is venerated with hindsight today, people tend to speak of their work very highly. If that's true, is it just a hindsight thing, or maybe a favourable comparison to today's giants?
I don't think enough people were aware of Microsoft pre-1981 for there to have been any kind of strong opinion. From the point in time where Microsoft was well known, I don't recall any period of time where "beloved" would be even remotely accurate.
if anything, people have a much much higher opinion of microsoft now than they did even just 5 years ago. the arc can change, when you have a good CEO like Satya
This is how a lot of online journalism works today. Come up with an agenda you want to push that is sure to start flame wars (and drive advertising traffic), search for it on Twitter, find a single Tweet posted by anyone that agrees with your view (or just post it yourself from an alt account), and write a clickbait title and short article linking to that Tweet.
"Subscribers quitting Netflix in droves over new policy."
"No one uses Google anymore."
"AI replacing 80%+ of programmers at software companies."
"People outraged over [latest nothingburger]."
You can come up with an unlimited amount of catchy content, and most of it makes it to the front page of sites like HN and Reddit.
The Verge has always been considered a tabloid source. No different to the Daily Mail, since they both have heavy use of ads and affiliate links in every section and corner of their articles.
In one sense, that’s how people talk to each other. The reporter is based “growing” off of people talking about it. It’s sort of unclear how many people need to talk about a thing for it to be part of culture? Or if these articles should even exist in the world of interconnectivity? But our lives are online now — this is a quote from a “man on the street”.
I enjoyed this article, and I found myself nodding through the parts that discussed Google's history over the past couple decades.
However, the last couple concluding paragraphs, and the comparison to AltaVista, I found to be extremely weak. It was as if the author had diagnosed all these problems, and felt like they couldn't just end the article but had to wrap it up with something they felt was a potential solution.
In my opinion, there is no potential solution, and that's both a good and bad thing. At worldwide scale, I find it hard to believe that any company wouldn't fall down the path Google has: they are pretty fundamentally a victim to Goodhart's Law [1], and that dynamic is inevitable.
I think the bad thing about that is it does kind of make me yearn for some of "the good old days" when not everything was just teeming with SEO nonsense and blogspam. For example, when looking for particular software solutions, I've found it impossible to use Google to do "ProductA vs. ProductB" type searches anymore - all the top links are just some sort of affiliate link spam, the analysis (if there is any) flat out sucks.
So the good news is that it's made me step away from the Internet more: e.g. for the example above, I don't even do a search: I'll ask for recommendations from friends and colleagues, post to a helpful employee alumni mailing list, etc. You know, the way we used to do things "in the good old days".
If anything the complete disgust and enshittification I find with so much online content and algorithms these days has actually led to me being mentally healthier - I just spend less time online (HN being the bad habit I'm trying to break) and more time in "the real world".
I never know how to interpret statements like this:
> More recently, there’s been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users.
What does it mean to use an entertainment-based video site as a "primary search engine"?
It means that users feel there is enough diversity of relevant content that they will find a result that gives them either the information, or the entertainment, they are seeking.
Some people (probably in particular older people) see the internet as the sum of everything (eg: Reddit + Facebook + TikTok + etc). Other people, I think, have less of a concept of the internet as a mass data collective and see it as more silo'd. And within those silos they feel that certain ones will have results/content that is more inline with their viewpoints, desired results, etc. So the result is we see some of these social media sites like Tiktok becoming very much a micro-internet to these users, and they specifically DON'T want google-style results that reflect the internet at large (and they don't want to use search modifiers to say only search tiktok.com).
In some ways we may be trending back towards the days of AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve/The Well, where you virtually hang out with "your people", and content that doesn't exist within your group basically doesn't exist at all.
> In some ways we may be trending back towards the days of AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve/The Well, where you virtually hang out with "your people", and content that doesn't exist within your group basically doesn't exist at all.
It's something that is more alien the longer ago it was that you got involved with the internet, but I've recently seen this firsthand myself and it works. It's not a general purpose search but if you put in terms related to an upcoming vacation, for example, you will find an endless stream of people's videos of any aspect of it. If your hotel has a suite you're considering, search the name and watch videos to see if it looks worth it, etc. It's basically a way of bypassing highly staged and curated ad photos or videos to see what real people recorded.
It seems more like a side effect of how everyone is trying to become an influencer than a new permanent state of being, but for the time being it can be interesting
People will search on Tiktok for things like "how to get game working on linux" or "how to fix a computer" or whatever. They wont bother with Google and go straight to tiktok.
Reminds me of how often I add "reddit" to the end of Google searches because I know the base results will be useless for a whole range of topics without it. This is doubly true for any even slightly risque or illegal topics.
Right, a sort of generational divide. Old people (like me) looking for how-to information go to youtube; young(er) people go to tiktok. Tiktok is 100% blocked from my system but from what i've seen leak into twitter, it's hard for me (an old person) to imagine how it could compete with youtube for how-to. But then maybe that's just growing old.
I have found youtube videos that are simply superb for tasks as diverse as:
* replacing the steering rods on my Sprinter van
* restoring factory state on an ancient Garmin watch
* mixing adobe plaster
* tying a prince of wales knot in a necktie
Different people are different, of course. Video doesn't work well for me if I'm trying to learn something new. I was only pushing back on the notion that there's an age connection to this.
> Videos are too light on solid information and are too hard to use as references.
Depends on the video.
I rarely use videos for how-to though. The written word is more convenient as it allows me to skim it and it’s easier to skip ahead. Video is good for demonstrating things where motion information is useful though.
Probably means people use it for “how do i X”, “Y review” and other types of queries more which certainly rings true just bc of how google results for these are usually about 100% spam
I suppose that makes sense. Video is low-density and hard to search compared to text, so it never occurs to me to seek out video as a first option, but given the amount of SEO spam I can see how someone would come to the opposite conclusion.
I kind of get it. It's very much "I need to make a word limit" jargon, but they are basically talking about how social media has become a primary news source for many of the youth. This generation doesn't read Reuters/AP or watch any mainstream news network, they get updates from their facebook wall or they see the news on Reddit. If they are curious about some news piece they will search within the website about posts made, not a general google taking you to professional media.
I didn't know Tiktok could do this, but I guess life finds a way.
I've read through the post and this reads more of a memory lane of Google, rather than getting into the statement "Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question."
There are a few links scattered about on relatively minor topics , but nothing substantial showing that it's in question. Either that's clickbait, which I'm now starting to associate with the verge, or it's far too early days to tell.
Like other comments here my impression is not the same as the post. And the slivers of reasoning given are weak at best.
This article reminds me of how everyone seems to think the USD is on the way out as the world reserve currency while nothing could be further from the truth. Sometimes people hope to see the end of the status quo so badly that they convince themselves that their delusions are true.
There's an overarching theme in the world today of the existing power structures being challenged by new power hopefuls. It almost never works out in favor of the new power, however. It doesn't stop the hopefuls from engaging their cognitive biases, and reality distortion soon follows.
I think this is premature. Google is still a huge force in tech. Google search, GMail, DeepMind and more are huge and aren't going anywhere. I have the same experience as PurpleRamen, I truely don't see the decrease in search quality. I think people just expect perfection every time. That's how high the bar is.
Google's biggest problem is that they're a huge force. Google search directs an absurd amount of traffic to where-ever they point their search ranking. The bigger they've gotten the stronger the observer effect has grown.
Search engine spam isn't something that's happened to Google, it's a consequence of their dominance in directing web traffic. No matter which beautiful flower you find, point a power washer at it and all you get is dirt and mud.
I think people’s GoogleFu has also gotten worse. A lot of examples on this page of bad google results have natural language queries.
Google is a traditional search engine. Traditional search engines run on keywords. You enter the keywords you want on the webpage and press “search”. Didn’t find what you were looking for? Add more keywords to make it more specific. Things you don’t want polluting the search results? Exclude a keyword by adding a “-“ in front of it to remove those specific results. Rinse and repeat until you find what you need or give up.
I first heard "Google" more than 10 years before the search engine, when my uncle (who later worked for IBM) was explaining my grandmother about this huge number. Then a decade later I got the joke at the bottom of the result pages that said "gooooooooogle" and each of the o's was a result page link. I've been on the Internet for that long and now I do ChatGPT queries before anything else. They lost the SEO wars long ago, but more important they lost to their own perverse incentives. Same will happen to LLMs as public knowledge engines. Just enjoy while it last.
This, IMO, is actually a good thing. If Google stayed really great (and thus dominant), there might be less incentive for new info retrieval and knowledge/"cognitive" tech. But the decay of Google makes consumers far more likely to experiment with alternatives. It sort of feels like the circle of (tech) life.
I imagine that (at least) 2 things have happened to Google Search.
1. SEO content farmers have filled it up with low quality results.
2. Google used ML to tune the system and it optimized for the lowest common denominator, incompetent searchers.
The average person never learned how to construct succinct search queries and so habitually enters too little or too much into the search box. Current Google Search wants to help the poor searcher so it adjusts their entry, or in some cases rewrites it completely, before processing it and returning results it has decided that they really want.
Whatever culture they were trying to build with their interviewing approach, politics engagement and staff promotions, that is not a culture to aim for it turns out.
I suspect there is a large difference between "old Google" and "new Google" (maybe there is a cutoff year, like... 2012? I don't know.).
I would love to compare people who passed the old interviews and worked at old G, to the new ones, and just see what kind of culture, personality, and technical competency each side had. Then you get to see how those people shaped the company and how public opinion changed.
I think you’re on the wrong track. Let the blame where it belongs… management. Sundar, Ruth, and Thomas are simply corporate ghouls working to enrich themselves. Sundar is a billionaire… all that money came as an employee of Google.
They don’t understand branding or trust, or if they do, they simply don’t care. The reputation for cancelling products to the point of untrustworthiness demonstrates this.
Google is a classic case of the fish rotting from the head down.
I'm guessing 2012 because I thought that was the year they stopped doing brain teaser interviews, which were very controversial at the time. Googling it now, the exact year is fuzzy -- like, they originally stopped in 2006, but only fully stopped around... 2011-2012? My evidence is this thread and its linked article: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1gq72n/comment...
I received an offer from Google around May 2012. My interviews were long and numerous with interactive coding and whiteboard sessions. No brain teasers. Larry Page was still giving final yes or no on hiring.
Total tangent but did anyone notice the floating hair on the cherub on the header image (the top right one)? Stable Diffusion in the wild? It looks composited by a human (i.e. use SD to generate "cherubs" and then use photoshop to arrange the final image).
It says "Illustrations by Michelle Rohn" but maybe it should say "Illustrations by Michelle Rohn and an AI"
It's not floating. If you open the image on a new tab and zoom in, at about 350% you can see a few faint pixels connecting it to the nearby loop of hair.
I find it somewhat ironic that DuckDuckGo returns more relevant results for me than Google does.
Some years ago, i would occasionally have to prefix my query with !g to get the Google results, but these days, if DDG cannot find it, chances are Google cannot find it, but will happily return a bunch of spam pages instead.
I use DDG as my daily driver but I get better results with Google. Often it does find stuff that DDG cannot. The use of "matching terms" is good for example. Google is more flexible with its advanced search techniques.
It's a choice like Linux vs Apple. I choose to use something (DDG) that is a less good generally but better overall.
"Only 5 websites each mostly screenshots of the other 4" makes signal to noise more than difficult. Amplify the mutually adverse forces of SEO and advertising dark patterns and here we are, alas
When this happen, there is always a lot of inertia at first, it can take years or maybe even decades, but almost every time the denial leads to a pernicious internal erosion and a sudden collapse at the end.
When I read the article, it was on the front page. An hour later, when I wrote the comment, I was talking to a friend of mine from Google and wanted to share it but couldn't find it on the frontpage anymore. It was on the 4th page.
A company in search business need to evoke a sense of trust which I don't associate with Google any more. The word Google now stands for flippant attitude to products and services, disregard for privacy, and bloated interfaces combined with a degrading search experience. They need to dig deep and do better to change this attitude
Yes, we can most of us name real websites that we still read & rely on. When did those sites start publishing? How many of the creator-controlled, non-commercial websites/blogs you read began less than say 5 years ago? I bet the number rounds down to 0.
Google search sure as hell played their part in creating this world, but fixing search isn’t going to bring back an internet worth searching.