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".
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".
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law