I guess we all kinda knew that, but it’s always nice to have a study backing your opinions.
What fight? Google is making money, and nearly everyone is playing Google’s game following their tune. Google is definitely not losing.
The Google ads team is functionally all of the company’s revenue.
Google search still remains their most used product offering with most of their ad revenue (58.1% in 2022).
Google leadership is terrified that anyone could eat their lunch, because they know the search offering is getting worse and worse.
The origin of Google was taking out complacent search companies that had gotten comfy.
I’m pretty sure when I was laid off (1 year ago yesterday ❤️❤️ thanks Google) it was because they saw LLMs as a threat they hadn’t taken seriously enough… Combined with that asshole billionaire being pissy that Google was only making 1.2 million per employee instead of 1.3 million.
There are literal careers dedicated to gaming search results. That’s bound to happen.
Yeah it’s pretty wild how bad search results have been lately. The unfettered proliferation of AI bullshit on the internet is gonna have some really goddamn irritating impacts on just about everything I think.
Google search has,become so bad I couldn’t even get the number of my insurance company yesterday. There was nothing but spam on the first page. I am in the market for something new.
Same. Though according to the article, Google is still better than competition, so yeah, not that many alternatives.
and the study itself points out that Google has improved over the past year and is performing better than other search engines. More broadly, numerous third parties have measured search engine results for other types of queries and found Google to be of significantly higher quality than the rest.
I switched to DDG merely to get rid of Google’s irrelevant paid results up top.
If I’m searching for brand model manual I don’t need every competitor’s marketing detritus.
Likewise contact details etc… it’s maddening.
So Bing. Got it
Nah, AltaVista is where it’s really at.
I’m talking about how DDG is just Bing-ish.
Yes, but DDG seems to have worse organic results in my experience. I mean the bar is low, but DDG falls under it.
Oh yeah, the results are worse, but at least I can filter with search grammar and not also have to mentally filter out the ads too.
I’m not sure if we’ve ended up back at the ol’ altavista/askjeeves keyword-stuffed hell yet, but it’s close.
Arent they trying to make their search worse so you have to search multiple times, showing you more ads?
The study found that ddg was worse than google though. But they only searched for products, so nk complete “test”.
Ddg is still good for non product shit, hell sometimes if im looking up niche enough shit itll give me results with for example space battle forums.
I would think they’d make more money by sending you to sites that use Google ads.
The ads on Google’s own pages are often fairly benign as far as internet ads go. I’ve certainly never had them tell me I’m the millionth visitor and try to reward me with the gift of an epileptic fit.
I’m really enjoying perplexity.ai most of the time you just get the answer you’re looking for.
IMHO, the problem with Google isn’t SEO. It’s Google. When Google was great, it would find exactly what you were searching for. The whole point was to get you off of Google and on to whatever site you were looking for as quickly as possible. Over the last several years, their search has increasingly been drinking the ‘engagement algorithm’ Kool-Aid. Now Google doesn’t search for what you ask, it searches for what it thinks you are trying to find. Which is fucking useless because I know exactly what I’m trying to find and that’s exactly what I typed in. Selecting verbatim search and putting things in quotes helps. But it’s still displays tons of irrelevant stuff that doesn’t include what I searched for.
It’s actually easy to point to exactly when the downfall started. Years ago Google was trying to make a social network called Google+ that would compete with Facebook. Before this, a + operator in the search field meant only show results that contain that particular term. But they wanted people to search for Google+, so they changed it so the plus sign became a searchable term and quotes were necessary to include a term or phrase. That was the moment Google decided that search wasn’t their most important product. And it’s been slow downhill ever since.
I remember back in the day when the same shit was happening because websites would just put, like, an entire dictionary in tiny, hidden text somewhere at the bottom of the main page so it would have a greater chance of showing up no matter what you typed into the search engine.
It’s pretty wild that they didn’t think about people doing exactly the same thing with all the new methods they came up with to make searches “relevant” since that was one thing that made Google so much better than the competition back then.
Any system you make to push certain things over other things are going to be figured out and gamed.
It’s time for Google to die. They are a truly awful company now so it’s time to take her down to the shed like ol’ blockbuster
What will be replacing it? Bing?
Selfhost
LMAO as if.
I’ve been trying DuckDuckGo recently and already started seeing some better results. I’m not ready to change my default search engine yet, but if it keeps up I could see that happening sooner than later.
Same on the default search changing, I’m very much used to Google Search and it’s gonna take me a while before I switch. Though I’ve already managed to switch from Gmail and it’s kinda refreshing, so this will be just another step.
Though I’ve already managed to switch from Gmail and it’s kinda refreshing
No doubt, I’ve been thinking about doing the same. What provider did you go with, and what is your experience so far, if you don’t mind me asking. I’m definitely looking for recommendations.
