Are We Seeing the End of the Googleverse? – Slashdot

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>>As he sees it, Google’s advertising tools gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform.
So, the money that sustains it is inherently bad?
What is next, asking me to burn my paycheck because getting paid for work devalues me as a human?
imo, google is successful because they produce a superior product _and_ they know how to monetize it. How many times have we seen a superior tech company fail simply because they could not market their product?
That was the ultimate failure of Alt
Even when they made a good “product”…. you weren’t the customer.
I still find Google Search to be superior to all the others for the quality of results, but they have been declining everywhere because the Web is changing.
Social media is one problem, but also things like Discord lock information away and make it difficult to search. If you see some software where the support is “join our discord channel” you know it’s going to be a pile of crap.
What other search engine do you find to be approaching the quality of Google search results? It’s certainly not Bing, or Yahoo, or Duck Duck Go, or Brave. All these sites do OK for normal stuff, but if you’re looking off the beaten path, it’s still Google all the way.
Use one of the many SearxNG engines. Like:
https://searx.org/ [searx.org]
They aggregate the results of multiple engines, strip out the tracking of Google and the rest, and each user CAN tune what search engines are used. And you can optionally install it locally on your own system.
As many of us learned when AltaVista was king, more results is not necessarily *better* results.
And company info for SearX is difficult to come by. This page https://tracxn.com/d/companies… [tracxn.com] says that the company is “deadpooled.” That’s not very encouraging. Can we actually trust them not to track or market our data? How do we know, given that it’s basically run anonymously?
After reading Kagi’s site https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why… [kagi.com], I would agree they offer more search privacy, but they never claim to offer a “better” search. Yes, they offer “personalization” but you have to actively personalize it.
If privacy is your thing, certainly use Kagi. But the moment you click through to a web site, your privacy is out the window. Your IP and all kinds of other information is collected and aggregated and correlated across all the web properties, through advertisers and marketers and G
Alta vista didnâ(TM)t âoelesâ to google, and monetizing search they way it was done led to the entire internet being built around fooling people that search, or organizing the worlds content as a giant QA scam. The fact every little thing you search becomes part of secret dossiers accessed by advertisers or those that can profit in questionable ways is also another bonus. Google has done enormous contributions in many fronts, and while Microsoft has always been extremely profitable at monetiz
I used to do IT for a blood banking/research organization
At some point I read about google grants, reached out to them and got free advertising, along with analytics tools
It was fantastic, and it even helped us identify the source of a hacking attempt from overseas
Training was kind of thin, and you had to teach yourself how to fish
As far as I can tell it is still in place, for nearly two decades now, with an annual valuation of nearly $100k
imo, google does not suck, and the pettiness of the complaints demonstrate how “fringe” this anti-google movement is

imo, google does not suck, and the pettiness of the complaints demonstrate how “fringe” this anti-google movement is
Like any large corp, some parts of them suck and some don’t.
Dupont and Eli Lilly and Dow Chemical all do some good things (like your experience with Google), but they also do some truly terrible things and there’s no getting away from that.
In the end, the good they do never seems to outweigh the harm they cause.

I think there’s widespread misunderstanding of how ad targeting works. The “dossier” is internal to Google (or Meta, or…). That doesn’t get sold. What gets sold is ad views to a broad category of customer. Then Google makes sure that users who fit a given category see the corresponding ads. The advertisers don’t get your PII in most cases.
Not certain what misunderstanding there is. I do a lot of research on the intertoobz, and I don’t wan’t their ads derived from their knowledge of my surfing to show up as ads.
The ads that used to show up were always pointless and bandwidth consuming for things I’d already bought, and Google is also used on some sketchy sites. Any ads shown to me would be just plain weird. SO I block all things Google
By the way – download a good script blocker, and take a trip to the dark side of town. Google is loggi

Certainly use care where you log in, and where you accept cookies.
You aren’t kidding. If you want a real kick, install Wireshark, and look at the results.
The shittification of the internet.
You are more than welcome to go back to that level playing field that was Gopher for that unstained wonder in ASCII
The heights of human endeavor seem to require some motivation, and in our current society, humans use money for that motivation
If a company is successful in a capitalist manner, in a capitalist society, then change the society and stop wasting time carping about the company, it is irritating and does nothing to reach your goal
I suppose it depends on when you think the “shitification of the Internet” began
From the topics opined so far, it appears to coincide with the monetization, or introduction of grotty capitalism
Gopher was a university project, that along with Archie and Veronica allowed for relatively widespread access to the nascent Internet
After that came Mosaic, and I would even say AltaVista which was not a university project, but a research project by Digital Equipment Corporation
Initially Altavista had a clean interface, and was a superior search engine to it’s (monetized) competitors like Magellan or Yahoo!
So, please let me know your list of non-monetized Internet tools that are not x = -infinity
You really are not as smart as you think you are, unfortunately they do not make a pill for Dunning-Kruger
It coincides with AOL letting their users on the net and those lawyer scumbags spamming USENET.

It coincides with AOL letting their users on the net and those lawyer scumbags spamming USENET.
That more or less sums it up really.
I would give the parent points if I currently had them.
The arrival of AOL onto the general internet brought a huge decline in the quality of general information in the 90s.
And that was about the time when I had to start writing anti-spam software…
My goal is to have a search engine with useful results and without all of the crap.
The fundamental problem with your worldview is that people are not rational actors. Companies know this, and when given a choice between making a better product or changing society, they will choose to change society if its the more profitable option, to the detriment of everyone else.
Corporations have certainly worked to change society in their favor, just look at the the Citizens United case [brennancenter.org]
Incidently, almost every google result that comes up for Citizens United (corporations are people dammit!), leads to a politically active organization that wants your donation to fight the forces of Corporatism
This is not my world view, this is reality
What follows is my word view
Past generations have risen up and fought for level playing fields. In the past this involved unions, and it was a long ha

You are more than welcome to go back to that level playing field that was Gopher for that unstained wonder in ASCII
The heights of human endeavor seem to require some motivation, and in our current society, humans use money for that motivation
If a company is successful in a capitalist manner, in a capitalist society, then change the society and stop wasting time carping about the company, it is irritating and does nothing to reach your goal
It’s a plain black and white world for some people – like you.
Your version of capitalism is bordering on pimping out your daughters, or selling meth for fun and profit. There’s money to be made!
Having concerns about Google’s surveillance does not make one a socialist or communist. It’s just concerns, like people had about companies like Enron or Theranos a scam, and Enron a politically motivated ripoff.
So relax a bit, and don’t go about claiming that people wiht a concern are commies.
Dude, you sure read a lot into what I wrote, and got most of it wrong

Dude, you sure read a lot into what I wrote, and got most of it wrong
Uh huh. I’m always wrong. Makes you look like a genius.
You’re welcome.
um, thanks
I always enjoy your posts, hope your summer is going well

um, thanks
I always enjoy your posts, hope your summer is going well
I try. Or is that I’m very trying? 8^)
Hearing people like you say stuff like this, one would think that humans lived in caves building and inventing nothing until about 200 years ago when capitalism became a thing.
It’s not the money that sustains it. They passed that line long ago.
The old quote isn’t, “Money is the root of all evil”
The old quote is, “For the love of money is the root of all evil”
As a google user, sometime in the last 10 years, I realized that money had *corrupted* google search results. They were no longer giving me the answers I wanted. In some cases, egregiously so. During the last few years, even google foo could no longer get me good results.
They no longer produce a superior product. And as a result, I use google less and less. It hasn’t been my primary search engine for a few years now and I *do not trust* the results. I have a strong feeling they are *advertising* instead of search results. They produce *actively* bad results.
Because of their love for money. Billions in profit were not enough. They happily butchered the golden goose for 5% more so many times that the goose is dying the death of a thousand cuts.
You see this in many products. Each manager cuts quality by 2% to increase profits by 5%. No one notices a 2% reduction in quality. But after enough iterations, the quality is way down and the customers don’t want it and don’t trust the company to fix the problem. Everything from microwave ovens, to refrigerators, to dishwashers, to washer dryers last 1/2 to 1/3 as long as they used to last.
Google’s excessive greed has seriously damaged their brand.

>>As he sees it, Google’s advertising tools gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform.
So, the money that sustains it is inherently bad?
What is next, asking me to burn my paycheck because getting paid for work devalues me as a human?
Read the story. It isn’t specifically about the money. It is that Google transcended from a company that wished to do good, to a company that sells your private information, that introduces products, then strands people by pulling them, to having their primary focus is making money, and anything is is a distant second at best.
Now between you and me, making money is a good thing, and being rich is a good thing. But for better or worse, Google seems to be actively stomping on their moral compass.
But wit
I’m not religious. But I respect the fact that what is happening at Google was obvious even to primitive tribes over 2,000 years ago.
The root of all evil isn’t money.
The root of all evil is the love of money.
Are you buying advertising? Because if not, you’re not the customer.
If you’re trying to make your search results on Google more accurate… they don’t care nearly as much. Barely at all, even.
“Are you buying advertising? Because if not, you’re not the customer.”
Corporate entities and organizations that are paying for corporate Google Suite are legally customers in the traditional sense, not just product. I’m sure Google’s standard contract for GSuite is thick with disclaimers about the support service level being 0.000001% coverage and response time within 43,800 hours, but nonetheless they are actual customers.
I doubt Google can manage to support a true paying customer in only 43800 hours.
And their practice have become so abusive to me that your advertising dollars are *much* less effective at reaching me than they were a decade ago. I don’t trust Google to give me reasonable search results. So I’m using them less.
Trying to look up troubleshooting info on Google for anything that has a price tag is like 1/3rd ads and links to storefronts at a min.
Large scale support is multi tiered with highly technical people at tier 3 only available if tier 1 & 2 can’t resolve.
A few hundred is a lot of potential tier 3.
The Verge. Yes and I’m sure they’re qualified to opine when they say Facebook is the new resource and up and coming is Tik Tok.
That’s likely where they got their entire article from, if not from the 12 year old FB addict next door.
Google – what you need, when you need it.
Yt – A five minute vide on the two CLI commands you could type.
FB – A ten people discussion on that video
TT – A 30 second review of that same discussion. Oh no you din’t.

The Verge
indeed, and of course /. is happy to promote this nonsense for the regular fee.
funny thing is that this crap article is signed by some “Ryan Broderick” who has been publishing on the verge since 2021.
could that be the same “Ryan Broderick” who … “In June 2020, Broderick was fired from BuzzFeed for direct plagiarism in authored articles spanning over the course of his entire employment as a journalist there.” ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… [wikipedia.org]
wow, fired from buzzfeed. for plagiarism!!! that’s a really low
And then you find the answer on Reddit from 9 years ago, if you’re lucky.
… try finding what you want on Amazon. There’s so much featured Chinese junk on the first few pages that I’ve just stopped using them. If I want that rubbish I’ll go to Alibaba and pay half the price.
At the moment Google usually has what I’m looking for hiding among the featured links on the first two pages. If it gets to the point where the ads exceed the useful content I’ll try a different search engine. There’s plenty out there.
Worse, even assuming you’re OK with cheap Chinese junk, search results are so far from matching what you typed, that it’s pretty much useless.
Today I tried looking for a Toyota remote key fob with remote start. Yeah good luck. It showed lots of key fobs for all kinds of car makes, none of which had remote start. When I found a key fob that worked for Toyota, it offered to show me results “similar to this.” Clicking that made the search even less useful, showing all kinds of random car parts, that again didn

If I want that rubbish I’ll go to Alibaba and pay half the price.
Assuming the “seller” doesn’t cancel your order and increase the price like what happened with my last aliexpress order, sure.
I only buy unbreakables from Ali express. Cables, power packs, other random solid objects. Don’t buy a crystal vase from Ali and expect to see anything but a pile of broken shards at your door. 🙂
What if I actually ordered a pile of shards? Do I just get a pile of smaller shards?
Lol, yes. If you don’t get a pile of smaller shards and some shard dust then file a complaint. I’ve always been refunded from Ali Express sellers when I had a real issue.
How do people use Bing for fuck’s sake?
This search engine completely ignores words in your search query willy-nilly, it often shows results which are 100% unrelated to your request (when nothing is found), how do people even use it when not searching for something terribly trivial?
I’ve been hearing about Google search’ doom and gloom for years, yet no search engine comes even close to it. Yeah, there’s ChatGPT4 which is confidently hallucinating and making stuff up. You must always check its answers for correctness or you will be royally fucked up as evidenced by numerous stories even here on /.
Me too, although I use Duckduckgo. I see the problems that the parent commenter reported, and the lack of some features, like eliminating some words from the search (the site claims that there is a way to *reduce* the occurrence of a expression in the results, but it doesn’t actually work). But that is the trade-off of some privacy.
However, unless I am writing a research paper, Wikipedia is good enough.
Your experience with Bing is my daily google experience. Wrap words with quotes and they still get ignored.
And yet it will still ignore those quotes and give you random stuff half the time.
there’s ChatGPT4 which is confidently hallucinating and making stuff up
Fits my experience perfectly, and from now on this will be my go-to description of what is an AI language model: It is a computer program that hallucinates and makes stuff up. Perfect!
In the early years (which lasted over a decade) it was always “…and then one day we will aggregate the data and sell targeted ads!” This always sounded suspicious.
I have a client who looked at G Search results for their company – they usually have an ad blocker, but they turned it off. All their competitors were there, buying their company name as an adword. The way the ads look makes it very difficult to tell they are ads. Google’s suggested solution is to try to outbid competitors on your own company name.
We spent $1500/month on this. After a year or so, we turned it off. No difference in traffic. All of G’s advice, documentation, way of thinking about the web and the Internet, are geared toward the idea of you giving them money, if not right now, then later. This attitude has seeped into the deepest corners of everything they do. Even their explanations of technologies are all tainted.
People, even the people who don’t know enough to have an ad blocker, realize that all the G search results are designed to be in the interests of Google only. We all try to eek out our own little bit of value from them, but we know we are in for a a few seconds of pain each time we do a G search, no matter how benign.
Google bought Applied Semantics in 2003 and Doubleclick in 2007, and then 20 more PII-stealing, I mean online advertising, firms from 2007-2015. Anyone who knew what Doubleclick was and what they did knew what was coming back then – and it has.
… Google died.
“Don’t be evil” [wikipedia.org]
The fascinating one to me is Google Labs and Google Research, where they hired hundreds of top-level computer people and research PhDs from all over the world, gave them free rein to investigate and create, and got basically nothing out of what is probably hundreds of millions of dollars invested.
got basically nothing out of what is probably hundreds of millions of dollars invested
I’ve wondered about this as well. It might be a couple things. The first is their own commercial income as the GP states, and the second is that they need to run just to stay in place in the battle against all the SEOs also competing for commercial income. Though I’m not so sure they’re able to stay in place. I was recently frustrated with a Google search on a technical subject and tried Bing which indeed gave better resul
Not true. I have a friend who works as a “scientist” for Google. He is paid a salary, and has a discretionary budget for staff/equipment/offices and lab space.
He has come up with several things that they have patented and licensed/sold for many times more than his total cost -each. There is definitely return on investment even if the researchers are not creating things that you see Google using.
If Google is destroying themselves, why do they still have 91% of worldwide market share, with the next closest competitor, Bing, at 3%?
https://gs.statcounter.com/sea… [statcounter.com]
It seems like an interesting definition for “destroying themselves.”
Example search for my personal hero [slashdot.org]
Yes, in short that’s what happened.
Google became more and more infested with ADs as prime search results, and you’d search for hours through endless of people trying to sell you something you can easily service and fix yourself, in the heydays of Google you could find relevant info in an instant.
Now A.i. does that, like when you ask a question on ChatGPT (especially version 4), if you don’t need data from 2021 and onwards, ChatGPT is an awesome “search” engine in a way, and also narrows down information and
And it won’t be until they manage to subvert the AI to serve advertising.
… to find anything useful with the google
It takes a LOT more work to sift through the crap
Useful information still exists, it’s just buried under a mountain of crap
The TFS did not touch on how Google rewrites your search. It deletes terms, and brings up results that do not contain all the terms you searched on without marking it as “term X deleted” (it sometimes does that also, in tiny letter at the bottom) often at the top of your results as “most relevant”. I unbundles quoted term sets to bring up lots more irrelevant content. It adds “synonyms” you did not search on. All this is to homogenize the results for some “general public” that does not understand search and Google knows better than you what you want.
For most searching I need to use the semi-hidden advanced search these days (odd that the Google Search page provides no hint that it exists isn’t it?). Still has all those featured ads given premium placement though.
As per the title, for better or worse everything on the web has a lifespan.
I am but a pixel-stained techno-peasant. May the Blessed Algorithm favor me in all it’s Glory.
I’m frequently searching for things and needing to make sure a word doesn’t show up in the results. The old time standard operators for excluding words not only don’t work anymore but are now seen as something you are explicitly searching for, not against. Doesn’t matter if you use Google or DuckDuckGo, the result is the same. It’s adding lots of time to my efforts. I know part of this is because sites game the SEO by including the things you are trying to avoid which would exclude them from the results even if it is exactly what you are looking for but that’s not the whole problem.
The summary describes how Google killed or failed to maintain Groups, Blogger, and Reader. That should surprise no one, they’ve been killing off second-tier products for years. Remember Google Plus? Here’s a nice list… https://killedbygoogle.com/ [killedbygoogle.com]
In the end, Google has certain core products that it depends on: Search, Gmail, Maps, Chrome, Ads, and Docs, plus YouTube. These aren’t going anywhere, and aren’t really losing market share.
So to say that Google is in decline, is focusing on the wrong products.
htt [statcounter.com]
Everytime I try to search for something on Amazon, I have to scroll half way down, or sometimes to the next page of results, before I find what I searched for.
Usually it’s full of “promoted” items, and often from 3rd party sellers, that don’t match what I searched for. I’ve seriously cut back my Amazon purchases, and cancelled my prime, due to this reason alone.
I routinely now search for something with Google. It says âoeno results found.â Then I manually go and find the thing, verify that it has all the keywords, and then realize âoeGoogle just does not work any more.â
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