Google’s slow demise is entirely expected late-stage enshittification.
What is frustrating is that search is mostly a solved problem. Crawling and indexing are solved problems. Fighting adversarial SEO is a continuous task, that Google Search is essentially refusing to perform but is clearly cheap enough for an upstart like Kagi to do reasonably well (their only added-value is the aggregation and filtering of other indexers such as google and mojeek, and let’s be honest it’s probably 99% google’s index powering Kagi).
This shows that the lack of meaningful competition in the space is actually merely a matter of capital. There are too many webpages to scrape, process, and save and nothing short of “indexing almost as much stuff as google” is going to cut it.
In the software world we’re used to seeing FOSS alternatives to most things, because software’s capital costs are typically almost equal to manpower costs. However for search this doesn’t work, just like it historically hasn’t worked too well for some really expensive software (such as audiovisual creation tools, with the notable exceptions of Blender and to a lesser extent Krita).
There should be a well-funded non-profit building and providing a high-quality, exhaustive, transparent and open-source indexing service for the world. It definitely sounds possible, and even rather easy in the grand scheme of things. Yet current economic incentives do not favor such models. However I do wonder if there are not options to be explored, such as distributed crawlers or even a distributed index (after looking it up, YaCy seems to be doing just that though at a glance it seems, uh, old and clunky). Or maybe the EU should finally put a real focus on meaningfully funding indigenous FOSS R&D so the enshittification process of American tech giants doesn’t crush us as well.
I feel like Google’s crap results predate the AI tech by at least five years. It has been garbage SEO stuff for a while.
I feel so bad for the younger folks these days.
Way back when, if Google couldn’t find it and we did some good Google Fu, it probably wasn’t readily available online.
Now, you know it probably is there, just buried in nonsense generated purely by layer after layer of people’s selfishness. And they never even knew it could be any other way.
It’s a sick joke that we’ve celebrated being in the “information age” for the last 20-25 years, and now that information is being obfuscated by various means again.
SEO, censorship, paywalls.
Now we have graduated to the disinformation age:-(
Maybe we should start calling disinformation “Lore”
lore-posting time
it’s not the information age, it’s the data age.
Information implies usefulness. Data is just data. Could be right, could be wrong, who knows.
You could say the same thing about information, though. Information doesn’t necessarily imply usefulness. There is an infinitude of information in the universe which is useless to us.
Google has also disabled some of the search operators that made refining results more useful.
Like I don’t think the minus operator to exclude a search term works anymore.
Which is the most important one for me. It’s also really useful for filtering SEO crap that has 50,000 keywords attached to every page.
Is that a rollout thing? I was just using it last night
It really breaks when you’re using it multiple times in a string or combining it with other operators.
Woah, with 5 years you guessed correct, google decided to kill search accuracy for profits 5 years ago, in 2019
It does.
Straight out of college in 2015 I did some SEO sidehustling. We’d get blogs writing for cheap by fiverr people, adjusted it a bit, and they ranked high very easily based on certain keywords for the industry. Those blogs were just random bullshit (AI does a better job for a short story), jargon was on point but the content was just snakeoil. Business went thriving.
This unironically is what I/my peers do with resume/cover letters for job/internship applications nowadays. My friend actually has a decent beer moneymaker for building optimized resumes for other people on campus.
The whole system we’re playing in is so fucked.
My buddy needs help doing this with his resume. He works in IT. Think you could help him out? He’d pay, of course.
Sorry, it’s my friend who does it, not me, and I can tell you right now his clients are dumb finance/business bros, not tech.
All he does is throw the job description into some version of chatGPT to generate a cover letter, and edit it around to make it relevant to the person’s skills and sound like a human wrote it. Then he reduces the resume down to one page. Usually this is enough to get them into the group interview (according to him).
Basic stuff to tech oriented people but this shit is still a mystery to so many college kids/recent grads.
Roger, thanks for the insight! It seems that the job market is difficult at the moment for experienced tech folks. My friend has been talking about paying several hundred to a company who does similar resume editing, and they guarantee an interview in 30 days. IT has never been this rough in the 13-ish years I’ve been in the field.
I don’t know where you live and how bad it is there, but I just got my new job (software architecture) and I specifically asked in my interviews how to improve my resume. The final version was the culmination of all this feedback and got me the perfect job for me, as it makes use of every skill and strength I have.
The two most important points for my resume:
- As some companies use AI for filtering out candidates, don’t do anything fancy, no double columns or star ratings, just write text separated by headers.
- the first page was more like a profile page from a website, where I present relevant general technical and social skills, specific domain knowledge and examples from previous jobs that are relevant for this position. And just from page 2 onward is the usual stuff like education, internships, languages, etc.
It was a lot of work to tailor the cover letter and resume to every posting, but I had much more interviews than when I started and sent out the generic version to a multitude of postings. So in the end it was roughly the same time I invested, with less applications, but more interviews, tailored to my interests and skills.
For reference, this is the style I used for my resume. Hope that helps your friend!
I really like the format of this. Thanks for sharing, and you look like a really solid candidate.
I couldn’t help but notice this at the bottom, “References and other document’s available”.
When it should read: “References and other documents available “The apostrophe in “document’s” suggests that the documents are in possession or have ownership of something.
I see you speak Hindi as well as English, so for the record, I could not draft such a great resume myself in Hindi.
nothing you do in the system will do anything but dig you in deeper.
It has been garbage SEO stuff for a while.
garbabe SEO has been there since almost the beginning. More recently google started to promote sites base on their profitableness.
Remember when you could suppress sites from Google search results? Due to “unknowable reasons”, they got rid of that feature. Enshittification is real.
Yeah I was looking the other day to block certain sites because every time I google shit I can’t get an answer or it’s just really an add. Along with fucking Qora or whatever it is.
Unfortunately the option is gone
there’s a mozilla extension for that, here is the github page, though it’s also available as extensions to other browsers, including mobile
But the SEO garbage sites active up to 2023 have updated since 2023 to keep up with each other.
So it works really well.
This beats using “reddit” because that site has also become full of ai generated and bot spam/product astroturfing
And now Reddit won’t let me see the content while I’m on a VPN if I’m not logged in with some trite “whoa there partner!” bull.
I started switching everything to duckduckgo. So far it’s been a much better experience.
I set DDG as my default a while back and I’m finding myself having to open Google all the time to get results.
I committed to using ddg for a couple years, finally quitting about a year back, and I have to agree. I found myself using bangs for nearly every search. Google is absolutely getting worse and fast, but I’m not sure there was ever a point where ddg had better results than Google. After all it’s just reheated bing.
Bing
DDG gets their results from Bing
Yes. That’s why I said it
Works great for old stuff, now how do I look up stuff on the bridge collapse near me last week?
go to the actual site, it’s near you.
Oh good I am sure I can find out the eta of when the bypass will be built from the broken bridge.
ask the workers working there. easy peasy *thumbs up
You can’t do shit about it either way …
I can save driving an extra 120kms if I know the status of the bridge…
Just done 4 searches and got the exact same results regardless of “before:2023”
It’s because these are two idiots trying to sound smart. I have used pre-2015 searches, because sometime between 2009-2016 is when SEO in general started being used. The AI generation just kicked it into high gear. Stuff before 2015 at least appears to offer information that isn’t just reworded lists of advertisements.
…interesting…
Yeah, tried it when this first got mentioned. Doesn’t do squat.
I imagine google have changed the settings.
I also note Duckduck doesnt give great results these days either.
I find DDG still provides more reliably useful results than google, but not by much.
You could also just avoid Google. They haven’t been reliable for two decades.
For what? DDG results are just as bad, if not worse.
Ironically I find myself using Bing more often than not, for it’s Copilot AI. It has a tendency to just repeat the same incorrect information when it can’t find what you want, but it’s still better than anything I get from a search engine, that is, not without adding site:reddit.com to my queries, and for obvious reasons, I don’t want to have to keep doing that.
Please share your secret. What magical unknown search engine are you using that is immune to AI-generated nonsense?
DuckDuckGo primarily uses Bing results, mixed with a few other smaller sources. Kagi (paid) uses AI, but in a way that benefits the user, not the advertiser. They were an early adopter of AI.
I use DDG and keep adding words until I get what I want. Especially quoted words.
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This has the bonus side effect of being able to ignore any news that happened since 2023 to gaslight yourself into thinking that we’re not all living in a hellscape of a world
I think the news in 2022 was still pretty hellish. I’m going to go with (before:2013). Some hell still, but a naively optimistic hell
Probably more poverty/starvation but a fraction of the climate change?
way fewer active genocides and all of them trying to fly under the radar.
You’d need to go back to pre 2012 for that
Little further than that. Further… Keep going until you see fish legs.
Before 2007 gets one well before the 2007 financial collapse.
No the news from 2024 is an improvement over the news from 2023. Moderately anyway
And then SEO optimiser add the tag “before:2023”
Thanks, I hate it.
I know its a joke but using Google dorks has always been the most effective way of searching. There was a period of like 4 or a bit more years where you didn’t need them anymore because engines actually got good. Now though they’re more useful than ever.
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An alternative that actually uses its own web crawlers https://mojeek.com
issa me!
Okay, beat your chest, tell me about what you got.
8bn pages crawled and indexed in house by us, but if you want something a bit more fleshed-out: https://www.mojeek.com/about/why-mojeek
The year is 2235, and the warp drive has been invented. I go to search Google for the latest news on the tech but remember this old bit of advice from an old meme that was floating around almost 2 centuries ago I saw once while lurking in the Ancient Memes community. All I find are things taken from fiction. Only about 25% are factually accurate.
At this point, 25% is pretty solid.
nowadays, all tabs look like the shopping tab
also the shopping tab, if you’re actually shopping, is completely fucking useless.
Commercialization of everything.
That’s what inevitably happens when you give a mega corp like Google all of that power over you, your life, and your data by simply using their products. Ultimately, they then get to decide who you are and how you act. And it’s in their benefit to shape everything, including you, in their corporate image.
People don’t notice how much they’re getting fucked on an individual basis until the consequences of the actions of millions or billions of people adds up and comes back around in the form of something stupid and obvious like Manifest V3, SEO everywhere, WEI, or the doublespeak “privacy sandbox” comes to bite you in the ass. Enshittification everywhere and even then most people still don’t care.
We’re their cattle and we’re choosing to walk into a slaughterhouse with our eyes wide open. In more ways than one. As fun as the game is, I really do not want to actually live in Cyberpunk.
ive been saying this for 20+ years, and people still don’t fucking listen. fuck, apple users still exist!
also: what about a ‘shadowrun’ campaign gm’d by a severely concussed Kurt Vonnegut as he dies of dysentery at the table?
Many Google users are reporting that their results are not as good as they used to be.
If you’re suffering from this annoying problem don’t worry. Simply follow the steps below.
- Install Driver Easy.
- Run Driver Easy.
- Pay for Driver Easy.
It won’t fix your problem obviously, but here we are on the front page of the search results for every fucking Windows problem regardless.
The new episode of the Better Offline podcast is the first in a three part series on the death of the web. I’m halfway through and would recommend it. It’s a good show just in general.
Is this podcast available online?
No you have to send a postcard to a PO box and then they send you back a cassette tape. With a free pencil to fix it when it inevitably unravels.
No you have to ask around and get it on kasette
