BlueSky Post.
Transcript.
If you tell someone to “Google it” at this point you’re telling them to look up five ads and some AI-generated bs instead of the actual thing they want to know.
old guy takes long hit on the bong
“Back in my day, search engines used to find things besides the wreckage of late-stage capitalism.”
Google was a "disrupter"
Which means they burnt investor money for years to deliver a great product while not making any profit.
Once they gain market share and are the default, enshitification begins and people eventually wonder why they're still using it.
Haven’t used Google in months and haven’t felt any loss in my quality of life. Protonmail and DuckDuckGo, easy peasy
The one Google product that I still use is Google maps. Openstreetmaps just isn't as good in my area and only Google maps, Waze, and Apple maps have accurate traffic data here.
Also for the uninformed Google owns Waze.
I can't stop using that and Google photos. Instant backup of all photos, and more importantly, great search. It even recognizes my two dogs.
If you are in to hosting things yourself on an old computer. Immich is pretty much a drop in google photos
Organic Maps is a huge step in the right direction using Openstreetmaps. It is about at the level if a dedicated GPS in my opinion, just doesn't have traffic data to route around like the big 3.
well I'm all about that :) but will it's image recognition capabilities work on a raspberry pi or a 12-year-old laptop?
I'll check. both of them. thanks!
I'm working on improving Open Street Maps wherever I can, but I'm only one person. Every few weeks or so I'll login and add or fix something. Slowly but surely!
While live traffic might be a hurdle (even though Magic Earth, despite not being FOSS, has good enough data, at least for me), why not contribute to OSM yourself?
I do have street complete and contribute for my neighborhood, but there just aren't enough other ppl nearby contributing to be useable. There are a lot of missing roads in my town.
For me, the main advantage of Google maps is the traffic preview. Mostly used daily to find fastest road between home and workplace
I'm fine with Google being a map company.
I miss the auto email sorting, but Proton Mail is definitely a good option, especially if you want your own domain.
The search engine wasn't disruptive in the sense that it was subsidized, it was disruptive in the sense that it didn't try to be the portal to everything in the internet (as opposed to, say, Yahoo) but offered a clean page.
Except that I wouldn't use Google Search as an example of enshittification.
It isn't like Google tried to break search to increase profits. Instead, the industry around Google changed to adapt to Google's search algorithms.
No, they most certainly broke it. Instead of just searching for what you type in, it now "interprets" your query and the interpretation is always whatever has more ads. If you switch to Verbatim mode, the results are noticeably better.
You can switch to verbatim mode?
Tools -> dropdown "All results" and select "Verbatim"
That looks good! Thanks!
They absolutely did break it. Without even getting into all of the convoluted shenanigans they pull now, their advanced search operators are dog shit now. They completely ignore negative search terms whenever they have a bunch of ads to show you with that term, or when there's an abundance of agenda-rich propaganda articles with that term. They're fucking poopoopcacca now.
It also sucks that all information is now hidden away in a youtube tutorial or on a reddit thread full of dead links and deleted comments. I don't want to watch your shit YouTube video, I never did.
Right? I never understood why people would rather watch some over sensationalized YouTube video that is full of fluff, rather than just quickly reading an article. I can get information I need from an article before a YouTuber even finishes their stupid intro. I guess the average person is pretty bad at reading.
I wonder if there is a new term to use to target secondary or tertiary entshittification. I mean Google did participate in entshittification with the increase in ads but they are also a big victim of the same entshittification. Like maybe the entshittification is rolling downhill.
some call it capitalism. cash is king.
Not really true.
Googles stance on protecting net neutrality totally changed over the years with the cell phone internet browsing, and them getting in bed with Verizon. Google=Verizon
Obama fought off the end of net neutrality his entire presidency.
Now they have a large financial reasonability to direct you to specific content and companies
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/net-neutrality-is-ending-heres-how-your-internet-use-could-change
I'm not defending Google itself, just noting that the declining quality of its search is based less on a malicious decision on Google's part and more a result of SEO.
I mean, the 5+ ads that Google serves at the top before real results are not the result of SEO. It's a problem sure, but don't take the credit away from Google. They worked hard to make sure you see those ads.
I feel like they did break search to profit, though possibly through inaction. It doesn't feel like they're even trying to deliver good content over seo garbage anymore.
Hard to distinguish malice from incompetence with Google, though.
Lol wut??? They drove the industry in this direction. What fuckin bullshit.
PageRank was a huge deal, and drastically increased the quality of the results over previous approaches. They absolutely disrupted search.
Google was founded in 1998. AdWords came out in 2000 and the company had its first profitable quarter in 2001. Three years isn't bad to build a tech company that can turn a profit.
They are an ad company first and foremost. Search, Android, Chromebooks, browsers and Cloud hosting all just feed their machine.
Butterfly meme:
Literally everything bad vaguely related to tech
Lemmy users: "Is this enshittification?"
What's an example of Lemmy complaining about something you would say isn't enshittification, but the Lemmy users do say is enshittification?
This. Google is losing the fight against SEO (and now AI), they're not intentionally giving you bad search results. Bing, DDG, etc. are all facing the same struggles.
Enshittification isn't when companies make their products worse on purpose, for the sake of making it worse. The goal isn't to get worse, the goal is to maintain competitive force and increase profit margins by way of strategically "optimizing" previously good products to squeeze ever more profit.
The mere fact that AI and SEO are ruining these search engines is a product of the profit-motive and markets functioning "properly."
Exactly. Google isn't intentionally delivering shitty search results to maintain a competitive force or increase profit margins, but because they're fighting a constant battle against people trying (and succeeding) to outsmart their algorithms.
The comment I replied to was specifically talking how Google was attempting to deliver a good product while they were small and is now leveraging it's market position to deliver worse search reults.
And that's just wrong, it has nothing to do with Google burning through venture capital back in the days or being the most popular search engine nowadays. Sure, the ads are annoying, they take all your data and all that could be reasonably called enshittification, but the crappy search results aren't intentional.
It's still enshittification, because that's a consequence of Capitalism in general. Capitalism isn't bad because Capitalists are big scary evil people, but because it structurally stands against itself and prioritizes profit over results.
But that's still not what they said in their original comment. They were directly linking Google's search becoming worse to Google's monopoly, while the same is happening to all other providers as well, no matter how niche they are.
Sure we can tranform this into some handwavy "capitalism bad" statement (and I agree), but that's not what they said and has basically no substance.
You spoke about enshittification and claimed it is overused, then gave an example that fits enshittification to a tee. Kinda hard to argue with that.
No. Enshittification imho requires intent. When Google makes you watch twelve ads before a YT video, that's enshittification. If SEO ruins search engines as a whole, that's not enshittification.
Enshittification does not require intent to do anything other than maintain competitive advantages. SEO ruining search engines is a factor of enshittification, as it's a direct flaw of Capitalism and the Profit Motive that led to its existence.
More that SEO won.