A few years ago anything you wanted to search for would generate hundreds of pages of results. From sources all over. If you structured your query well you could dramatically cut down the irrelevant results and then spend a bit of time skimming through the offerings until you found your target.
Searching felt like a hunt, it could take you to far flung corners of the web, and hitting the jackpot on some obscure forum was part of the fun.
Now searching anything feels incredibly frustrating. You know what you are looking for is out there somewhere but it feels impossible getting to it. Basically we have only two main routes now, Google and Bing (and I swear Bing is just copying Google's homework). I've tried a handful of others and they all fall very short.
Something has changed dramatically under the hood.
It seems like the results are very shallow and no amount of prodding will get either search engine to produce anything besides the laziest output. Any subject has a limited pool of sites they lean on and then pretend that that's all of the Internet.
It generalizes very quickly and if you try to counter by putting things in quotations it gives up.
Even in the rare moments I've buckled and used their stupid AI, it takes even more time browbeating the program to just deliver the damned specifics.
What is going on??
How do we get our old search back?
I swear every day of trying to navigate the web feels worse than the day before.
How did we get here?
There's got to be something better, right? Or something we can do to pave a new structure that benefits the denizens of the web better than the lazy slop our tech overlords scrape off the table for us. What can we do?
I read an article about it somewhere, but, can't find it. Basically the guy in charge of search realized they were at the highest level of users they can get so the only way to increase search traffic is to make it just bad enough you have to search different phrasing a couple of times to get the result therefore increasing search traffic.
Is this intentional ironic?
Lmao no it wasnt I did search for it too
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
I've read that, too. Probably that same article. I've read a few other explanations, about how SEO "ruined" the Internet. How they've deliberately handicapped search so you'd use AI, etc.
I feel like all of this is true but there is also more to all these stories than meets the eye.
To me it feels like back in the the day everyone just collectively allowed the tech giants to be lifeguards. But then we find out that they've been taking money on the side to let people shit in the pool.
Now the pool is completely filled with the commercial sectors turds and the "lifeguards" want to sell us a scooper to get our carefully curated results out, sans logs.
This one maybe ? https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Yep
The thing that is eternally forgotten when people ask these sorts of questions, or perhaps it is just deliberately pushed to the back of their minds is that the corporations providing these services are not in the business of providing services, they are in the business of making profit, primarily by finding ways to push as much advertising as is possible. Remembering that is really the only true answer to these sorts of questions.
"Number go up" is all that counts.
Diabolical