The sad thing is, we've already had this figured out before.
15-20 years ago Google was almost perfect. It completely blew my mind how accurate and fast it was. Many times it felt like it was a mind-reader. I didn't even type in half my question and it was already auto-completing it and showing the results, the first few of which contained a very exact and detailed answer that someone wrote on a forum somewhere or an article that gave me a complete and correct answer. Remember the old 'I'm feeling lucky' button which directly took you to the first search result? Yea, it was pretty usable back then, because the first result was usually correct. Pepperidge farm 'members...
And then the enshittification started by pumping the site full of ads. First the ads were pretty distinguishable from the real results and you could just scroll through them. Then they started to disguise the ads more and more like real results, and just showing more of them. And by now I think google is basically ONLY ads. There are NO real results on it. Virtually the only 'content' you are shown are what somebody has payed for google to show. Even if what you are looking for is a very well known, public interest fact, if nobody is paying for it, google is not going to show it.
E.g. the other day google could not find me the website of a country-wide utility company for electricity by typing their exact name, because I guess they haven't paid their monthly ads for google.
Luckily there are other alternatives to google, which still have 'don't do evil' in their corporate philosophy. None of them are close to as good as google used to be, especially if you are not searching in english. But still a hell of a lot better than how google is now.
The sad thing is, we've already had this figured out before.
15-20 years ago Google was almost perfect. It completely blew my mind how accurate and fast it was. Many times it felt like it was a mind-reader. I didn't even type in half my question and it was already auto-completing it and showing the results, the first few of which contained a very exact and detailed answer that someone wrote on a forum somewhere or an article that gave me a complete and correct answer. Remember the old 'I'm feeling lucky' button which directly took you to the first search result? Yea, it was pretty usable back then, because the first result was usually correct. Pepperidge farm 'members...
And then the enshittification started by pumping the site full of ads. First the ads were pretty distinguishable from the real results and you could just scroll through them. Then they started to disguise the ads more and more like real results, and just showing more of them. And by now I think google is basically ONLY ads. There are NO real results on it. Virtually the only 'content' you are shown are what somebody has payed for google to show. Even if what you are looking for is a very well known, public interest fact, if nobody is paying for it, google is not going to show it. E.g. the other day google could not find me the website of a country-wide utility company for electricity by typing their exact name, because I guess they haven't paid their monthly ads for google.
Luckily there are other alternatives to google, which still have 'don't do evil' in their corporate philosophy. None of them are close to as good as google used to be, especially if you are not searching in english. But still a hell of a lot better than how google is now.