I guess we all kinda knew that, but it’s always nice to have a study backing your opinions.
There are literal careers dedicated to gaming search results. That’s bound to happen.
It’s time for Google to die. They are a truly awful company now so it’s time to take her down to the shed like ol’ blockbuster
Before we had Google, we had Altavista and before that we had indexes like Yahoo. Maybe we should consider going back. With the help of AI (I know…) it seems feasible to keep up with the ever growing content.
Maybe we should consider going back.
You can’t really go back. Those old engines worked on more naive algorithms against a significantly smaller pool of websites.
The more modern iteration of Altavista/AOL/Yahoo has been the aggregation sites like Reddit, where people still post and interact with the site to establish relevancy. Even that’s been enshittified, but its a far better source than some basic web crawler that just scans website text and metadata for the word “Horse” and returns a big listical of results based on a hash weighted by number of link-backs.
That system was gamed decades ago and is almost trivial to undermine in the modern moment. Nevermind how hard you’d need to work to recreate the original baseline hash tables that these old engines built up over their own decades of operation.
Google’s relevance of search has gone extremely downhill in the last few years even before the surge of AI articles, so it’s no surprise the keyword-injected articles are all that’s winning now.
But holy shit does it piss me off how many of these first page results have literally incorrect information now too. Want to learn how to do something in software? See a release date? Find accurate information? Good fucking luck.
For all people complain about the decline in ad revenue, there’s still clearly a strong incentive to get click-bait responses.
I honestly wonder if the solution isn’t to fight the SEO wars forever, but to just cut this shit off at the root and screen out sites that host ads, period. Obviously, Google can’t limit its search by screening out folks that use AdSense because… that’s half their business model. But perhaps a search engine that does bias itself against sites that monetize click-throughs could dramatically improve results.
IMHO, the problem with Google isn’t SEO. It’s Google. When Google was great, it would find exactly what you were searching for. The whole point was to get you off of Google and on to whatever site you were looking for as quickly as possible. Over the last several years, their search has increasingly been drinking the ‘engagement algorithm’ Kool-Aid. Now Google doesn’t search for what you ask, it searches for what it thinks you are trying to find. Which is fucking useless because I know exactly what I’m trying to find and that’s exactly what I typed in. Selecting verbatim search and putting things in quotes helps. But it’s still displays tons of irrelevant stuff that doesn’t include what I searched for.
It’s actually easy to point to exactly when the downfall started. Years ago Google was trying to make a social network called Google+ that would compete with Facebook. Before this, a + operator in the search field meant only show results that contain that particular term. But they wanted people to search for Google+, so they changed it so the plus sign became a searchable term and quotes were necessary to include a term or phrase. That was the moment Google decided that search wasn’t their most important product. And it’s been slow downhill ever since.
Okay, sure that was bad. But consider all the value that we’ve gained by having a lively and competitive alternative to Facebook! I mean, who do you know that doesn’t treat Google+ as their first point of contact with the internet?
Lol Don’t know anybody that does that, not since they closed in 2019 :P Amusingly, double quotes are still the standard ‘must include’ operator on Google search.
Google has also completely blown a very good opportunity to make a ubiquitous chat system. Several iterations of Google talk and Google meet and the like, only one of which federated outside of Google, none of which are compatible with each other, all of which seem to get remade or rebranded every few years.
Competitor to Facebook would have been a great idea. I had actually planned to join Google+. But shortly after it launched they started pushing it so fucking hard, like almost sneakly signing up people for it and making it damn near required to do anything, that made me say hell no. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone in that regard.
I don’t know what the hell is going on at Big G HQ, but it doesn’t seem like they have much of any real mission these days. Haven’t really since ‘don’t be evil’ stopped being part of their mission statement.
I don’t know what the hell is going on at Big G HQ, but it doesn’t seem like they have much of any real mission these days.
The company is increasingly compelled by Wall Street pressures
The latest round of layoffs was practically dictated by activist investors like Christopher Hohn.
Stupid short sighted crap too. Complaining about excessive compensation and too much stock given away… That’s the people who build the best generation of money making products there. If they have no skin in the game and aren’t being compensated well, they aren’t going to attract and keep the best talent. The best talent is going to go to companies like Tesla and OpenAI and various startups where those people have a chance to become millionaires on stock options.
It’s one thing to pull the Netflix strategy, keep only the very best of the best people, pay them a lot, and get rid of everybody else. But treating labor overall like a cost and not an investment is not a good long-term strategy.
If they have no skin in the game and aren’t being compensated well, they aren’t going to attract and keep the best talent.
I think the theory being challenged is that “best talent” translates to “most lucrative product”.
Certainly, there’s no shortage of shitty mass market crap that makes enormous amounts of money purely by saturating the market. What’s more, the model of cornering the market through regulatory capture or cartelization means that the talent of your staff has less and less of an impact on your market dominance. Eventually, when you’ve got a full blown monopoly, the only thing you really care about is the margin on your sales.
It’s one thing to pull the Netflix strategy, keep only the very best of the best people, pay them a lot, and get rid of everybody else.
Netflix hasn’t even been following the Netflix strategy. They’re routinely cutting bait on the highest watched shows and opting for cheaper productions with less overhead. One reason they love pumping out anime stems from the fact that licensing an English sub of a foreign media import is crazy lucrative relative to sourcing original content from Hollywood.
WB is taking this strategy into overdrive with their quest to saturate HBO with reality TV and old movies.
Generally agree.
But it depends on what your product line is. Does Google want to be Microsoft (new flavor of the same old crap, cloud centric, no special talent needed just competent coders and project leadership) or do they want to be OpenAI (push the envelope of what’s possible and commercialize it)?
If the goal is to be Microsoft, this investor’s comments are accurate. Fewer staff, less compensation, just get a few well paid product managers with a vision and a buggy whip to drive the coders to build it. Higher margins will mean more profits.
If the goal is to be OpenAI, this investor is dead wrong.
Netflix hasn’t even been following the Netflix strategy.
I was talking about their employees, not their content. Their content strategy is brain dead. They cancel so much stuff that it’s not even worth getting into a Netflix show because it’ll probably be cancelled after one season.
It might work, in the short term. But without quality content people will give up on Netflix and they will be the ‘budget option’.HBO is doing the same thing- I really think their management must be on drugs or brain damaged or something. HBO was THE most recognizable brand name for QUALITY content in the entire industry, and they killed it in favor of ‘max’ which is generic and means nothing and blends in with everyone else’s ‘plus’. And lopping off their own content is equally stupid.
Just like Boeing putting the useless McDonnell Douglas bean counters in charge of the company post merge, WB put the people who ran Discovery into the ground in charge. Sad to watch.
They cancel so much stuff that it’s not even worth getting into a Netflix show because it’ll probably be cancelled after one season.
Yeah. There was definitely some business goon looking at a spreadsheet and saying “Most shows get the max audience inside the first three seasons, so we should just cancel everything inside the first three seasons” without really considering what that means for the business model long term.
HBO was THE most recognizable brand name for QUALITY content in the entire industry, and they killed it in favor of ‘max’
Should be noted that they got bought out by the Discovery Channel precisely because the Discovery brand schlock was able to churn enormous profits relative to Warner.
Just like Boeing putting the useless McDonnell Douglas bean counters in charge of the company post merge, WB put the people who ran Discovery into the ground in charge. Sad to watch.
Boeing is testing the bounds of “too big to fail”.
One thing about Max is that I don’t really pay for it. I just get the service gratis through AT&T. I have to wonder how much of their business model effective boils down to “since people just subscribe and forget we can charge them indefinitely for schlook they’d normally click past on terrestrial TV”.
I think this is the real wage of modern Streaming. An entire business model built on elderly people who never cancel anything.
I’ve been trying DuckDuckGo recently and already started seeing some better results. I’m not ready to change my default search engine yet, but if it keeps up I could see that happening sooner than later.
Same on the default search changing, I’m very much used to Google Search and it’s gonna take me a while before I switch. Though I’ve already managed to switch from Gmail and it’s kinda refreshing, so this will be just another step.
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