https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi
"Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years
of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was
literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
Today, Google has a 90% search market-share. They got it the hard way: they
cheated. Google spends tens of billions of dollars on payola in order to ensure
that they are the default search engine behind every search box you encounter
on every device, every service and every website:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics
Not coincidentally, Google's search is getting progressively, monotonically
worse. It is a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense. Important
resources that I never bothered to bookmark because I could find them with a
quick Google search no longer show up in the first ten screens of results:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task
Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so
much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months
later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is
saying that they don't need to spend money on quality, because we're all locked
into using Google search. It's cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere
in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried
another search engine, we'd still prefer Google.
This is enshittification. Google is shifting value away from end users
(searchers) and business customers (advertisers, publishers and merchants) to
itself:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith
And here's the thing: there are search engines out there that are so good that
if you just try them, you'll get that same feeling you got the first time you
tried Google."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
