SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Over at The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel wonders if Google Search is becoming a victim of its own success:
In February, an engineer named Dmitri Brereton wrote a blog post about Google's search-engine decay, rounding up leading theories for why the product's "results have gone to shit." The post quickly shot to the top of tech forums such as Hacker News and was widely shared on Twitter and even prompted a PR response from Google's Search liaison, Danny Sullivan, refuting one of Brereton's claims. "You said in the post that quotes don't give exact matches. They really do. Honest," Sullivan wrote in a series of tweets.
Brereton's most intriguing argument for the demise of Google Search was that savvy users of the platform no longer type instinctive keywords into the search bar and hit "Enter." The best Googlers—the ones looking for actionable or niche information, product reviews, and interesting discussions—know a cheat code to bypass the sea of corporate search results clogging the top third of the screen. "Most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust," Brereton argued, therefore "we resort to using Google, and appending the word 'reddit' to the end of our queries." Brereton cited Google Trends data that show that people are searching the word reddit on Google more than ever before.
[...] Google has built wildly successful mobile operating systems, mapped the world, changed how we email and store photos, and tried, with varying success, to build cars that drive themselves. [...] Most of the tech company's products—Maps, Gmail—are Trojan horses for a gargantuan personalized-advertising business, and Search is the one that started it all. It is the modern template for what the technology critic Shoshana Zuboff termed "surveillance capitalism."
The article goes on at length about ruthless commercialism via ever-intrusive ads, constant tweaks to the search algorithm, and how different generations use the ubiquitous search engine.
Previously:
Google's Ad Business Could Finally Crack Open
Google Allegedly Hid Documents From Search Monopoly Lawsuit, DOJ Claims
EU and UK Open Antitrust Probe Into Google and Meta Over Online Ads
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday June 22 2022, @03:02PM (5 children)
+1 informative.
Allow me to add a plug for Whoogle. I needed the phone number for a business in Mt. Pleasant minutes ago. I KNOW that doing a search on Google will give me hits that are nonsense, totally unrelated to the information I want. So, I go to my locally hosted Whoogle instance, type in the business name, press enter, and every single link is directly related to the business. The first link lands on the business' home page, complete with phone number, fax number, driving directions, a photo of the building, photos of personnel and equipment.
Believe it or not, I got those results despite misspelling the business name in my search! The business name (misspelled) and the city were sufficient terms to get the information I needed.
https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search [github.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 22 2022, @03:18PM (2 children)
Ma Bell used to give away large paper books full of phone numbers.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday June 22 2022, @03:28PM
Yes, and I would need a small library dedicated to the phone books, if I were to keep every phone book for every town within 100 miles of my home. Whats more, the phone book would only give me the phone number. All that information on the business' home page is potentially useful, like the driving directions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 24 2022, @03:04PM
A website would be better nowadays.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 22 2022, @07:05PM
> ...Google will give me hits that are nonsense
Yep, same result with Google search.
However, using Google Maps usually gets me the local business information I need including phone number.
(Score: 5, Informative) by driverless on Thursday June 23 2022, @03:31PM
Yup, showing that Google’s Search liaison, Danny Sullivan, is full of shit with his "You said in the post that quotes don’t give exact matches. They really do. Honest": Enter search terms in quotes and you get a bunch of results that don't contain the quoted terms anywhere on the page. They really don't. Honest.