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posted by hubie on Wednesday June 22 2022, @12:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the I've-got-a-secret dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 23 2022, @12:09PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 23 2022, @12:09PM (#1255567)

    Reddit is just as gamed as google. Honesty is rapidly disappearing off its pages just as much.

    We're back to the days of running through multiple search engines. Something to that dead internet theory.

    Search for things google doesn't like and watch it return the same results or irrelevant results. Try searching for how communism is bad and get all the reasons communism is great back.

    Nobody's content can survive off of social media either unless it's a labor of love. There appears to be nothing but the corporate internet left.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 23 2022, @01:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 23 2022, @01:43PM (#1255576)

    "Nobody's content can survive off of" --- what does this mean?
    I have content on the internet that's been there for 15 years, not on social media.
    Still there.

    Or are you somehow measuring "survival" by number of visitors?