People say this to acknowledge out loud the perceived change in how Google makes product decisions. In the early days, the lead priority was an awesome, focused search experience. Today, the lead priority seems to be comportment with the revenue model.

This explains user-hostile deprecations like newsgroup search (a literal search engine they bought and abandoned), RSS Reader, etc.

In addition, the ever-decreasing visual distinction between organic search results and ads on Google SERPs is well documented. As is the ever-increasing encroachment of data collection into all their products. Look at how Chrome works with Google accounts now vs 5 or 10 years ago.

Google went from a search engine company who runs ads so they can afford to keep building cool things, to an ad company that runs a search engine because it provides provide data and inventory for its ad network.

No, they make their search worse to sell more ads. Just like they make YouTube worse to sell more ads.

It seems pretty clear that Google has made their search worse to sell more ads.

It properly calls attention to what google’s primary purpose is.

Its not search.

A newspaper’s primary purpose is to inform the public, and make money while doing so.

Googles primary purpose is not search, and to make money while doing so.

Googles primary purpose is collect and sell data, and make money while doing so.

Google doesn’t sell data, and Google’s primary purpose is Search and organizing information, ads is just the way it’s funded.

If the primary purpose was ada, then it would stop all of the wasteful spending on engineering projects with no relation to, and no hope of, making ad money.

You’re right on the not selling data directly. I should have been more precise.

Google is in the business of collecting data and selling advertising using that data. For the purpose of making money.

Search hasn’t been part of their purpose in decades.

Let me ask you this, has search gotten better or worse in the last 5 - 10 years? Has their data collection gotten more invasive or less over the last 5 - 10 years?

I think we both know what kind of company Google is once those questions are answered.

Search hasn't gotten worse. If you have objective measures as opposed to subject personal anecdotes, present them.

Subjective personal anecdotes are 100% valid forms of data.

But since you asked: Compare Google search engine results over nearly two decades and a trend emerges: Results are filled with advertising and non-Google results are lower down. https://wapo.st/3dHj2Xf

That's still N=1. He uses a single example, product search for t-shirts, but doesn't look at all the ways search actually got better. It's cherry picking.

There are firms which evaluate search quality by employing a huge corpus of queries and human raters. I trust those more than someone running a single query for a commercial search.

The reality is, the Web didn't stay static. If Google 2020 used the same exact search algorithm as Google of 2000, the results would be worse, because of all of the massive amount of noise and spam that's been added to the web since then, to say nothing of adversarial attacks. Google of 2020 is doing a hell of a lot to maintain freshness, index an exponentially bigger web, and defeat pretty much an army of blackhat SEO adversaries from spoiling it.

It's like saying Email spam is worse in Gmail or other clients. Compared to what? 30 years ago, there wasn't much spam being sent and spammers were unsophisticated. The fact that you see almost none these days, but still a few slip through, compared to standard IMAP in 1993 is irrelevent, because the email population was tiny back then.

I'll admit that the product search category in queries has over-the-top ads. But then again, this is the one area where even going back to 2000 era, Sergey and Larry justified ads by saying say that serving up keyword based ads is in a way, satisfying query intent. If I type in "toyota cars" and I get ads for 3 toyota car dealerships nearby, why is this completely wrong? It's very likely a strong buy signal.

Personally, when I'm doing product search, I go straight to Amazon, or I use Shopping.google.com (or Froogle back in the old days)

I can do my own cherry picking. For example, when looking for actual information, especially long tail information, Google search is way better than it was in the early 2000s, and unmatched by things like DDG.

Compare long-tail search vs DuckDuckGo. Try for example "the movie where a robot kid flies a spy plane". Google returns D.A.R.Y.L as top item. DDG doesn't even have it in the top 10. This is way bette than it was in 2000.

"who wrote the c64 game mule". DDG just gives me Wikipedia. Google gives me the Answer + Wikipedia plus related games to explore.

Or try "what is the moment of inertia of a disk", on DDG the snippet displayed in the first result is far less useful than the snippet Google displays. Plus Google shows actual diagrams in the results too.

Look, I'll be the first to admit they increased the # of ads for some queries (mostly product search, real estate, travel, etc) and are using questionable dark patterns that make ads harder to discern from non-ad content. But quite obviously to me, the non-ad query results have gotten ALOT better from 20 years ago, and it's just false memory nostalgia about how queries use to work on a much smaller, and non-commercial web, that thinks they were better.

I've been on the internet/web since the 80s. It was a marvelous time in the old days before commercialization, but also in many ways, it was far less useful and worse.

Look, I wanted to keep this debate going, but your reference to MULE totally derailed my train of thought. Damn you, now I’ve got to go find an emulator and see how bad the C64 days were all over again.

I’ve only been on the web since the mid-late 90s, but it has changed so much for the worse, perhaps not in usefulness, but in… Idealsim? I remember reading the hacker manifesto and it moving me. That crappy little text inspired so much in me. I just hope that in todays overly commercial, algorithmically driven, ML curated world, there is room for life changing chance encounters.

Lets just end this on a positive note, I can't argue with anyone who is a fellow M.U.L.E. lover. :)

When those projects are found to not lock users and customers in Google ecosystem and/or not to bring ad revenue, those are axed with no remorse.