I logged in today, not a single mention of a friend in any way, shape or form on my feed. No posts from friends. No comments from friends. No "here's what your friend liked."
Half of the content wasn't even stuff I was following, it was posts that were "similar" to something I liked or to some group I was in.
It's amazing what a bait and switch these companies pulled. They really leaned into it. Google barely resembles a search engine now. Facebook is basically just a billboard.
For better or worse, millennials have become much more discretionary in what they post online than they were 15 years ago. I imagine Facebook had organic content from your real friends to show you then it probably would, the well's just run dry.
Zuckerberg and co. muscled their way in and extracted value out of the dismantling of traditional social dynamics and cohesion, and left us with a hole where the scaffolding of youth should have been. Very Uber-esque. Actually, it describes any number of start-ups from the last 2 decades. Maybe "disruption" has a negative connotation for a reason.
The web was different as well.
Google isn't some dainty little startup. They're the dominant interface (search and browser!) through which most of the planet uses the internet.
If any of Ask Jeeves or Lycos or Webcrawler or AltaVista had risen to the top of the heap instead of Google, then web pages would have been optimized for that respective bot instead.
We have a garbage Google-specific web because websites didn't have to satisfy anyone else; not other search engines, and not even the users themselves. Instead of Google delivering customers to websites, Google positioned itself to be the only customer.
Free will still exists. Nobody from Menlo Park has put a gun to anyone's head to make them use Google to search the web instead of Bing or DDG or Yandex or whatever.
> All it would have taken was some restraint: some combination of being less dominant in the market (i.e., optimizing for a 90%-market-share search engine is different vs. 60%-market-share)
So, let me get this straight: The idea is that Google Search sucks, and the suggested cause for this level of suck is that it is so popular that it causes many publishers to deliberately poison the well using Google-optimized SEO. (Or, more simply: That Google has reached critical mass, and that this is problematic for Google users.)
And, well: I don't disagree. That does appear to be the state of things.
But the apparent proposed corrective action is for it to somehow make itself less popular? By doing what, exactly? Sucking harder? Does it not already suck hard enough?
What a confounding paradox.
Wouldn't a simpler and less paradoxical plan of attack -- that anyone can accomplish completely and absolutely, starting right now -- be to just not use Google search at all for one's own dealings in life?
Google remains simple, but its output is corrupt.
There were plenty of engines where you could just type a query and they would list sites for you.
I suppose Google would have to somehow exit the personal data broker business to pull this off, too.
As a long time Google user, I was used to search for phrases that might be written in articles related to the stuff that I’m looking for. I had to switch my mental model on how Google works, so instead of typing what might have been written in an article about the stuff I’m looking for I had to type my question.
Maybe it’s time for another unlearning phase and learn how to use the LLM dominant Google? I’m not sure yet, LLMs seem too unpredictable.
I understand technology needs to change with gamification of SEO but I get so much frustration in my searching and often have to use Google in combination with site filtering keywords (e.g, site:stackoverflow.com). But it would be even more difficult to use if I didn’t even know what sites were trustworthy ``authorities.''
I just wish somebody would disrupt Google like Google did with search and email 2 decades ago. Searching on Alta Vista or Yahoo was a nightmare until Google came into our universe.