> That was a product decision, and a very bad one.

I don't know that it's a bad decision, time will judge it. Also, we can expect the quality of the results to improve over time. I think Google saw a real threat to their search business and had to respond.

The threat to their search business had nothing to do with AI but with the insane amount of SEO-ing they allowed to rake in cash. Their results have been garbage for years, even for tech stuff where they traditionally excelled - searching for "what does class X do in .NET" yields several results for paid programming courses rather than the actual answer, and that's not an AI problem.

SEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have more sympathy for Google. They are just… losing at the cat-and-mouse game. They are playing cat against a whole world of mice, I don’t think anyone other than pre-decline Google could win it.

The number of mice has grown exponentially. It's not clear anyone could have kept up.

Millions, probably tens of millions of people have jobs trying to manipulate search results - with billions of dollars of resources available to them. With no internal information, it's safe to say no more than thousands of Googlers (probably fewer) are working to combat them.

If every one of them is a 10x engineer they're still outnumbered by more than 2 orders of magnitude.

I understand what you're saying, but also supposedly at some point quality deliberately took a back seat to "growth"

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

> The key event in the piece is a “Code Yellow” crisis declared in 2019 by Google’s ads and finance teams, which had forecast a disappointing quarter. In response, Raghavan pushed Ben Gomes — the erstwhile head of Google Search, and a genuine pioneer in search technology — to increase the number of queries people made by any means necessary.

(Quoting from this follow-up post: https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/)

Btw this was the HN discussion, I realized, well, where else would I have come across that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

No, they made the problem by not dealing with such websites swiftly and brutally. Instead, they encouraged it.

Google isn’t even playing that game, they’re playing the line-go-up game, which precludes them from dealing with SEO abuse in an effective way.

> SEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have more sympathy for Google. They are just… losing at the cat-and-mouse game.

I don't think they are; they have realised (quite accurately, IMO) that users would still use them even if they boosted their customers' rankings in the results.

They could, right now, switch to a model that penalises pages for each ad. They don't. They could, right now, penalise highly monetised "content" like courses and crap. They don't do that either.[1]

If Kagi can get better results with a fraction of the resources, there is no argument to be made that Google is playing a losing game.

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[1] All the SEO stuff is damn easy to pick out; any page that is heavily monetised (by ads, or similar commercial offering) is very very easy to bin. A simple "don't show courses unless search query contains the word courses" type of rule is nowhere near computationally expensive. Recording the number of ads on a page when crawling is equally cheap.

>A simple "don't show courses unless search query contains the word courses" type of rule is nowhere near computationally expensive

It’s nowhere near good either. What about the searches for cuorses or classes or training?

Their current search already recognises mispellings and synonyms.

Why would they drop that? It's not as if they have to throw away all the preprocessing they do on the search query.

They can continue preprocessing exactly like they do it now.

> If Kagi can get better results with a fraction of the resources, there is no argument to be made that Google is playing a losing game.

Google's algorithm is the target for every SEO firm in the world. No one is targeting Kagi. Therefore, Kagi can use techniques that would not work at Google.

Getting high SEO ranking is a lot of job. Some FTEs could just manually downrank SEO farms.

They are doing an OK job of making AI look like annoying garbage. If that’s the plan… actually, it might be brilliant.

I can't argue here, for me they are mostly useful but I get that one catastrophic failure or two can make someone completely distrust them. But the actual judges are gonna be the masses, we'll see. For now adoption seems quite strong.

Their "AI Overview" has not noticeably improved on its (many) failings for at least a year. In that time, Google's LLMs have gotten much better. They aren't implementing the advances they've made, presumably for cost reasons.

Meanwhile, every single person I know has come to trust Google less. That will catch up with them eventually.

Right, the classic google search results are still there. But even before the AI Overview, Google's 'en' plan has been to put as many internal links at the top of the page as possible. I just tried this and you have to scroll way down below the fold to find Barry's homepage or substack.

No, the search queries are likely run through a similar "prompt modification" process as on many AI platforms, and the results themselves aren't ranked anything like they used to be. And, of course, Google killed the functionality of certain operators (+, "", etc.) years ago. Classic Google Search is very much dead.

Was there ever an announcement regarding the elimination of search operators? Or does Google still claim they are real?

Nothing for "" afaik. + was killed to make Google+ discoverable (or so Google claimed at the time).

At some point, Google search was so good that you didn't really need the operators, like you weren't just prodding some primitive AltaVista to give the results. So I think "almost nobody used that" came long before the en-plan of filling the top 50% with internal links.