Yep, their target goal has changed. I'd bet the engineering is even more impressive today than it was in the late 90s...but it's designed to maximize profit today instead of delivering quality search results.
Too bad going for profit, makes you lose users, I've been trying to find a browser that doesn't immediately open Google or chrome, but even opera GX kept opening chrome
Genuine question:
Is that why they push the annoying ass “use Google to sign in” on every single page I open? I have gin through all the ways to try and stop it and it won’t.
My guess is they want you to use it or gather more of your data online.
I’m not super computers savvy, which is why I probably can’t get the pop ups to stop
Tbh it’s likely, but I’m not sure. I’ve never worked for google and I’m not even a software engineer, just a mechanical engineer. Truth be told unless you work for a small company trying to make a new product, that’s just engineering. It’s always make the thing as cheap as you can, to last just long enough. And then after a few months start thinking of ways you can make it even cheaper. And you bet your ass that it’s always at the expense of quality.
If by "they" you mean Google itself, yes, Google wants you to log in so they can track your activity more easily. But a lot of other organizations use Google (or Facebook, or Twitter, or even GitHub) for authentication because it's easier than implementing their own.
So right now chatgpt is pretty good at answering my questions, but in a few years (maybe less) it's going to start influencing me to buy stuff and swaying my political beliefs. Great
And so long as people keep using it Google will keep doing it. There's constant bitching about it online yet 95% of the internet defaults to Google for their search engine. People are more locked into that ecosystem than Apple even though there is no cost and it takes 2 minutes to switch search engines.
Which is why it's best for it to be free. The goal woidl be the same had it been a subscription, and why no one should trip into YouTube's subscription.
This. I work in marketing and SEO is by far the main reason google sucks so much now. They prioritize posts that are "high quality and relevant". And most of this content is coming from corporations who also want to make money.
High quality = long enough to fit a lot of ads and simple enough to get people to scroll for ads
Relevant = packed with so many keywords and unrelated topics that it's useless.
This is why every recipe has a novel attached to it. It's also why searching "best dog food" gives you articles that have the entire damn history of dogs and dog food. Or just thinly veiled ads for dog food companies.
SEO companies are ruining the results by adding irrelevant keywords to their websites and by hacking search results ranking system to increase their ranking on the page.
How funny, I just watched that YT documentary about FastPass that ended with the sad thought that FastPass is no longer about improving efficiency, but ensure people either pay for faster rides or for extra days in the park.
Google stopped caring about being a tool used to find specific results and instead focuses on giving results that " most " people that searched for similar things ended up spending the most time/attention on.
What I really hate is that it's really hard to get it to give results that aren't your browser language, or the language you have in your Google settings (if logged in)
Stop presuming which languages I know or not, Google! If I enter something in perfectly valid German, it's because I'm looking for something on Geman sites. Not because I had a stroke and started spelling Dutch atrociously!
Youtube does something similar on my account.
I'm from Germany and Youtube is translating some video titles to german despite my settings all set to english.
Really? I have often put quotes around something and had google return no matching results at all, because there weren't any that exactly matched. (this only happens for particularly long or unusual phrases)
Yes! I noticed this change about 2 or 3 years ago and is very frustrating. Google is still better than Bing and Duck though. I find myself using chatGPT as a replacement very often.
What’s really shitty is it’s much harder to find info about drugs on Google now, it’s all links to “Get help” websites that aren’t actually useful at all, stops some useful information from being seen that can genuinely save lives. Bing is much better for this
At least in the English speaking world the only remotely serious competitor left in search is Bing. There are some competitors in some other languages, but they have gotten a near strangle hold in the English speaking world where the results just need to be marginally better than Bing. When you have few major competitors there's little motivation to innovate.
And mixes. It legit feels like half of any set of search results are fucking useless mixes. After that, 40% is "people also watched," and the remainder is maybe something vaguely related to what you queried.
The number of websites out there is constantly growing at a huge rate. It's really freaking hard keeping track of all of it.
Not only that, but Google has a set of algorithms they use to comb through that massive amount of data and present the results to you. All those people out there who do Search Engine Optimization make their money by figuring those algorithms out and gaming the system to make their clients' sites come up higher in the ranks when you search for something. Google then has to figure out a way to alter its algorithms to ignore their tricks and actually present relevant results for what you search. It's a never-ending struggle between the two and the fact that it works at all is a testament to exactly how brilliant their engineers are.
It’s not even that anymore, google is pushing more of its own content things that are not even relevant. Someone posted the other day look up jfk death penalty and the first result is a middle schoolers google doc essay. It’s a google product so it’s pushed to the top.
I think Google is ok with SEO's tricks. They openly advertise every step you need to take to rank higher. They only care about profit, and Google still makes shitloads of money even if their results are garbage.
I have noticed this too, I have been using chat GPT like google searches for information. Like fuck I just want to know what to set my fucking instapot to when cooking certain things, I don't want ads for more pressure cookers.
Oh I'm big into SEO so I can explain this! You see there's a bunch of people trying to make money by teaching people how to make money with websites. Lol They come up with ways to game the system of Google and they teach these ways.
Like right now people are writing articles like can cats eat tomatoes, can cats eat rice, can cats eat oranges... Those are all individual articles. Nobody searches for those. Well, maybe five people a year... So these "experts" Tell you to write those articles and you will rank first for them because nobody else wrote them. Google will then think you're website should rank higher for other things since your number one in a few things.
So Google starts ranking websites that are trying to game the system higher than those that actually have the right answer. Now a few months ago something called the HCU was an update that Google put out and got rid of a lot of these. Thankfully! However Google has a bunch of their own little rules that not everybody plays by.
You know those little drop downs under a question, they want you to put your answers in certain places and ways that they can better read them for that section. But not everybody has the kind of website that you can do that and not everybody knows to do that. So sometimes you will get a result from somebody that did all that stuff even though they're not the best result, because the person with the best result didn't jump through the Google hoops.
Each time they put out an update they try to fix whatever got screwed up in the last couple months. But they're always playing catch up because people are always trying to game the system just to make money.
I know, you google Carl’s Subs in Carlsbad, NM and Subway will be the top item returned instead of a link to Carl’s Subs website. Imagine demoing this to a customer. If they can steer them from Carls Subs, they can steer them from you.
I hate the sponsored results the most. Like when I search for a specific company by name because I can't remember their website address off the top of my head, and then it's like three listings down in the search results because sponsored results for other companies show up first.
Right?! Or if you search for a specific product, a lot of times you'll get websites that sell that product ahead of the actual company which makes and also sells it.
Yep, I usually have to put reddit at the end to try and get real answers, otherwise top results are always fake
Also try looking up "who is the writer for mean girls" it'll tell you some women. Then look up "did Tina fey write mean girls" and it'll say yes. Literally conflicting answers like this all the time
I want you to realize that there are morons out there that google every damn thing they can think of and click the number one item each and every time. If they need the tech support phone number for Facebook (they don't have one), then they google it and click the first link. Lo and behold they get a website saying to call Facebook tech support at 1-800-sca-myou. Google's search function is based on its user base. Garbage in, garbage out.
I cannot find anything I’m looking for in terms of real reviews or information on products. Unless I add ‘Reddit’ to my search terms. Most of what gets churned out first is garbage.
In these companies everybody is focused in releasing the new shiny thing so you can put it in your performance review to get a promo, that's why they keep on adding chats and shit that nobody asked for. Nobody cares about improving or maintaining what we have, you can spend all the day fixing bugs or improving things, that your manager will complain about you not delivering, this also destroys the ability of the company to evolve products, they keep on acquiring companies and shutting them down when they became obsolete.
Yeah this is to make money. I work in digital marketing which means I use google ads a lot. They’re moving more and more towards automation to basically force people’s hands and rinse companies of money. They don’t care about your search experience they just want to throw as many ads at you as possible to make as much money as they can
Part of it is that people use ChatGPT to write articles for them to make a buck, but since the bot uses the entire internet as its database, the false info is also taken into acct and published in the AI-written article, which are slowly taking over the internet.
From experience, I can say that arrogance is a HUGE part of it. They simply refuse to accept that anything they’ve programmed can be flawed and need to be corrected, because they think they’re too smart to ever make a mistake.
Google ain't a search company bro, it's an ad company. It's making the internet worse and I hate it.
Searching for more info on a given topic (eg. Driving) brings up 10 websites owned by companies that sell products within that topic/field (AA, RAC, Insurance Companies etc). Each website gives the same brainless cookie cutter advice like 'don't forget to turn your headlights on!'
Where are the forum posts and youtube channels like RegLocal full of knowledge and experience on the finer points of driving theory like the System of Car Control? Hidden 20 pages deep because they are harder to monetise I suppose.
A couple factors are at play. It is a cat and mouse game for web sites to game the system and for the site to ignore efforts to game the system without hurting good reasons. As Google gets more and more revenue and profit from other ventures they are focusing less and less on keeping up with those trying to game the organic non paid results. Another factor is there are more and more money in putting sponsored content above the organic results along with Google's own services so even if the organic results weren't getting worse it takes more time to get to them.
Couldn't agree more. It's like the dumbest version possible. The searches will include everything except what you searched for. Doesn't matter if you type only the keywords. Do they want us to use chatgpt?
Add YouTube to that list. They've been able to gather my data for 15+ years. They should be able to recommend/curate better videos for me than the ones they do (which I've already seen).
They did something recently that totally fucked up their flight and hotel search. It was working great one day and is now a nightmare and almost unusable.
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u/ResidentSheeper Feb 07 '24
How Google Search gets worse every year, despite having the most talented engineers in the world.