Comment on Daily discussion thread: ⚔️ Friday, May 3, 2024

• ajsadauskas@aus.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  @melbaboutown @dumblederp Yeah, it's not just you.

  And it's deliberate.

  This article by Ed Ziltron has a really good rundown of what happened inside Google: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

  Basically, in February 2019, there was a some corporate politicking going on within Google.

  The search/tech experts (some who had been there from the start) wanted to improve search results.

  The finance guys wanted to deliberately make search results worse so people would search more often and there would be more money from ads.

  The finance guys won.

  They replaced the head of the search team (who had been there from the very start) with the guy who had been in charge of the search engine at Yahoo at the time Yahoo stopped having its own search engine.

  source

  • RustyRaven@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If by “search more often” they mean searching the same thing on multiple different search engines trying to find better results I guess it worked 🤷‍♂️

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  • melbaboutown@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yep. The numbers must always go up, at the cost of killing the golden goose. And it’s not confined to Google. It’s in social media, any kind of tech, streaming services…

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  • Seagoon_@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I barely even bother with google anymore

    I just go straight to wikipedia and if want further reading i look up the references on the wikipedia page ( I do pay for wikipedia , not much but something )

    and yes, i search reddit quite a bit

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