It makes me sad because Google used to be great. The main feature that made Google great was the click rejection. Basically the search would know when you clicked on a link and didn’t come back to the search results. This action would add weight to that result as “this probably has the information that was being searched for” so it would be nearer to the top later when others made similar queries.
This was their killer feature, it basically crowd sourced the correct information. After a small amount of time, the correct results would kind of float to the top so subsequent searches would put those results near the top to help satisfy queries faster.
Now? They seem to want to give you results that satisfy their partners, and keep you tied to the results page as long as possible. The focus seems to have shifted from being a good search engine with accurate results, to a meme of how to make money.
Never before has this shift been more clear to me than right now, directly in the wake of I/O 2024; an event my friends have taken to calling AI/O. Pretty much every single presentation was about Gemini and AI generated garbage, but this isn’t what made Google’s new direction clear to me. In the last 20-30 minutes of the event it was made perfectly clear what they were doing with I/O. And to drive the point home, every I/O has showcased stuff you can’t use yet, stuff they’re working on, and other cool shit. Some of it cost money, but there was usually some stuff that was just done because it could be done and it would be made available at some point, a nontrivial amount of it was free. At AI/O, the entire focus was on AI, with little to no non-AI stuff in there, at all, then at the end, they kicked everyone in the shorts. Here’s our prices to access this shit. Buy it. As far as I’m concerned AI/O was a gigantic marketing circle jerk to sell their AI.
It seems that Google has entered the final phases of enshittification.
Saw an article that said that some execs demanded for search to have better user retention. I.e make the user search multiple times to find what they’re looking for, so they can be shown more ads.
It’s frustrating because it’s all done by people. Like if a volcano erupts you can’t really get mad at it. It’s just physics stuff. But all of this? People are making these choices. People made of meat and bone. Like, you could find the decision makers at Google who decided to shit up their product and kick them in the junk.
I remember how people used to joke about the second page of Google results being a desolate wasteland where no one ever looks, now I just instinctively scroll down a bit because I know the first page of results is going to be trash.
This is possibly something you could implement in a meta search engine like SearXNG, though there are some privacy concerns.
Maybe it could locally store which domains you personally tend to click (and stay) on. Then automatically raise those domains when it sees them somewhere in the output of the underlying engines. This isn’t perfect because you wouldn’t get data from other users. But I think it could do a lot to improve search results.
I might actually clone the repo and see if I can get somewhere soon
The thing with Google was that the data about click through vs click back was supposed to be anonymised. Whether it was or not, inside of the black box that is Google’s algorithm, who knows?
Either way, I’d be interested if you get any progress here. I’ve never tried to self host a search engine, but I might consider it.
It makes me sad because Google used to be great. The main feature that made Google great was the click rejection. Basically the search would know when you clicked on a link and didn’t come back to the search results. This action would add weight to that result as “this probably has the information that was being searched for” so it would be nearer to the top later when others made similar queries.
This was their killer feature, it basically crowd sourced the correct information. After a small amount of time, the correct results would kind of float to the top so subsequent searches would put those results near the top to help satisfy queries faster.
Now? They seem to want to give you results that satisfy their partners, and keep you tied to the results page as long as possible. The focus seems to have shifted from being a good search engine with accurate results, to a meme of how to make money.
Never before has this shift been more clear to me than right now, directly in the wake of I/O 2024; an event my friends have taken to calling AI/O. Pretty much every single presentation was about Gemini and AI generated garbage, but this isn’t what made Google’s new direction clear to me. In the last 20-30 minutes of the event it was made perfectly clear what they were doing with I/O. And to drive the point home, every I/O has showcased stuff you can’t use yet, stuff they’re working on, and other cool shit. Some of it cost money, but there was usually some stuff that was just done because it could be done and it would be made available at some point, a nontrivial amount of it was free. At AI/O, the entire focus was on AI, with little to no non-AI stuff in there, at all, then at the end, they kicked everyone in the shorts. Here’s our prices to access this shit. Buy it. As far as I’m concerned AI/O was a gigantic marketing circle jerk to sell their AI.
It seems that Google has entered the final phases of enshittification.
Saw an article that said that some execs demanded for search to have better user retention. I.e make the user search multiple times to find what they’re looking for, so they can be shown more ads.
I can’t wait for this to spread to unrelated areas!
Supermarkets maximizing profit: put ads everywhere and hide the most commonly bought foods!
Gas stations maximizing profits: unskippable ads on all pumps, plus the pump stops halfway to make you watch another ad.
Dating apps: oh… They already killed themselves. Swipe swipe swipe swipe. Hide messages. Hide likes. Reduse exposure to profile unless paid member.
I hate this future.
It’s frustrating because it’s all done by people. Like if a volcano erupts you can’t really get mad at it. It’s just physics stuff. But all of this? People are making these choices. People made of meat and bone. Like, you could find the decision makers at Google who decided to shit up their product and kick them in the junk.
“alright, we need to make our service worse to satisfy our real customers”
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Good read.
Would this be the inverse of SEO?
I remember how people used to joke about the second page of Google results being a desolate wasteland where no one ever looks, now I just instinctively scroll down a bit because I know the first page of results is going to be trash.
Because after taking a quick look at that first or second page, I don’t even go back. I just head to another search engine 😅
This is possibly something you could implement in a meta search engine like SearXNG, though there are some privacy concerns.
Maybe it could locally store which domains you personally tend to click (and stay) on. Then automatically raise those domains when it sees them somewhere in the output of the underlying engines. This isn’t perfect because you wouldn’t get data from other users. But I think it could do a lot to improve search results.
I might actually clone the repo and see if I can get somewhere soon
I’d be interested if you can get anywhere.
The thing with Google was that the data about click through vs click back was supposed to be anonymised. Whether it was or not, inside of the black box that is Google’s algorithm, who knows?
Either way, I’d be interested if you get any progress here. I’ve never tried to self host a search engine, but I might consider it.