this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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The problem is, the internet has adapted to the Google of a year ago, which means that setting Google search back to 2009 just means that every "SEO hacker" gets to have a field day to get spam to the top of results without any controls to prevent them.
Google built a search engine optimized for the early internet. Bad actors adapted, to siphon money out of Google traffic. Google adapted to stop them. Bad actors adapted. So began a cat-and-mouse game which ended with the pre-AI Google search we all know and hate today. Through their success, Google has destroyed the internet that was; and all that's left is whatever this is. No matter what happens next, Google search is toast.
It's even broader than that: historically most of the original protocols for the Internet were designed assuming people wouldn't do bad things: for example the original e-mail protocol (SMTP) allowed anybody to connect to a an e-mail server using Telnet (a plain text, unencrypted remote comms terminal) and type a bunch of pretty si mple commands to send an e-mail as if they were any e-mail account on that domain (which was a great way for techies to prank their mates back when I was at Uni in the early 90s) and even now that a lot of it got tightenned we're still suffering from problems like spam and phishing due to the "good faith" approach for designing what became one of the most used text communication protocol around.