cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1271267
What do you guys think about this? (Wasn't sure which community to post this in)
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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I don't think you understand, we are the ones who are getting fucked. Search results are getting worse and harder for you to find what you need with all the ads, fake news, sponsored sites, ai generated articles, etc.. Google doesn't care if you find high quality results, they will still gett traffic and their money because people won't just stop using it.
Google is already an awful search engine and was most useful only for reddit. Search Engine Optimization killed it.
For example, do you know why every recipe Google shows has a 35 page life story article before the recipe? Because it takes you longer to scroll through the page and find the recipe and see if that's what you want. So Google says oh, this website is good and entertaining and full of so many words! This goes higher up! They don't write the stories because the bloggers care. They write stories because it's the only way to get their website seen on Google.
Meanwhile the website you actually want... The one with a simple recipe and no fluff? Well that's not going to sell itself to the Search Engine Optimization. So it's much further down on the list, several pages down.
The same shitification is happening with every website. Every website is a little bit worse than it has to be simply to optimize it's position on the almighty Google.
When you look for the "top shoes for running" or "best phone of 2023", those are just rushed articles with no research done by people with the sole purpose of pumping out millions of articles just to get some spots on Google.
Google was only good for linking to reddit because reddit could never get their search engine working no matter how many times they tried it.
In their defense, writing a good search engine is very hard, even if you own all the data yourself.
There's a good reason why the litte search bar on reddit, on every forum ever created and on every corporate website is basically useless.
It's also why, among other minor technological challenges (like caching and indexing the entire fediverse), there is no search engine for Lemmy. Nor will there likely ever be one. Which is actually a pitty, because finding valuable information in a comment stashed on some minor instance will be nearly impossible - even for google.