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this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Things definitely changed. 15-20 years ago you actually got good search results instead of unusable crap we get today.
OTOH 20 years ago half of the sites on the internet were not yet made of copy-pasta SEO optimized copies or stolen content designed to get search engine clicks. Maybe the enshitification of the web itself has something to do with it.
I remember it already was, but everybody knew it was, so search engines were the brute force approach. The intelligent way was to use web directories and to ask friends.
The enshittification of the web is just one aspect of the enshittification of humanity.
True their competition is actually getting much better whereas they just throw BS at you nowadays. It's unfortunate but Google is no longer my go-to for searching.
The issue is that there are 1000 spam sites heavily optimized specifically to exploit Google's algorithm for every legitimate site. Merely by not being the primary focus of SEO, alternatives have a pretty hefty advantage.
I was getting decent results up until about a month ago (though partly because I have an extension to block sponsored links and arranges the page as it used to appear around 2010). It was like they just flipped a switch from "good" to "shitty." Can't even find images I would grab off the first page when repeating a search from history, now. It seemed to correlate almost exactly with when it started to generate blurbs through AI at the top instead of just summarizing one of the pages in the top links.
i wonder what will replace it.. maybe some way of AI to figure out which websites are deemed good in the eyes of actual human users, and then human users opting into sharing such score charts with each other?
Gen AI is a net negative for the moment, since the deluge of generated low-quality content outweighs convenience of topical results generated by LLMs with natural language queries.