The sad thing is, we’ve already had this figured out before.
15-20 years ago Google was almost perfect. It completely blew my mind how accurate and fast it was. Many times it felt like it was a mind-reader. I didn’t even type in half my question and it was already auto-completing it and showing the results, the first few of which contained a very exact and detailed answer that someone wrote on a forum somewhere or an article that gave me a complete and correct answer. Remember the old ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button which directly took you to the first search result? Yea, it was pretty usable back then, because the first result was usually correct. Pepperidge farm 'members…
And then the enshittification started by pumping the site full of ads. First the ads were pretty distinguishable from the real results and you could just scroll through them. Then they started to disguise the ads more and more like real results, and just showing more of them. And by now I think google is basically ONLY ads. There are NO real results on it. Virtually the only ‘content’ you are shown are what somebody has payed for google to show. Even if what you are looking for is a very well known, public interest fact, if nobody is paying for it, google is not going to show it.
E.g. the other day google could not find me the website of a country-wide utility company for electricity by typing their exact name, because I guess they haven’t paid their monthly ads for google.
Luckily there are other alternatives to google, which still have ‘don’t do evil’ in their corporate philosophy. None of them are close to as good as google used to be, especially if you are not searching in english. But still a hell of a lot better than how google is now.
There is more to it than that… 20 years ago most of the people on the internet were likely similar to you, so most of their desired results were similar to yours.
Now people on the internet since the early 2000 are a minority compared to the “democratized” flood of users who joined in the mobile crapplication phase and started skewing search results towards simpler, less useful results.
SEO and ads didn’t help, but the whole ecosystem broke the model.
I don’t like elitism. The least techy people I know are the most culturally similar to what I was seeing on the Internet 20 years ago.
Because despite being less necessary for daily survival and thus less popular, it was also less structured and less hierarchical.
It’s the other way around honestly, the “techy types knowing better” have built leviathans.
You might not see it, but when people talk about some “better” Internet, an alternative timeline from the 90s to what we got, it’s funny. Because there are people who have that better Internet, Facebook’s and Google’s and others’ infrastructure inside is basically that. These companies and other such have been created and driven by that exact smarter kind of people which you seem to claim was opposed to the bad changes that transpired in the world and on the Internet. And the “democratized” crowd of monkeys was complaining, but couldn’t do anything. Then that same crowd, yes, started using what was given to them. Because the crowd of monkeys is wiser, they look at the whole forest and not some particular trees, as they are not the foresters, and they see when the wind changes. They are not interested in sectarian holywars over specific technologies or elitism on tech, because their interests and elitism are usually in different domains.
Each and every case of something not shit becoming shit is connected to a group of smartasses getting their way at forcing the world go some chosen path. Because nobody is smart enough to choose that path correctly, and when those not smart enough people can no longer get each and every other person’s approval to what they’re doing before doing that, they are turning things into shit.
I also remember how in year 2003 as a kid I loved HTML 4 and such as they were and didn’t understand what are all those movements to CSS, why Flash is bad, and so on. I was a monkey. There were some smarter monkeys who’d say there’s technological development ahead of us, and that it will be better than what we have. And there were some wiser monkeys, who’d predict correctly where all this is going.
OK, some of the wiser monkeys were also studying CS, so now I’m simplifying things to help my claim.
It’s just - when a smaller group decides for all, this is called degeneracy. Degeneracy is not a compliment to the organism described as degenerate.
No, I know EXACTLY what I’m talking about. Google’s old results were based on click-through determining which results were best. Now that the quality of the average user is lower, so is the quality of the average click-through result.
That’s as much response as you’re going to get though. You responded in bad faith, so now you’re going to talk to yourself if you choose to respond.
The sad thing is, we’ve already had this figured out before.
15-20 years ago Google was almost perfect. It completely blew my mind how accurate and fast it was. Many times it felt like it was a mind-reader. I didn’t even type in half my question and it was already auto-completing it and showing the results, the first few of which contained a very exact and detailed answer that someone wrote on a forum somewhere or an article that gave me a complete and correct answer. Remember the old ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button which directly took you to the first search result? Yea, it was pretty usable back then, because the first result was usually correct. Pepperidge farm 'members…
And then the enshittification started by pumping the site full of ads. First the ads were pretty distinguishable from the real results and you could just scroll through them. Then they started to disguise the ads more and more like real results, and just showing more of them. And by now I think google is basically ONLY ads. There are NO real results on it. Virtually the only ‘content’ you are shown are what somebody has payed for google to show. Even if what you are looking for is a very well known, public interest fact, if nobody is paying for it, google is not going to show it. E.g. the other day google could not find me the website of a country-wide utility company for electricity by typing their exact name, because I guess they haven’t paid their monthly ads for google.
Luckily there are other alternatives to google, which still have ‘don’t do evil’ in their corporate philosophy. None of them are close to as good as google used to be, especially if you are not searching in english. But still a hell of a lot better than how google is now.
There is more to it than that… 20 years ago most of the people on the internet were likely similar to you, so most of their desired results were similar to yours.
Now people on the internet since the early 2000 are a minority compared to the “democratized” flood of users who joined in the mobile crapplication phase and started skewing search results towards simpler, less useful results.
SEO and ads didn’t help, but the whole ecosystem broke the model.
I don’t like elitism. The least techy people I know are the most culturally similar to what I was seeing on the Internet 20 years ago.
Because despite being less necessary for daily survival and thus less popular, it was also less structured and less hierarchical.
It’s the other way around honestly, the “techy types knowing better” have built leviathans.
You might not see it, but when people talk about some “better” Internet, an alternative timeline from the 90s to what we got, it’s funny. Because there are people who have that better Internet, Facebook’s and Google’s and others’ infrastructure inside is basically that. These companies and other such have been created and driven by that exact smarter kind of people which you seem to claim was opposed to the bad changes that transpired in the world and on the Internet. And the “democratized” crowd of monkeys was complaining, but couldn’t do anything. Then that same crowd, yes, started using what was given to them. Because the crowd of monkeys is wiser, they look at the whole forest and not some particular trees, as they are not the foresters, and they see when the wind changes. They are not interested in sectarian holywars over specific technologies or elitism on tech, because their interests and elitism are usually in different domains.
Each and every case of something not shit becoming shit is connected to a group of smartasses getting their way at forcing the world go some chosen path. Because nobody is smart enough to choose that path correctly, and when those not smart enough people can no longer get each and every other person’s approval to what they’re doing before doing that, they are turning things into shit.
I also remember how in year 2003 as a kid I loved HTML 4 and such as they were and didn’t understand what are all those movements to CSS, why Flash is bad, and so on. I was a monkey. There were some smarter monkeys who’d say there’s technological development ahead of us, and that it will be better than what we have. And there were some wiser monkeys, who’d predict correctly where all this is going.
OK, some of the wiser monkeys were also studying CS, so now I’m simplifying things to help my claim.
It’s just - when a smaller group decides for all, this is called degeneracy. Degeneracy is not a compliment to the organism described as degenerate.
None of what you said explains what they are talking about lol.
It’s like you have no experience with what they’re talking about
Nice troll bait.
No, I know EXACTLY what I’m talking about. Google’s old results were based on click-through determining which results were best. Now that the quality of the average user is lower, so is the quality of the average click-through result.
That’s as much response as you’re going to get though. You responded in bad faith, so now you’re going to talk to yourself if you choose to respond.