There’s nothing particularly inevitable about what happens next, but let’s hope they get an IE6-sized kick in the teeth.
Turns out "Don't be Evil" was more than just a feel-good marketing slogan. It may have actually been good for business as well.
Bye bye Google. It really has been great!
More like since 2014.
I use google search for one thing only these days: product search, when I'm trying to find a local dealer for a product.
For everything else, duckduckgo, which, to be completely honest, is a lot more like the old google from the early 2000s, than the current google.
I do remember remarking to somebody around this time that google search had become something of a glorified grep.
You could still get things though. What I meant in this comment is that it has gotten even worse to the point that its almost unusable. It really does remind me of Microsoft of the 00’s.
But sometimes I dream about building my own search engine. It would avoid the big ad-driven sites as much as possible, and give preferential treatment to obscure blog posts about topics nobody else has written about. I want a search result to show the many different ways it could be interpreted, rather than assume one of them based on whatever heuristic, and show me tons of identical results that aren't what I want.
Google knows I land on StackOverflow results so often that SO results appear near the top, if not the #1 result, for terms that often have nothing to do with programming or computers. I was recently looking for an online thesaurus service and Google showed me an SO post about building linguistic/semantic search algorithms. Hmmm.
Now my last visit to Google is more than a year ago because DDG got better while Google got worse.
I noticed this since around 3-4 years ago.
It seems to be based on region.
Quotes get ignored. Even very specific queries about X prioritize clickbait junk like "TOP 10 X!!"
I THINK they might be anti-competitive too; searching for particular Apple APIs is sometimes more miss than hit, though that might be because of Apple's own poor documentation.
However, most Apple-related searches used to show me Samsung crap, and that's definitely not benign. Like searching for "iPhone" literally presented an ad for the Samsung Galaxy at the top, for a while.
That's how ads work. If Samsung pays more money than Apple to show ads to people searching for "iPhone", then people will see Samsung ads.
i.e. if Samsung was shoving itself into the searches for all non-Apple phones?
as in: people will continue to suffer for about a decade while good alternatives readily spring up but suffer slow adoption?
For example, it takes a lot of effort and energy for me to explain to non-technical people that comparing Apple and Google in terms of their mobile devices is non-sense. Just look at their regular financial reports, I usually say, and understand that one is an online advertisement business, while the other is a purely software + device business. One wants you to use their devices at all costs, while the other wants you to buy them. Those are very different core business models, different mentality and approaches. Etc etc. And so the choice between them comes down not even to taste or quality or price; it comes down to which business model you sell your soul to.
And then there's ad blockers and understanding how modern internet works etc. It worries me that the disconnect between those who understand the inner workings of tech and those who don't becomes bigger and bigger by the day. As the tech business itself becomes more and more sophisticated (and monopolist/authoritarian).
It’s not just tech savvy people. I imagine plenty of people here have set one up for their family members.
I won't be using Chrome anymore once they implement this since I like my element-hiding rules which I wrote myself, but for the common rabble, Manifest v3 will be an improvement.