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Comment by tekstar | Hacker News Reader

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tekstar·

Maybe some PM realized:

Worse search results -> more Google searches -> more ad views

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I don't think it is a PM. Googlers are generally nice.

I think it is a second level machine learning system that has gone haywire and nobody knows how to fix it, or they lost the keys, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397797 for a real life (or not : ) story.

Good point. Users only know about Google at this point. And won't even consider another search engine.

And if the spammy, garbage pages now appearing on results page #1 also use Google ads....

That backfired then (well, for me). I use DDG now because if my results are going to suck either way, I’d rather have privacy.

I've been using DDG for years, and its quality has recently gone down too. I was accustomed to using !g to search Google, but now I'm very surprised to find that the Google results are worse!

Google has completely lost the plot if DDG is the engine with the better results.

Yeah, it’s at the point where search engines are now closer to shortcut bars for me. It’s rare that I don’t have to append “wiki” or “Reddit” to my search in order to find a decent result (which I assumed existed before I even searched it).

I wonder what the consequences are for discoverability on the web. It can’t be good. Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic, but it seemed like there was a time I discovered new and cool web sites. Now all I discover is ad spam clogging up the tubes.

> I wonder what the consequences are for discoverability on the web. It can’t be good. Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic, but it seemed like there was a time I discovered new and cool web sites. Now all I discover is ad spam clogging up the tubes.

I feel the exact same way too. I can't even discover blogs with solutions any more (even ones I know exist because I've seen them before), it's all just spam.

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