Perhaps the issue isn't that Google is bad, and the issue is that search is incredibly hard.
Now Google won't even acknowledge "" anymore, and having to hold its hand and guide it towards a single website which I already need to be aware of, is pretty pathetic compared to what Google was once able to do. Also the fact that it gives back so much spam and even puts it at the top of results.
> Google's general purpose search engine is still better than any of the specific search engines of these individual sites
This is only partially true. Google's search engine is definitely better than Reddit, but that is really not hard (I need to emphasize this, as reddit's search is really bad, unless it is old.reddit, then it is at least somewhat OK), but for many other sites the reason to pick Google is just convenience.
> Perhaps the issue isn't that Google is bad, and the issue is that search is incredibly hard.
I think the issue is more Google deliberately allowing and pushing all that spam, because users that find what they seek will spend less time on the site. Otherwise I find it hard to explain this drastic drop in quality. Would also explain why they are taking away all the useful search and query tools.
Or the people responsible for working on it just don't have the skill anymore, who knows.
It's bad because their incentives aren't aligned with their users. The shit results they are giving aren't because they can't give good ones, they are because they don't want to.
I just want to be (yet another person) to echo this sentiment. For the first time in my life I had to resort to Bing (!) instead.
The lower quality of results must make business sense somehow, I suppose...
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
* A search engine that only crawls and searches a whitelist of sites.
* Community functionality to vote on the contents of the whitelist.
But I'm not sure I would want an allow list approach. How to you run into new interesting websites? How would people find your new website? A block list would be good though.
I don't keep track of my discoveries, but I found some cool recipes even recently hosted on (sometimes independent) websites I didn't know.
Great way to kill neutral, organic web?
This would become a community of mostly SEO spammers very fast.
It is disturbing because I thought this was a problem we had solved 20 years ago. If I could remember a few details about something that was indexed by Google, I used to be able to just find it.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/rqzvf3/why_doe...
It's unlikely given current capital interest rates, but at this point this drama has pretty much crossed the borders of plausible fiction anyway.
they'd give it some icon indistinguishable from the rest of the google apps, forget about it, and then turn it off in a few years.