Are bad results actually good for google in some perverse ad-based way?
Do people at google actually use their products at all?
But the web has changed in these years. It would be interesting to have it again.
I still use the basic -websitename to exclude websites when I search.
It pays better than google.
- But this must be balanced with other incentives, like upranking links that also display ads good for the bottom line. (And up/downranking stuff to maximize its "value" (eg data collection), at users' expense.)
- re "best software engineers in the world"; Firstly, Google (200k pax corp with national interests) has optimized itself to lowrisk recruiting, thus having a heavy "careerists" bias builtin by design ("best software engineer" is definitely nowhere near the top priority of its hiring rulebook). Which corresponds to a very low % of mentioned group. Also https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
Obligatory venn diagram here: https://i.stack.imgur.com/GN2Rl.png.
( You'd think ppl such as Satoshi will pass the Google interviews? What about Linus and etc? )
( Not to mention plenty of weirdos (like Ciro on SO) would be banned from interviews regardless of skill level; and plenty of best engineers are weirdos )
Not when you frame it like that.
But I always google when I need to buy something.
And when I search for anything non-commercial, I use a private search engine.
Google is good for search results which generate money, e.g. when you intend to buy things.
I think how true that is depends on where you want to buy from. Google is good at referring you to certain other websites to buy from. If you're looking for broader search results than that, it's not really any better than for other sorts of searches (at least, that's how it was a couple of years ago).
Search engines lost. With ChatGPT it's about to get 10x worse.
We could switch back to manual human-curated web directories, or website link lists.