>... or was the enshittification of search inevitable?

My bet is on the latter. Enshitification is a direct product of greed. No crafts person or creator I know of goes into something they enjoy creating with the intent to make it this monstrosity of money extraction. Most creators have a drive for their creation to be shared and experienced by many.

Yes, you may want to get a reward in the process and for some creators, their motives may change over time if they see an opportunity to turn their creation into a wealth machine for themselves so they can do whatever after.

Enshitification I believe is a secondary effect of something that becomes successful for the owners of something and either they or others change motives towards value. Optimization is no longer about the creation, sharing, experience, humanitarian, whatever motive and shifts to money. The second that becomes the goal, enshitication is just part of the optimization journey. In my line of thinking, it's the same reason monopolies or near monopolies tend to form, these are merely further states along optimization strategies in the monetary/wealth extraction goal.

Part of that process is that when something starts to succeed, it attracts people with these goals so the goal of something shifts pretty rapidly.

> if Google wasn't there and Altavista was the incumbent, would it be any different, or was the enshittification of search inevitable?

You might not remember this, but before Google, paid search placement was par for the course. One of Google's innovations, one of the things that really endeared it to users was clearly labeling their ads.

So, yes - it was inevitable. And, in fact, Google probably staved it off at least a decade; maybe more.

Was at Tokyo Disneyland today and taught my girlfriend the word “enshittification”. (i.e. making your customers pay via your stupid app to do literally anything in your park, and not even providing wi-fi.)

Before Google, new search engines became crappy after 6-12 months, maybe two years tops.

It's not surprising Google search is now crap, it's what happened to all the old search engines. It's only surprising that it took 15-20 years (depending on perspective), and in the mean time, they've developed a big ecosystem of other stuff.

I'd say enshittification is inevitable. It isn't a technology issue, it's human issue. Imagination and desire are what brought us this far and also what holds us back. See also: the tragedy of the commons, the prisoner's dilemma, the trolley problem, etc.

There is a reason Google’s first office was right next door to DEC WRL and Alta Vista. There is so much cross contamination between the two that it’s impossible to say.

As someone old enough to remember: one of the main reasons Google won was that the other engines (shedding here a tear for Lycos) simply couldnt handle the increasing amount of web spam. They were built in a trusted web environment, but suddenly things became cheap enough for less scrupulous people to start creating effectively spam sites, and the engines somehow didn't manage to react in time.

Altavista started turning to shit as soon as it was no longer an Alpha demo. That was a major reason Google took off so quickly.