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Comment by goalieca | Hacker News Reader

What we used to have, 15 years ago, was a really well functioning google. You could be lazy with your queries and still find what you wanted in the first two or three hits. Sometimes it was eerily accurate and figuring out what you were actually searching for. Modern google is just not there even with AI answers which is supposed to be infinitely better at natural language processing.

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15 years ago there were fewer content farms trying to get your clicks.

I think that played a somewhat smaller role than Google seemingly gradually starting to take its position for granted and so everything became more focused on revenue generation and less focused on providing the highest quality experiences or results.

Beyond result quality it's absurd that it took LLMs to get meaningful natural language search. Google could have been working on that for many years, even if in a comparably simple manner, but seemingly never even bothered to try, even though that was always obviously going to be the next big step in search.

Google could afford to manually exclude the content farms if they didn't morph from a search company to an advertising company.

We used to have an endless supply of new search engines, so "SEO" was not viable. Then Google got a monopoly on search, DoubleClick reverse-acquired Google, and here we are.

Google was such a revelation after the misery of Alta Vista and kin. I miss the days when I liked them.

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