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Comment by elcapitan | Hacker News Reader

I get the naming from the other thread, but is any of this particularly Microsoft-specific? Google creates a mess in search and their docs as well, slop code is one the main artifact of all these AI tools, and bloat, hallucinations and the sloppification of web content is a general problem.

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People hate me, maybe its the Google employees on HN but Google search for me has been garbage for at least 10 years now. Even in the late 2000s they crippled it, every 5 years or so they make it worse and worse.

If search shows more ads in the results it means they show more ads.

If the organic results are worse then the paid results it means people click on more ads.

If people have to search twice to find what they are looking for it means they show more ads.

I have no idea how google made their products so sticky while dropping the quality.

I think part of the problem is there's a lot of SEO farming type sites too, it feels like a lot of high quality content (even before AI slop was so common) is just gone. I hope Google takes this issue seriously and works on a true PageRank algo / service that fixes their search because its been bad for a while. Now I just ask Perplexity or any model for links to things instead.

IME this is the consensus view. Google's search quality is abysmal. DDG was the 1st popular alternative, but it's been supplanted by Kagi. Kagi costs a few $ /mo but that's part of its appeal, it's a great deal and a game-changer for the service (vs the user) to be the product.

Name and shame - https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

I understand that people are fed up of it running on their operating system (and perceived poor performance of Windows 11), but yes, google/duckduckgo are all running LLM queries with every search.

I have to use Windows 11 at work, it can literally take half a minute before a Win key, then, say, "ou" will find the program Outlook*.

* I was also completely unable to find a keyboard shortcut for New Outlook to filter by 'Unread' without performing a search and respecting the inbox search order etc.. Turns out the filter button just above the inbox is a React component and it can't be called from the Alt - key shortcut.

It's due to both: the deranged AI push MS did in last 3 years and continuous degradation of their flagship product - Windows, for last 10.

I think no other company managed to get a punny nickname due to their questionable pursuits and actions around new trends. Tho most of them were ridiculed in memes and countless critical posts on the Internet when something have surfaced.

Also, it appears that Microslop was coined first in 1994, acc. to wikitionary [1]

[1] - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Microslop

TBH, I discovered the website by just domain checking the word. It might be that someone has been inspired by the same incident to write down their general thoughts and if not for it, the website would've been slopgularity.com.

Speaking of Google Search, I absolutely hate that the AI answers push down the whole content and you constantly misclick. Not to mention these are often hilariously wrong. Trying Brave Search currently and the AI answers are way more accurate and actually don't push the content down (it's a fixed container).

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