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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

Also gives off desperation vibes with Google finally doing some innovation on their monopolistic product now that it’s losing market share to AI.

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That and it's wild to celebrate innovation that was literally default behavior 20 years ago, which they themselves worked hard to break.

Used to be you'd look at your server logs and see referrer headers of google.com/?q=search+terms

Then they broke that (deliberately, well before cross origin header concerns were a thing) so you'd have to sign up for their webmaster tools.

I don’t think google should be held responsible for “breaking” this. It was crazy that one website got to see what i was doing on a second completely unrelated website.

Yep. There was all kinds of data a user could enter into Google search and unknowingly share with a search result site. Sucks for "SEOs", but great for users.

They made search worse on purpose to make more money, then tried to gaslight everyone by blaming SEO. It was getting rather hard to find things with it, I would have to explain to people that search wasn’t always this bad. I have negative sympathy for them.

If they indeed made search worse “on purpose”, there should be plenty of alternatives with better results. I’ve tried about a dozen of them, including paid ones like Kagi, and found the quality of results to be universally worse than Google’s, especially for niche searches where it matters the most.

Your logic makes no sense. Just because something is worse relative to how it used to be does not mean alternatives are now better than it.

It takes a huge amount of money to compete with Google in search and all Google has to do to destroy that investment is to dial back the sandbagging. They really did have a moat.

I recently tried Kagi again after not being particularly impressed 2-3 years ago. Swapped it to default after a week. For me it works better than Google probably 80% of the time now.

Google also did 100% make search worse on purpose as this great piece discusses: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Doctorow goes into greater detail on how Google purposely worsened Google search in his book Enshittification. It’s a very thorough chapter and it’s clear what they did. They were chasing “engagement hacks.”

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