That and google had a major interest in killing bookmarks. Bookmarks were actively competing with google search traffic, so they put in a lot of effort to get you to stop using them. Why bookmark something when you can just search for it.
They put precisely zero effort into killing bookmarks. I know because I was there, and probably would've been tasked with doing it. Well, that and because bookmarks still exist and I can still use them. They also put zero effort into improving bookmarks or making them easier for you to use, but it's death by inaction and consumer choice, not by anything Google did.
But on the commercial incentives, it does make sense for them to kill it.
Companies pay good advertisement so they show up first on the search result when a user want to find them.
Eg you want to go to carglass website: you type carglass in google and the company will most likely pay Google to show up first in the ads section because competitors are trying to sway away customers from them. If they didn’t outbid their competitors, even though the customer want to go to carglass, he will click on first result and may end up buying from their competitor without even noticing.
That wouldn’t happen if people had put carglass.com website in bookmark.
Search for [carglass], no ads. Search for [facebook], no ads. Search for [spotify], no ads. Search for [american airlines], no ads. All of these would be very desirable queries to advertise a competitor on.
(IIRC they've gone back and forth on this depending on what the lawyers thought they could get away with; ISTR when Bing launched Microsoft would run ads on [google] that pointed to Bing. It's been a long time since I've seen an ad on a navigational query though.)
I just tried this query on chrome / android.
This is the first link on the page at the very top:
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
(The product page)
The next site listed was Wikipedia.
I don't have any adblockers. I am in the US.
When people tell me this stuff about their Google searches it drives me insane, I want to know why our experiences are so different. It is regional? Is it OS, is it browser, is it something else? I want to know!
Of course.
But these results don't seem to change on a degoogled chromium on desktop, with no google account login personalization, no account logged in, in incognito, using: Ublock origin lite, User Agent / OS Randomizer, Privacy Badger, and using a VPN to other locales.
That's why I want to know, I've been curious about this for years, and nothing I've looked at seems conclusive.
My biggest guess is country or native language, but it's been hard to pin down. I think that may be the biggest factor (with local laws contributing maybe to how search results get displayed).
I'm curious! I want to know the driver behind the bad experiences people are having with it. (I've been using it literally since it was released.)
If so, you may not be aware that the locations represented by square dots on the map are ads.
Which explains why they push an AI Summary to the top of most searches which discourages clicking on any of the search results.
Or not.
AI summary seems like the same play, even if it hurts their current ad business some. After all why search for stuff when a chatbot can just tell you? Makes sense they'd view it as an existential crisis and push their AI.
Google will be well positioned when ads start being added to AI for most users.
With my normie setup (logged in account, granted location permissions, no PiHole, no particular anti-tracker mechanisms beyond classic ad blocking), I get decent local results on Google, in contrast to basically any other "privacy focused" search engine.
Chat GPT and Claude seem to be struggling a lot more. I suspect this is because OpenAI and Anthropic aren't talking to the local companies here, and they may have some robots.txt shenanigans going on.
I’m somewhat in-between of two extremes, but in grand scheme of things I don’t really care, as I have completely different priorities in life. Convenience services enable me to focus on those priorities, and I don’t really care about all other stuff to a specific degree.
I’ve been lucky enough to see how people from every walk of life interact with the Internet, and realized the way I function is extremely different. To them, I am the “flat earth weirdo and do stuff differently than the others”.
To give another example - I’m expecting people in HN type about 100 words per minute on average because of our general exposure to coding, typing, internet and etc. That puts us to 99th percentile. Average person does not live like us, nor cares about it.
such as? maybe I am missing something, but I find this "this big outcome is due to some engineered effort" applied to this specific case to be inaccurate as I was there and I remember.