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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

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gruez·

Like, today, or the pre-chatgpt age where all the common questions have been spammed to death by SEO farms?

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Google's search has been frustratingly awful for quite some time now, long before AI.

Today I googled "emacs" to get the download link.

Top of the search result page: "Did you mean: vim"

Felt like I was being trolled.

That's an Easter egg. It goes the other way too (vim -> did you mean emacs).

Back in the day, more people might have seen something like that as a clever easter egg.

These days, we default to

"Day 3,449: google's still broken. what was i thinking?"

Back in the day, GG search was so reliable that when stuff like that happened, people think it's intentional

It's an Easter egg. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25371017

You were.

Back in 1998, I specifically started using Google because it somehow managed to avoid spammy search results, unlike its competitors. Today, unfortunately, I find that a lot of Google's search results are spammy, useless information that is there for clicks and advertising only.

That was Google's whole selling point and reason for existing: "other search engines suck. We invented this algorithm to make one that doesn't suck."

They have obviously been in an arms race with spammers and scammers since then. In 1998 it was relatively easy to stay ahead, but to keep winning for 30 years?

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