I don't understand this position, do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse? Before I'm misunderstood I do want to clarify that IMO, the end user experience for web searching on Google is much worse in 2025 than it was in say 2000. But, the web was also much much smaller, less commercial and the SNR was much better in general.
Sure, web search companies moved away from direct keyword matching to much more complex "semantics-adjacent" matching algorithms. But we don't have the counterfactual keyword-based Google search algorithm from 2000 on data from 2025 to claim that it's just search getting worse, or the problem simply getting much harder over time and Google failing to keep up with it.
In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".
>These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.
Of course, it's hard to "objectively" prove that they literally made search worse, but it's clear they were fine with stagnating in order to maximize ad revenue.
I see it as the same way Tinder works if you want the mentality. There's a point where being "optimal" hurts your bottom line, so you don't desire achieving a perfect algorithm. Meanwhile, it can be so bad for Google that directly searching for a blog title at times can leave me unsuccessful.
> I see it as the same way Tinder works if you want the mentality. There's a point where being "optimal" hurts your bottom line, so you don't desire achieving a perfect algorithm
Yes, in the case of Google:
- They make more money from ads if the organic results are not as good (especially if it's not clear they're add)
- They get more impressions if you don't find the answer at the first search and have to try a different query
This is entirely because "we" insist on search being free. This means Google needs to find other ways to pay for it, which creates a different set of incentives.
If we somehow paid directly for search, then Google's incentives would be to make search good so that we'd be happy customers and come back again, rather than find devious ways to show us more ads.
Most people put up with the current search experience because they'd rather have "free" than "good" and we see this attitude in all sorts of other markets as well, where we pay for cheap products that fail over and over rather than paying once (but more) for something good, or we trade our personal information and privacy for a discount.
When I get a full time job, Kagi is the first thing I'm buying a subsciption for. It's not perfect, but I want to at least show a demand. I'm willing to contribute premiums for proper services that won't mine all my data and is actually beholden to customers
> In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".
"SEO" is not some magic, it is "compliance with ranking rules of the search engine". Google wanted to make their lives easier, implemented heuristics ranking slop higher, resulting in two things happening simultaneously: information to slop ratio decreasing AND information getting buried deeper and deeper within SRPs.
> do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse?
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10286719?hl=en-...
Google is literally rewriting the queries. Not only results with better potential for ads outrank more organic results, it is impossible to instruct the search engine to not show you storefronts even if you tried.
Interesting haha, I've played enough NYT connections that I would never have gotten it on my own because when I thought of the correct word with sauce, I thought "_ crab" ? no, can't be that...
Haha, I know what you mean! Though in fairness, Wyna Liu isn't beyond throwing in a "mostly works" category from time to time...
Wild tangent incoming...
One instance that recently bothered me with an NYT puzzle was the crossword clue (3 letters): "Chromebooks, but not MacBooks". The answer was "PCs" which doesn't make sense to me under any level of categorization for PC.
If we go narrow/historic, then it means x86 IBM PC derivatives which eliminates a lot of chromebooks.
If we use the "home computer" interpretation, then I think it's unreasonable to except Macbooks from the PC umbrella.
If we go literal, well then everything is a PC, including smartphones, tablets, smart devices. The only reasonable test seems to be "Can it play Doom?". :D
Using PC in a "every consumer computing device but Mac" probably made sense in the 80s/90s, now it seems to dilute the term to the point of confusion. I have personally never thought of a Chromebook as a PC, given that it ships with an OS incapable of many things people generally associate with PC activities.
It seems to me that it's exactly why I don't like word games.
They use words like "combine", but it's generally mixing abstractions or taxonomies.
To guess it, I looked at 'crab' because it's a quite uncommon that has some deep relationship with a few words only. Then checked the most obvious one (which was the solution) against the other words, and determined that it didn't bear any significant relationship to the third word. So I checked the other (less obvious) potential solutions, and after a frustrating lack of match, I gave up. And then got annoyed that the first candidate was the right one. To be fair, I guess it's partly because I'm an ESL, as I think that solution/sauce can be used as a nominative locution enough to form a "special relationship".
To be a designer, you have to play with people's (as in general crowd, not individuals) general understanding of the subject.
In particular, that means avoiding the curse of knowledge, and yes for normal people PC meant "not Apple consumer product".
So ultimately, the search algorithm includes:
- categorize all relationships between words, ranked by strength
- compare with what is expected to be known in popular culture (adjust ranks)
- match against the designer's expectations of similar problems (look for clues to pick a best match)
It's a lot of words to say it's the opposite of a aha moment, the result of a pure computational problem, that is often quite frustrating. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
I totally get that, I am ESL too, and I have a similar approach for English-based word games.
And yeah that often results in mild disappointment or frustration instead of an "Aha!" moment. Actual puzzle video games fair better for me at that aspect, as they avoid the inevitable subjectivity of natural language.
Another +1 comment under it is far more likely to make more people mute the issue if anything. Spamming "google pls fix" just adds to the noise at this point.
Right, but if memory serves me correctly droplet based transmission was the prevailing theory for the first few months while the WHO was oscillating like a pendulum on its masking recommendations.
> droplet based transmission was the prevailing theory for the first few months
iirc that was the prevailing theory until after the vaccines came out. I don't recall it ever being in the news when it was determined to be airborne. By that time, COVID wasn't even newsworthy.
Definitely, I don't think official channels recognized aerosolized transmission until way too late, and even when they did it was very low key and non-committal.
I'm on team "ball was dropped badly re pandemic policy and communication", though I personally don't extend that to blind distrust in institutions in general. It was a tough (arguably unprecedented) situation in a media landscape primed for misinformation.
There is so much complexity in interactions of systems that is easy to miss.
Saying that one can understand a modern CPU by understanding how a transistor works is kinda akin to saying you can understand the operation of a country by understanding a human from it. It's a necessary step, probably, but definitely not sufficient.
It also reminds me of a pet peeve in software development where it's tempting to think you understand the system from the unit tests of each component, while all the interesting stuff happens when different components interact with each other in novel ways.
But you see, the destruction of your house is (protecting) nature.
I'm being facetious, and agree with your point. But I'd go further to say protecting nature is too vague a goal so as to not qualify as a reasonable basis to make laws on top of.
That's not to say there's nothing in nature worth protecting. We should strive to make those things explicit (by having the ugly debates they'll undeniably ellicit), instead of having a game of vague moral grandstanding.
I for one think Pandas get too much care and attention. A species too lazy to reproduce doesn't deserve the resources we pour into them. :D
I don't think the general hatred of corporate personhood stems from the logical or taxonomic absurdity of it. Rather, I sense it comes from the perceived effects of it, that in their eyes allow corporations to get away without paying their "fair share".
I think it's an instrument of convenience that has predictably resulted in a lot of legal tech-debt, which is largely inevitable because of how slow we are at adapting laws to our lived realities.
I might be that guy soon. I really don't like Bitwarden's extensions, they have clunky UX, are slow and often don't even respect my settings. Autofill is a crapshoot, especially on Android. And they have performance issues with the Firefox and Chrome(-based) extensions so it's not even platform specific.
Sure, web search companies moved away from direct keyword matching to much more complex "semantics-adjacent" matching algorithms. But we don't have the counterfactual keyword-based Google search algorithm from 2000 on data from 2025 to claim that it's just search getting worse, or the problem simply getting much harder over time and Google failing to keep up with it.
In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".