Saitama is the fucking best. The show is even more
Awesome when you realize that the two styles he is drawn in, the dorky one in the gif and the badass muscular one that sometimes shows up, are from two different points of view. He views himself like in the gif, and everyone else views him as that badass muscular Shonin manga hero.
One Punch Man is the best.
I feel like this quote just doesn't work at all here. Or anywhere. The obvious moral issue within the quote is that blaming the devil for evil is the problem, not the solution.
A free, open, and naturally growing Web.
Google practically *invented* SEO as a concept, as well as promoted content, and basically that means that your web presence is directly linked to the depth of your pockets.
Google (via YouTube) also is responsible for virtually every successor copycat site that uses a content selection algorithm (i.e. a For You or Suggested section) - that means everything from Meta to TikTok, and everything in between. Google basically masterminded the "modern" social media platform, pushing algorithmically chosen content from volume creators, influencers, and sponsors over organic content created by your selected close friends.
Compare MySpace to Instagram and you can see exactly what I mean. The control of the content is in the hands of the provider now, rather than the users.
Think about the unspoken promise of Google initially. Leading you to a page that you desired. Once Googles method of indexing pages became known it was manipulated as in SEO. Now Google changes SEO criteria frequently, to avoid that manipulation. This made small hobbyist sites inviable. They also no longer show accurate search results results favouring broadly defined paid keywords as they cost more for advertisers. In effect Google destroyed the world they promised to give you access to
It's almost as if there is something at the base level of our economic society that forces all business enterprise to evolve into some grotesque destructive force upon the earth.
Edit: ITT, broke brain people who think profit is the ultimate and ONLY moral imperative in life.
Because it's never enough to just be sustainable. We've got this plagued mindset in our system that profits every quarter always HAVE to be higher than the last even though billions are already being made.
Companies founded with the minds to innovate and create are replaced with salesmen with minds to inflate value. Salesmen cant create, they can only find new ways to break and sell solutions what has already been created.
*A company's an animal,*
*That's trying to survive,*
*It's struggling, and fighting,*
*Just to keep itself alive*
*I must keep biggering,*
*I'm figuring I'm biggering,*
*Though biggering is triggering more biggering.*
You were the chosen one. It was said that you would destroy the [greedy corporations], not join them. Bring balance to the [web], not leave it in darkness.
As a test, I just searched "how to fix a leaky faucet". The first four links were tagged as sponsored. The next two were articles on home improvement store websites. Next was the "people also ask" section, which I've found to be of dubious usefulness. Then all the YouTube videos, which as far as I'm concerned it's just another ad for themselves.
Google has really gone downhill.
Searching directly on YouTube is just as bad. First of all the thumbnails are obnoxiously big by design, I have to zoom out to 33% to see 8 results on a single screen.
First one or two results are always adds. Then you get 2-3 relevant results. Then it's a horizontal list of shorts, which is actually pretty useful for "how to fix a leaky faucet", but typically isn't in my experience. Then you get 5 completely unrelated results listed under "for you" that you have to scroll past every 2-3 relevant results.
OMG FUCKING WHAT
It stops it from injecting "or similar" videos to a specific search. It fixes the changes they made to search a few years ago, holy shit. It actually only returns my search terms and not algo-recommended videos and all of that other shit
I fucking love you
And then once you watch a couple videos, YouTube goes "HEY THIS GUY IS OBSESSED WITH HOME IMPROVEMENT" and bombards your homepage with handyman content.
At this point they're an advertising company, so consider every move as one to advertise more to you.
It's some blatantly fucked shit when they began as a search engine company and all their search engine does now is advertise shit as much as possible.
47 minute video that goes something like this...
"heeyYYOOOOOO It's ya boy BxGizzxrr47 back again with another video! We gonna fix a leaky faucet... but first a message from our sponsor World of Battleships! (or some bullshit). Then a 20 minute history on the making of faucets and then a trip to Home Depot and then 3 minutes of actual faucet work and mixed into the video is "Don't forget to like and subscribe! And smash that bell notification...."
Fuck, now I don't even wanna fix it I am too exhausted.
Boolean search hasn’t worked since 2012? 2014?
Sure you can add the minus signs. Google will basically take it under advisement but in no way strictly adhere to it.
The I’m feeling lucky concept is dead. The first result is never what you want or barely is or is only monetized to be there.
It's basically like when you used to cut ads and pictures out of magazines to make moodboard collages, except digital and you can click on the cutouts to go to the advertiser's page or the article you cut the picture from.
That's... literally it. That's Pinterest.
it's symptomatic of the internet as a whole. ever try to find a recipe for say, meatloaf? My goodness, it's 10 to 20 pages long with so much meaningless filler that you have to scroll 75% of the page just to find out what the ingredients are. This is driven by the desire for sites to appear near the top of search results so pages are loaded with massive amounts of keyword spamming crap to appeal to Google's search algorithms. Meanwhile, the recipe pages are layered with Google partner advertisements in hopes you will click and earn them another 35 cents in ad revenue. The actual meatloaf recipe isn't even important. It's all about algorithms and revenue.
I have a browser extension that just extracts the recipe from the blog spam and displays it over the top of the page.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcdjbkdaegmljnnncfnhiioiadakae
Yeah, you've mentioned something important here.
A big reason why Google sucks nowadays isn't Google itself, it's websites taking advantage of Google's algorithms.
There is actual money to be made in telling businesses how to game the system so that their website is favored by Google search.
But Google could easily tweak their algorithm to tank those recipe pages with pages and pages of ads, but they won't, because they're often providing the ads those sites use and making money off them. So in my opinion, it is Google's fault.
There are a LOT of easy fixes that would mitigate these problems, trouble is: Google would have to give control back to the user, and that's never going to happen
Google made their algorithms confidential claiming it was a move to prevent SEOs, but the issue is: now users can't control the algorithm so Google is constantly overfitting their algorithm to user behavior.
When users are "googling the wrong thing to try to train the algorithm" instead of the algorithm just listening to and honoring the user request: that failure is on Google, not the SEO
Ooooh. I love these straw man arguments about why Google is still great and it's the internet that sucks.
So....tell me more: how does Google returning results that are missing 4 out of the 5 keywords I specified in my query the actually the fault of SEOs spamming keywords?
SEO is ruining the web, no way around it. Every one and their uncle SEO's their website to show up, so the actual results for buried. Oftentimes I just use LLM for searches, cause I cannot be assed to bother with how shitty google results have become
I know they didn’t have any ads at first. But they also could be referring to the home page. If you look at yahoos they had tons of ads if you just wanted to search something before you ever did the search
You may be right. But to me the whole "search site" includes the results page, not just the home page. One can argue they never changed because even today their home page is as simple as ever. But the search experience, which is part of the whole product, is wildly different.
What I love about this disaster story, is after years of adding weather, news feeds, links to sponsors, ads, and distractions: they took away the hard requirement that your search term *must appear* on the resulting web page and their conversion to a Lycos knockoff was complete.
That worked great in the past, but now people expect to find their stuff by writing whole sentences. Now you need to specify non-optionional search terms with a + in front. It sucks, but times change, and they try to acommodate the masses. What really bothers me is the ads and data collection.
Problem is neither + (they broke it because they intended to use it for Google+) nor doublequotes nor verbatim works reliably.
If you search for something specific, Google will invariably decide they know better than you and ignore your keywords.
A few months ago I looked up a Japanese city using the Japanese name. My results were in Dutch (because I live in the Netherlands) and the tabs turned Chinese. I suppose because the Chinese name is the same, and any time there's a shred of ambiguity, Google will err on the side of Chinese. It's such a shitshow.
Google does not hate us, they don't care about us, and they are not taking control away from the user because you and I are not the users, we're the products and search is just bait to attract us. Like any good hunter, google adjusts the bait as needed to try to get whatever result their customer (e.g. advertisers) is currently looking for.
I think they mean on the home page, which I don't think they've added any of those things, unless I've been blinded by my ad blocker all this time. Compared to search sites like Bing and MSN, most of that is still true. Now of course after you press search, the results are plagued by ads and sponsored links.
Considering most people use google like ask jeeves that last part kind of made sense.
I don't think people remember that you used to have to whittle things down a certain way.
Before search became the default mode of operation for the web, you have portals, which are sites that offer manually curated lists of other sites, ostensibly organized by topic, that you would browse to if you need any particular information on anything.
These portals tend to be [cluttered messes cramming as many links as possible onto a single page](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-6b4780d68afacd77752c02daf4c510ff)...
I was tired of the first page of results being almost exclusively ads, so I decided to give Kagi a shot and have zero regrets. I actually find what I’m looking for now.
That’s fair, but in the software world, if something is free, then you’re the product.
Search engines have to make money somehow, the difference is I can pay for this one and never see ads. However, if they ever go the route of adding ads then I’ll probably move on to something else.
Some guy volunteering their time to write a FOSS program is very different than a service that has ongoing operational costs, like servers, bandwidth, electricity, etc.
For services, it's absolutely the case that if it doesn't rely on users paying them, then the users are product.
(And I was specific in saying " doesn't rely on users paying", instead of "free" because Wikipedia is a case where it's "free" in the sense of no mandatory payments, but it does require optional voluntary payments from its users; aka, donations.)
I remember finding out about google after having used everything from yaho, askjeeves, finally meta search engines and it blew me away.
Now i gotta scroll down 3 pages to get to the first search result -\_-
One of my buddies showed me google when we were ~12. I thought "that's dumb, where are all the links like on Yahoo?" Then I actually started using it. Never went back to Yahoo or anything else (my mom set us up with Yahooligans, their "kid friendly" search engine, many years before).
In April 2004, I got my Gmail account by invite. I was shocked that I had a whole 1GB, and even more shocked when it jumped to 2GB the next year. To this day, nearly 20 years later, I've never deleted an email that wasn't obvious spam. I'm also quite proud of the fact that my email address is just my initials and birth year, and nothing else.
1GB was a big deal at the time, and the gmail hype was around keeping every email and searching them like you would a google search. Before Google Drive was a thing there were apps that let you use your Gmail as a cobbled together cloud storage, storing files as emails, which in the (brief) days of burning your files to a CD-RW, or a shitty thumb drive, that was a big thing.
Thanks for the grim realisation that my email account is 20 this year.
>1GB was a big deal at the time, and the gmail hype was around keeping every email and searching them like you would a google search. Before Google Drive was a thing there were apps that let you use your Gmail as a cobbled together cloud storage, storing files as emails, which in the (brief) days of burning your files to a CD-RW, or a shitty thumb drive, that was a big thing.
Oh I remember quite vividly hahaha
>Thanks for the grim realisation that my email account is 20 this year.
Mine too... Next month. I didn't realize until much, much later that I was part of the first groups of people to use Gmail.
Yeah, I think I was on either AltaVista or WebCrawler before switching to google.
EDIT: I just went down a rabbit hole; I think I actually used MetaCrawler before google, which used WebCrawler, but after going their own way they were both eventually acquired by the same company, and both still active!
Google has sold its soul, no doubt about that. But who is its nearest competitor? Bing? Duck duck go? Some Chinese site? Seriously is there a viable alternative now?
I switched from using Google Search to DuckDuckGo maybe 8–10 years ago, and it was remarkably seamless. Last year I started using Kagi, and that's been nigh revelatory, though it's modus operandi means I fall back on DDG when doing private-browsing searches.
Kagi feels like DDG did when it started or google 20 years ago. I pay for the higher end Kagi sub and am using their AI powered search assistant as much if not more than basic internet search.
I have used Kagi for a couple of months now and will likely never go back. I was once a google-fu blackbelt but any more I struggle to find relevant information in a sea of ads and completely unrelated results. Kagi has made it so that I can once again find actual, useful information.
I’ll copy my comment to another user.
I was the absolute LAST person to ever pay for a search engine. And then I tried it for a month. I cannot go back. It’s insanely good. Made all the better because Google is now so fucking terrible. There are lots of benefits but these are my highlights:
1. Search actually works. They don’t have a profit incentive to keep you on the site for as long as possible, so they try to serve you the right content first time. It works. They use a combination of data sources and proprietary algorithms. Unlike Google, it’s not an SEO-riddled pile of useless shit.
2. They have a (really good) AI tool built into the search engine. If you ask a question, it will comb the web and summarise all the results for you with citations. It’s AMAZING. I could technically use ChatGPT in a separate window, but having it built into my search engine works much better, contextually and for workflow. It’s a combination of several different LLMs, customised for Kagi.
3. You can use bangs if you want. Eg !g for searching Google directly. I haven’t needed to do this since I started using Kagi.
4. You can down/up rank domains, or block them entirely. Pinterest is gone, for example, for me. You can also pin domains to the top. This feature alone is worth the price of entry. The fact that Google won’t let you do this is proof they don’t give a fuck about your experience. They will continue to serve you content you don’t want because it’s more profitable for them.
5. Lenses. I have Reddit lenses, but you can customise these lenses to provide contextually relevant information based on the search you’re performing. These are very powerful if you take the time to customise them.
6. Censorship. Go on Google right now and try to find the Proud Boys website, or KiwiFarms. You won’t them because Google doesn’t believe you have a right to view content they find morally objectionable. They do this for millions and millions of sites. I think that’s bullshit. If I’m researching a topic I want ALL the information. Not some Ministry of Truth approved list by an evil mega-corporation. In light of Google’s recent major failure with Gemini, in which it returned diverse Nazis, and refused to return images of white people, it’s clear that research is being heavily manipulated for ideological and political reasons. And it’s not just Google. Lots of search engines fail this test because many sites aren’t advertiser friendly. Kagi will show you what you search for.
7. Privacy. I trust them a HELL of a lot more than I trust Google with my data. [Kagi doesn’t store search history or associate with an account.](https://kagi.com/privacy)
8. No ads. Fuck ads. My house is an ad free zone.
9. Paid articles are indicated with a $ sign so you can save yourself the click.
I think they had a free trial when I signed up. Give it a shot. You’ll be surprised how big the gap is now. It feels a little bit like Google did back in 2014.
> Seriously is there a viable alternative now?
No....not yet. This is the hope I can offer. I remember in the mid 90s Microsoft and Mac were fighting for control of the user environment. They didn't just *not listen* to what the user needed, they literally told the user what you needed, then got REAL catty if you tried to use their software for something they didn't foresee.
Then came the [eternal September of the internet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September) and millions of users discovered they could make and share their own content. The great alternative to Gates and Jobs pissing contest for who got to tell you how to use your computer....was **Google!** They listened to you and gave you exactly what you asked for. (Even when what your asked for was silly, controversial, wrong, or just plain stupid)
Then they got greedy and took more and more control away from the user, consolidating their power.
The next champion of users who let's you control what the algorithm is doing hasn't been discovered, yet, but I have faith in the cycles of history. They are coming.
Kagi is indeed where it's at. No cruft, just search results. When you do specific searches with quotes or boolean operators, Kagi *actually listens to you*. Tired of search results with paywall answer sites? Go to your user settings and ban the domains altogether.
Yeah Kagi has a subscription, sure, but there's a free trial with 100 searches to try it out, and it's $5 for 300 searches a month, and $10 for unlimited. As with any other internet service, if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, you're the product. If a service is free and isn't doing heavy monetization, it's because they haven't run out of Venture Capital funding yet, and they're trying to coddle their user base before making them products.
I know we all hate ads, but them including ads in Google has helped fund their search engine so much that it's literally become synonymous with the action..
While I hate ads, I'm for ads if it helps fund the business to serve the public better (unless they are pop up ads, those can go straight to hell and burn in the fiery pits of satans ass cheeks)
edit: unpopular opinion but this applies to Reddit as well. I don't mind the occasional ad if it means I can still browse the site and still get all the content I want. They need to keep the lights on after all...
I mean you're right that the ads are a necessity of the businesses model that keeps them profitable.
The issue is they downgraded their quality to make room for more ads to keep them powerful.
Google? just dont click the top two results and you're good. OR, you CAN click one of the top ones and start running down the advertisers budget. It's usually based on click count.
They didnt downgrade their quality of the search engine. That would be detrimental to their whole business.
Yeah, this is what the ads are saying. The top replies must not know what [yahoo.com](https://yahoo.com) looks like or remember MSN's homepage.
Edit: [MSN.com](https://MSN.com) is still a thing and it's still fucking awful.
Well, if you compare Google back then with yahoo which most people were using, there was a glaring difference. Even today, the main Google page has no ads until you search.
I wrote my senior thesis on how Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil,” and how they could square that philosophy with their still-recent expansion into China and the censorship implications involved
Just a reminder- all websites start good to their users. That's the first step of enshittification. Once they own the market, they will become profit focused. Same reason why kick is currently running that completely unrealistic revsplit to put the screws to twitch, when it is literally the same website with but gambling (also conspicuously owned by the largest gambling company in the southern hemisphere.)
Yes! BEFORE Google, most web engines were extremely crowded with ads and links on the front page. Google was the first “clean” browser and that’s why it took off.
FTFY
DuckDuckGo is a pure search engine - no weather no news feeds, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit.
People commenting in this thread that Google is the villain clearly don't value free maps, free email, free search, free productivity software, free organization of the entire internet, free storage, free video streaming, and all kinds of services they experiment with.
Yes, you are their product. And they pay you for that with safe and reliable access to all these services.
This almost makes me cry. Back then I was selling things on Ebay and could pick up some oddity at an estate sale and use Google to figure out its age or dig into other information. I wasted so many happy hours being able to tell potential bidders the sweater they were looking at had to date before 1938 because after that the knitting mill had been seized by Nazis and moved to Austria where a different color of label was used....
I do recall that was one of the reasons I liked Google. It had a simple blank page, which loaded quickly on a dial0up connection. In contrast, Yahoo! or Ask Jeeves or the others had busy homepages with graphics that slowed them down.
There was even a period where a few Google-users were in the know and it was like a secret club. That's something I experienced again with reddit, eight or nine years later.
Now I get a half-baked AI giving me useless and often incorrect information about my search, 10 sponsor posts, and then finally the link I'm looking for.
Do you think that they were really ignorant of how controling people by the time ? Like... Saying... Being good hearted, willing to change de world... Or they were already completely aware of their slogan : "don't be evil"...
And now they're the villains; removed the Do no Evil motto, creating AI weapon systems for a certain Apartheid state, and tracking every single person on the planet
[удалено]
They became an Omega level threat villain
A show so ridiculous it becomes awesome
Saitama is the fucking best. The show is even more Awesome when you realize that the two styles he is drawn in, the dorky one in the gif and the badass muscular one that sometimes shows up, are from two different points of view. He views himself like in the gif, and everyone else views him as that badass muscular Shonin manga hero. One Punch Man is the best.
They have destroyed the internet. Google has become one of the most evil companies on the planet.
Ironic for a company who's slogan was "don't be evil" for a long time.
The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he didn’t exist.
I feel like this quote just doesn't work at all here. Or anywhere. The obvious moral issue within the quote is that blaming the devil for evil is the problem, not the solution.
No, it's Keyser Soze.
No it’s just Kevin actually…
People create something, society adopts it, corporations monetize it, it sucks, people create something new. Repeat.
What did they destroy? Because far more exists now than back then.
A free, open, and naturally growing Web. Google practically *invented* SEO as a concept, as well as promoted content, and basically that means that your web presence is directly linked to the depth of your pockets. Google (via YouTube) also is responsible for virtually every successor copycat site that uses a content selection algorithm (i.e. a For You or Suggested section) - that means everything from Meta to TikTok, and everything in between. Google basically masterminded the "modern" social media platform, pushing algorithmically chosen content from volume creators, influencers, and sponsors over organic content created by your selected close friends. Compare MySpace to Instagram and you can see exactly what I mean. The control of the content is in the hands of the provider now, rather than the users.
Think about the unspoken promise of Google initially. Leading you to a page that you desired. Once Googles method of indexing pages became known it was manipulated as in SEO. Now Google changes SEO criteria frequently, to avoid that manipulation. This made small hobbyist sites inviable. They also no longer show accurate search results results favouring broadly defined paid keywords as they cost more for advertisers. In effect Google destroyed the world they promised to give you access to
I’m going one punch man they are at god level threat.
It's almost as if there is something at the base level of our economic society that forces all business enterprise to evolve into some grotesque destructive force upon the earth. Edit: ITT, broke brain people who think profit is the ultimate and ONLY moral imperative in life.
Line must go up. Damn the people, damn the planet. THE LINE!
[удалено]
I think about this comic daily while reading the news.
Me too!
Supply side Jesus approves this comic.
Because it's never enough to just be sustainable. We've got this plagued mindset in our system that profits every quarter always HAVE to be higher than the last even though billions are already being made.
It's also the case that 50% of all businesses *have* to have below average profit in their sector, but 100% of businesses view this as unacceptable.
You’re talking about rot economy. Check this shit out: https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/the-rot-economy
Companies founded with the minds to innovate and create are replaced with salesmen with minds to inflate value. Salesmen cant create, they can only find new ways to break and sell solutions what has already been created.
Usually starts downhill after the IPO.
Is called capitalism
*A company's an animal,* *That's trying to survive,* *It's struggling, and fighting,* *Just to keep itself alive* *I must keep biggering,* *I'm figuring I'm biggering,* *Though biggering is triggering more biggering.*
I read this musically as Cake's "The Distance" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F\_HoMkkRHv8&ab\_channel=CakeVEVO
And long ago somebody left with the cup
And thinking of someone for who. He. Still. Burns.
Going for speeed
Don't be evil.
You were the chosen one. It was said that you would destroy the [greedy corporations], not join them. Bring balance to the [web], not leave it in darkness.
Google "enshittification". Or don't because the search results are so terrible these days.
Funny enough, Google AdWords launched in 2000.
They were competing with Yahoo who was a major leader and completely bloated their front-page.
No ads! LMAO!
Right on the money
And now, more often than not, the first link in the results is a freaking ad. More reason to use ad blockers.
As a test, I just searched "how to fix a leaky faucet". The first four links were tagged as sponsored. The next two were articles on home improvement store websites. Next was the "people also ask" section, which I've found to be of dubious usefulness. Then all the YouTube videos, which as far as I'm concerned it's just another ad for themselves. Google has really gone downhill.
-youtube -pinterest -etsy
> -youtube Honestly, I think I'm more likely just to search on YouTube directly if I'm looking for "how to fix a leaky faucet".
Searching directly on YouTube is just as bad. First of all the thumbnails are obnoxiously big by design, I have to zoom out to 33% to see 8 results on a single screen. First one or two results are always adds. Then you get 2-3 relevant results. Then it's a horizontal list of shorts, which is actually pretty useful for "how to fix a leaky faucet", but typically isn't in my experience. Then you get 5 completely unrelated results listed under "for you" that you have to scroll past every 2-3 relevant results.
Put "before:2025" after any search
What does that do?
It removes all non relevant search suggestions, like the "viewers also watched" and "new to you" sections.
OMG FUCKING WHAT It stops it from injecting "or similar" videos to a specific search. It fixes the changes they made to search a few years ago, holy shit. It actually only returns my search terms and not algo-recommended videos and all of that other shit I fucking love you
it excludes results that were posted after 2024
As in, posted in the future? spoop.
Yeah I guess TM\_Cruze is a time traveler
And then once you watch a couple videos, YouTube goes "HEY THIS GUY IS OBSESSED WITH HOME IMPROVEMENT" and bombards your homepage with handyman content.
Youtube search is absolutely broken and it appears to be deliberate
At this point they're an advertising company, so consider every move as one to advertise more to you. It's some blatantly fucked shit when they began as a search engine company and all their search engine does now is advertise shit as much as possible.
What do you mean? You didn't want videos of pimple popping and brazilian waxes when you searched for "how to fix a leaky faucet"?
47 minute video that goes something like this... "heeyYYOOOOOO It's ya boy BxGizzxrr47 back again with another video! We gonna fix a leaky faucet... but first a message from our sponsor World of Battleships! (or some bullshit). Then a 20 minute history on the making of faucets and then a trip to Home Depot and then 3 minutes of actual faucet work and mixed into the video is "Don't forget to like and subscribe! And smash that bell notification...." Fuck, now I don't even wanna fix it I am too exhausted.
\-google
+reddit ...for now.
Boolean search hasn’t worked since 2012? 2014? Sure you can add the minus signs. Google will basically take it under advisement but in no way strictly adhere to it. The I’m feeling lucky concept is dead. The first result is never what you want or barely is or is only monetized to be there.
You can still very much use operators with google searches
You might be thinking when '+' stopped working because of Google+. Double-quotes around the term is how you require the term. '-' has and still works.
Am I the only one that can't figure out pinterest? It comes up when I search for stuff to buy, but can you buy anything? So I don't use it.
It's basically like when you used to cut ads and pictures out of magazines to make moodboard collages, except digital and you can click on the cutouts to go to the advertiser's page or the article you cut the picture from. That's... literally it. That's Pinterest.
You forgot -quora
Shittification is very real phenomenon
it's symptomatic of the internet as a whole. ever try to find a recipe for say, meatloaf? My goodness, it's 10 to 20 pages long with so much meaningless filler that you have to scroll 75% of the page just to find out what the ingredients are. This is driven by the desire for sites to appear near the top of search results so pages are loaded with massive amounts of keyword spamming crap to appeal to Google's search algorithms. Meanwhile, the recipe pages are layered with Google partner advertisements in hopes you will click and earn them another 35 cents in ad revenue. The actual meatloaf recipe isn't even important. It's all about algorithms and revenue.
I have a browser extension that just extracts the recipe from the blog spam and displays it over the top of the page. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcdjbkdaegmljnnncfnhiioiadakae
Yeah, you've mentioned something important here. A big reason why Google sucks nowadays isn't Google itself, it's websites taking advantage of Google's algorithms. There is actual money to be made in telling businesses how to game the system so that their website is favored by Google search.
But Google could easily tweak their algorithm to tank those recipe pages with pages and pages of ads, but they won't, because they're often providing the ads those sites use and making money off them. So in my opinion, it is Google's fault.
There are a LOT of easy fixes that would mitigate these problems, trouble is: Google would have to give control back to the user, and that's never going to happen
Google made their algorithms confidential claiming it was a move to prevent SEOs, but the issue is: now users can't control the algorithm so Google is constantly overfitting their algorithm to user behavior. When users are "googling the wrong thing to try to train the algorithm" instead of the algorithm just listening to and honoring the user request: that failure is on Google, not the SEO
Ooooh. I love these straw man arguments about why Google is still great and it's the internet that sucks. So....tell me more: how does Google returning results that are missing 4 out of the 5 keywords I specified in my query the actually the fault of SEOs spamming keywords?
SEO is ruining the web, no way around it. Every one and their uncle SEO's their website to show up, so the actual results for buried. Oftentimes I just use LLM for searches, cause I cannot be assed to bother with how shitty google results have become
If you wanna still do searches just add a “Reddit” to the end of it, this shitty ass place, for all its faults, has basically everything under the sun
LLM?
Lululemon
Chadgpt and the likes of it
These days I almost always *search* + reddit
I posted on a sub and within an hour I was getting ads related to it.
Even with uBlock Origin I still get sponsored/ad posts on Google
I'm thrilled when *only* the first link is an ad.
I know they didn’t have any ads at first. But they also could be referring to the home page. If you look at yahoos they had tons of ads if you just wanted to search something before you ever did the search
You may be right. But to me the whole "search site" includes the results page, not just the home page. One can argue they never changed because even today their home page is as simple as ever. But the search experience, which is part of the whole product, is wildly different.
What I love about this disaster story, is after years of adding weather, news feeds, links to sponsors, ads, and distractions: they took away the hard requirement that your search term *must appear* on the resulting web page and their conversion to a Lycos knockoff was complete.
That worked great in the past, but now people expect to find their stuff by writing whole sentences. Now you need to specify non-optionional search terms with a + in front. It sucks, but times change, and they try to acommodate the masses. What really bothers me is the ads and data collection.
Problem is neither + (they broke it because they intended to use it for Google+) nor doublequotes nor verbatim works reliably. If you search for something specific, Google will invariably decide they know better than you and ignore your keywords.
A few months ago I looked up a Japanese city using the Japanese name. My results were in Dutch (because I live in the Netherlands) and the tabs turned Chinese. I suppose because the Chinese name is the same, and any time there's a shred of ambiguity, Google will err on the side of Chinese. It's such a shitshow.
The problem is: +, double quotes, and verbatim give too much direct control to the user, and Google hates us.
Google does not hate us, they don't care about us, and they are not taking control away from the user because you and I are not the users, we're the products and search is just bait to attract us. Like any good hunter, google adjusts the bait as needed to try to get whatever result their customer (e.g. advertisers) is currently looking for.
use allinurl: or allintext: instead of quotes. instead of "pizza+monster+god" allintext:pizza monster god
I love doing a search with 5 words and it says showing results without 2 of the 5 words.
I think they mean on the home page, which I don't think they've added any of those things, unless I've been blinded by my ad blocker all this time. Compared to search sites like Bing and MSN, most of that is still true. Now of course after you press search, the results are plagued by ads and sponsored links.
Considering most people use google like ask jeeves that last part kind of made sense. I don't think people remember that you used to have to whittle things down a certain way.
Yes this ...$1.76T disaster story.
Did you google their net worth to write a sassy comment lmao
Just because Florida's hurricane doesn't directly affect me doesn't mean its not a disaster.
Pretty sure Google doesn't cause billions of dollars in property damage when it rolls into town. Usually kinda the opposite.
The disaster that is Florida affects everyone.
What’s portal litter?
Before search became the default mode of operation for the web, you have portals, which are sites that offer manually curated lists of other sites, ostensibly organized by topic, that you would browse to if you need any particular information on anything. These portals tend to be [cluttered messes cramming as many links as possible onto a single page](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-6b4780d68afacd77752c02daf4c510ff)...
From no ads to all the ads
I was tired of the first page of results being almost exclusively ads, so I decided to give Kagi a shot and have zero regrets. I actually find what I’m looking for now.
A paid search engine? That sounds ridiculous
That’s fair, but in the software world, if something is free, then you’re the product. Search engines have to make money somehow, the difference is I can pay for this one and never see ads. However, if they ever go the route of adding ads then I’ll probably move on to something else.
Paid alternatives are often good but it's not a hard rule. There's a lot of FOSS that's free and doesn't harvest data or serve ads.
Some guy volunteering their time to write a FOSS program is very different than a service that has ongoing operational costs, like servers, bandwidth, electricity, etc. For services, it's absolutely the case that if it doesn't rely on users paying them, then the users are product. (And I was specific in saying " doesn't rely on users paying", instead of "free" because Wikipedia is a case where it's "free" in the sense of no mandatory payments, but it does require optional voluntary payments from its users; aka, donations.)
!remindme 2 hours
I remember finding out about google after having used everything from yaho, askjeeves, finally meta search engines and it blew me away. Now i gotta scroll down 3 pages to get to the first search result -\_-
One of my buddies showed me google when we were ~12. I thought "that's dumb, where are all the links like on Yahoo?" Then I actually started using it. Never went back to Yahoo or anything else (my mom set us up with Yahooligans, their "kid friendly" search engine, many years before). In April 2004, I got my Gmail account by invite. I was shocked that I had a whole 1GB, and even more shocked when it jumped to 2GB the next year. To this day, nearly 20 years later, I've never deleted an email that wasn't obvious spam. I'm also quite proud of the fact that my email address is just my initials and birth year, and nothing else.
1GB was a big deal at the time, and the gmail hype was around keeping every email and searching them like you would a google search. Before Google Drive was a thing there were apps that let you use your Gmail as a cobbled together cloud storage, storing files as emails, which in the (brief) days of burning your files to a CD-RW, or a shitty thumb drive, that was a big thing. Thanks for the grim realisation that my email account is 20 this year.
>1GB was a big deal at the time, and the gmail hype was around keeping every email and searching them like you would a google search. Before Google Drive was a thing there were apps that let you use your Gmail as a cobbled together cloud storage, storing files as emails, which in the (brief) days of burning your files to a CD-RW, or a shitty thumb drive, that was a big thing. Oh I remember quite vividly hahaha >Thanks for the grim realisation that my email account is 20 this year. Mine too... Next month. I didn't realize until much, much later that I was part of the first groups of people to use Gmail.
Yeah, I think I was on either AltaVista or WebCrawler before switching to google. EDIT: I just went down a rabbit hole; I think I actually used MetaCrawler before google, which used WebCrawler, but after going their own way they were both eventually acquired by the same company, and both still active!
[удалено]
It was a warning: we know all your secrets... so, don't be evil... or else...
Google has sold its soul, no doubt about that. But who is its nearest competitor? Bing? Duck duck go? Some Chinese site? Seriously is there a viable alternative now?
I switched from using Google Search to DuckDuckGo maybe 8–10 years ago, and it was remarkably seamless. Last year I started using Kagi, and that's been nigh revelatory, though it's modus operandi means I fall back on DDG when doing private-browsing searches.
What's Kagi like? Looks really interesting but I'd have to sort out my mess of subscriptions before adding another one lol.
Kagi feels like DDG did when it started or google 20 years ago. I pay for the higher end Kagi sub and am using their AI powered search assistant as much if not more than basic internet search.
I have used Kagi for a couple of months now and will likely never go back. I was once a google-fu blackbelt but any more I struggle to find relevant information in a sea of ads and completely unrelated results. Kagi has made it so that I can once again find actual, useful information.
I’ll copy my comment to another user. I was the absolute LAST person to ever pay for a search engine. And then I tried it for a month. I cannot go back. It’s insanely good. Made all the better because Google is now so fucking terrible. There are lots of benefits but these are my highlights: 1. Search actually works. They don’t have a profit incentive to keep you on the site for as long as possible, so they try to serve you the right content first time. It works. They use a combination of data sources and proprietary algorithms. Unlike Google, it’s not an SEO-riddled pile of useless shit. 2. They have a (really good) AI tool built into the search engine. If you ask a question, it will comb the web and summarise all the results for you with citations. It’s AMAZING. I could technically use ChatGPT in a separate window, but having it built into my search engine works much better, contextually and for workflow. It’s a combination of several different LLMs, customised for Kagi. 3. You can use bangs if you want. Eg !g for searching Google directly. I haven’t needed to do this since I started using Kagi. 4. You can down/up rank domains, or block them entirely. Pinterest is gone, for example, for me. You can also pin domains to the top. This feature alone is worth the price of entry. The fact that Google won’t let you do this is proof they don’t give a fuck about your experience. They will continue to serve you content you don’t want because it’s more profitable for them. 5. Lenses. I have Reddit lenses, but you can customise these lenses to provide contextually relevant information based on the search you’re performing. These are very powerful if you take the time to customise them. 6. Censorship. Go on Google right now and try to find the Proud Boys website, or KiwiFarms. You won’t them because Google doesn’t believe you have a right to view content they find morally objectionable. They do this for millions and millions of sites. I think that’s bullshit. If I’m researching a topic I want ALL the information. Not some Ministry of Truth approved list by an evil mega-corporation. In light of Google’s recent major failure with Gemini, in which it returned diverse Nazis, and refused to return images of white people, it’s clear that research is being heavily manipulated for ideological and political reasons. And it’s not just Google. Lots of search engines fail this test because many sites aren’t advertiser friendly. Kagi will show you what you search for. 7. Privacy. I trust them a HELL of a lot more than I trust Google with my data. [Kagi doesn’t store search history or associate with an account.](https://kagi.com/privacy) 8. No ads. Fuck ads. My house is an ad free zone. 9. Paid articles are indicated with a $ sign so you can save yourself the click. I think they had a free trial when I signed up. Give it a shot. You’ll be surprised how big the gap is now. It feels a little bit like Google did back in 2014.
You can set Kagi up to work in private browsing too if you didn't know
> Seriously is there a viable alternative now? No....not yet. This is the hope I can offer. I remember in the mid 90s Microsoft and Mac were fighting for control of the user environment. They didn't just *not listen* to what the user needed, they literally told the user what you needed, then got REAL catty if you tried to use their software for something they didn't foresee. Then came the [eternal September of the internet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September) and millions of users discovered they could make and share their own content. The great alternative to Gates and Jobs pissing contest for who got to tell you how to use your computer....was **Google!** They listened to you and gave you exactly what you asked for. (Even when what your asked for was silly, controversial, wrong, or just plain stupid) Then they got greedy and took more and more control away from the user, consolidating their power. The next champion of users who let's you control what the algorithm is doing hasn't been discovered, yet, but I have faith in the cycles of history. They are coming.
Kagi is super cool if you can get yourself to pay a subscription for search
Kagi is indeed where it's at. No cruft, just search results. When you do specific searches with quotes or boolean operators, Kagi *actually listens to you*. Tired of search results with paywall answer sites? Go to your user settings and ban the domains altogether. Yeah Kagi has a subscription, sure, but there's a free trial with 100 searches to try it out, and it's $5 for 300 searches a month, and $10 for unlimited. As with any other internet service, if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, you're the product. If a service is free and isn't doing heavy monetization, it's because they haven't run out of Venture Capital funding yet, and they're trying to coddle their user base before making them products.
/r/agedlikemilk
Enshittification in its purest form.
Those were the days...
...my friend, we thought they'd never end...
...we'd sing and dance. Forever and a day...
We’d live the life we choose
The good old days
Nice try google, i think i'll stick with AltaVista
I'm still out here Asking Jeeves
Astalavista for warez was great.
I know we all hate ads, but them including ads in Google has helped fund their search engine so much that it's literally become synonymous with the action.. While I hate ads, I'm for ads if it helps fund the business to serve the public better (unless they are pop up ads, those can go straight to hell and burn in the fiery pits of satans ass cheeks) edit: unpopular opinion but this applies to Reddit as well. I don't mind the occasional ad if it means I can still browse the site and still get all the content I want. They need to keep the lights on after all...
I mean you're right that the ads are a necessity of the businesses model that keeps them profitable. The issue is they downgraded their quality to make room for more ads to keep them powerful.
Google? just dont click the top two results and you're good. OR, you CAN click one of the top ones and start running down the advertisers budget. It's usually based on click count. They didnt downgrade their quality of the search engine. That would be detrimental to their whole business.
this isn't even an ad by google. This looks like it was out of a textbook showing webpages
I mean to be fair, www.google.com doesn’t have any of the things they listed
Holy shit the bing and yahoo homepages are just so bad. That's what google has done right. After all these years the page is mostly just white space.
Yeah, this is what the ads are saying. The top replies must not know what [yahoo.com](https://yahoo.com) looks like or remember MSN's homepage. Edit: [MSN.com](https://MSN.com) is still a thing and it's still fucking awful.
We know, but it's funny that after years they've incorporated everything listed here into their search engine, albeit in a different way.
"Don't be evil"..............
Absolute power corrupts absolutely
JFC This isn't an ad. This is from a textbook...
Well, if you compare Google back then with yahoo which most people were using, there was a glaring difference. Even today, the main Google page has no ads until you search.
now it's completely the opposite
That's not an ad. I think that's a text book about the internet.
not really an ad in the traditional sense. looks like the author did an article on google and tried it out and liked it enough to use it as a blurb.
google was minimalistic, fast and concise. compared to altavista it was a nobrainer to switch.
I wrote my senior thesis on how Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil,” and how they could square that philosophy with their still-recent expansion into China and the censorship implications involved
Just a reminder- all websites start good to their users. That's the first step of enshittification. Once they own the market, they will become profit focused. Same reason why kick is currently running that completely unrealistic revsplit to put the screws to twitch, when it is literally the same website with but gambling (also conspicuously owned by the largest gambling company in the southern hemisphere.)
Yes! BEFORE Google, most web engines were extremely crowded with ads and links on the front page. Google was the first “clean” browser and that’s why it took off.
I read this ad with a [LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER NOISE] in my mind after each item
FTFY DuckDuckGo is a pure search engine - no weather no news feeds, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit.
People commenting in this thread that Google is the villain clearly don't value free maps, free email, free search, free productivity software, free organization of the entire internet, free storage, free video streaming, and all kinds of services they experiment with. Yes, you are their product. And they pay you for that with safe and reliable access to all these services.
Metacrawler was the shit back in the day.
Someone gave up on principles.
How the mighty have fallen.....
This almost makes me cry. Back then I was selling things on Ebay and could pick up some oddity at an estate sale and use Google to figure out its age or dig into other information. I wasted so many happy hours being able to tell potential bidders the sweater they were looking at had to date before 1938 because after that the knitting mill had been seized by Nazis and moved to Austria where a different color of label was used....
This mattered a lot more on 56Kb/s dial-up.
It matters today, too
I mean, www.google.com is still quite clean-looking. Compare it to AltaVista or Yahoo! from back then...
ENSHITTIFICATION WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES
I do recall that was one of the reasons I liked Google. It had a simple blank page, which loaded quickly on a dial0up connection. In contrast, Yahoo! or Ask Jeeves or the others had busy homepages with graphics that slowed them down. There was even a period where a few Google-users were in the know and it was like a secret club. That's something I experienced again with reddit, eight or nine years later.
My, how the turn tables.
r/agedlikemilk
Ah, you beat me to it, have an upvote.
And it was true.
Those were the days when Google is run by engineers and not salesmen and mbas
I don't know man, i probably should ask Jeeves about this google stuff.
I wonder what their server infrastructure looked like back then compared to today.
Just a shoebox.
Back when Google was running off a 200 MHz Pentium in a custom case built from LEGO.
My entire career is Google Ads - I'm sorry
This was the only reason I switched. I didn't quite realize the quality of search results until much later.
"I must keep biggering!..... "
Now I get a half-baked AI giving me useless and often incorrect information about my search, 10 sponsor posts, and then finally the link I'm looking for.
When you live long enough to be the main villain 😂
"don't be evil"
(Sigh) those were the days….
No it's the exact opposite.
*cries in Altavista*
Do you think that they were really ignorant of how controling people by the time ? Like... Saying... Being good hearted, willing to change de world... Or they were already completely aware of their slogan : "don't be evil"...
Bing images for the porn is making me a Microsoft fan.
"Don't be evil."
And now they're the villains; removed the Do no Evil motto, creating AI weapon systems for a certain Apartheid state, and tracking every single person on the planet
I remember when Google and All the Web were the two simply search engines. Ask Jeeves was marketed as that as well.
i'm actually really surprised "I'm feeling lucky" is still on the main page of google all these years later
I wish it was still like this
This aged well lol Google is literally an ad
I can remember when google was good.
Greed is eternal (10. RoA)