4 ms·

I didn't realize quite how bad it's become until I recently set up a small static site for a relatives two person business. They had no web presence and a very

I didn't realize quite how bad it's become until I recently set up a small static site for a relatives two person business. They had no web presence and a very unique name. The site quickly became the first result for a search on the company name in Bing and DDG. On Google its on page 3, behind all the auto generated business directories filled with google ads. Google has picked up all the Schema.org information from the site and indexed that and is using it in Google Maps. My conclusion is that Google now gathers information for internal use. But only wants to share that information when it gets paid for it with ad views.

MrLeap 8y ago
I've been using the internet since the mid 90's, and google since the early 00's. Google's early minimalism and result quality made me _fanatically_ loyal. Even when google started doing some unromantic things, I stayed the course. The results were just _so good_. I scoffed at bing. Pshawed at duckduckgo, hussled an early invite to gmail, thought google wave was the new sliced bread, and generally viewed anyone who used yahoo as sadly mistaken. In the last two years I've had so many misfire searches with multiple pages of spam that I've been driven away. Not at first, it's been a process. My first mitigation was to start searching by typing "<my query> reddit" that seemed to up my chances of getting non procedurally generated garbage content significantly. This method started showing its cracks too so I gave duckduckgo a try. It's been better most of the time. Not as good as google use to be, but way better than google is now. The muscle memory is STILL so deep that about 50% of the time I still type <g><o><backspace><backspace><d><u><down><enter>. Yes, I know I could set up my browser to search ddg from the url bar. My habits were forged decades ago. Besides that, I use lots of different devices, and I'd rather configure myself than every device. It's pretty crazy to think the signal/noise ratio has gotten so bad to sway me. It's not looking good when I prognosticate forward from where we are. The protocols are still good, maybe some nerds just need to chisel out a fresh start somehow. I unironically propose we make a web ring.
- basch 8y ago
  To be fair to google its an arms race. They write an algorithm, people try and game it. If google sits and does nothing, they get worse over time. They are fighting back, but their strength against bad actors has considerably weakened. The amount of spam in their results is maddening sometimes.

MrLeap 8y ago

I've been using the internet since the mid 90's, and google since the early 00's. Google's early minimalism and result quality made me _fanatically_ loyal. Even when google started doing some unromantic things, I stayed the course. The results were just _so good_. I scoffed at bing. Pshawed at duckduckgo, hussled an early invite to gmail, thought google wave was the new sliced bread, and generally viewed anyone who used yahoo as sadly mistaken. In the last two years I've had so many misfire searches with multiple pages of spam that I've been driven away. Not at first, it's been a process. My first mitigation was to start searching by typing "<my query> reddit" that seemed to up my chances of getting non procedurally generated garbage content significantly. This method started showing its cracks too so I gave duckduckgo a try. It's been better most of the time. Not as good as google use to be, but way better than google is now. The muscle memory is STILL so deep that about 50% of the time I still type <g><o><backspace><backspace><d><u><down><enter>. Yes, I know I could set up my browser to search ddg from the url bar. My habits were forged decades ago. Besides that, I use lots of different devices, and I'd rather configure myself than every device. It's pretty crazy to think the signal/noise ratio has gotten so bad to sway me. It's not looking good when I prognosticate forward from where we are. The protocols are still good, maybe some nerds just need to chisel out a fresh start somehow. I unironically propose we make a web ring.

basch 8y ago
To be fair to google its an arms race. They write an algorithm, people try and game it. If google sits and does nothing, they get worse over time. They are fighting back, but their strength against bad actors has considerably weakened. The amount of spam in their results is maddening sometimes.