4 ms·

> nothing much has changed, only the perception of the public. I would say things have changed: directly in google services, they are worse everyday (ads in yo

> nothing much has changed, only the perception of the public. I would say things have changed: directly in google services, they are worse everyday (ads in youtube, useless search engine etc.) and also indirect: they forced their black box in all sites' SEO and also adsales on so many sites that they are slowly ruining the internet for everyone else too.

tektekX 4y ago
At this point I feel like it's that Search has gotten significantly worse. I've had pages of results that are completely AI-generated text, with my search query just rephrased as a sentence. As an employee, it's disappointing.
- int_19h 4y ago
  What's worse is that it actively tries to rewrite your query by dropping keywords (esp. ironic when it does it to the single most important thing in said query) and substituting "synonyms" which aren't, presumably so that the output would have more results. I find having to quote things more and more, to the point where all or almost all keywords are quoted. Lately, somehow, even that produces results that don't actually include everything that was quoted.
  - AlexThrowAway 4y ago
    When you put every keyword in quotes it still incorrectly stems them, and it still ignores some keywords completely. I also wonder why almost no web forums I use are coming up in results at all, despite their robots.txt allowing indexing. Feels like Google is becoming a bit like East Germany...
- AlexThrowAway 4y ago
  As a loyal Google user from 1999-2021 that has now fully decoupled from all of it's services, it's a deeply tragic loss. If Google is so large and so arrogant that they can't even take feedback from internal employees then it's probably game over for them. They certainly aren't listening to developers and power users on forums.
- gsibble 4y ago
  The search engine is significantly worse than it was even a few years ago.

tektekX 4y ago

At this point I feel like it's that Search has gotten significantly worse. I've had pages of results that are completely AI-generated text, with my search query just rephrased as a sentence. As an employee, it's disappointing.

int_19h 4y ago
What's worse is that it actively tries to rewrite your query by dropping keywords (esp. ironic when it does it to the single most important thing in said query) and substituting "synonyms" which aren't, presumably so that the output would have more results. I find having to quote things more and more, to the point where all or almost all keywords are quoted. Lately, somehow, even that produces results that don't actually include everything that was quoted.
- AlexThrowAway 4y ago
  When you put every keyword in quotes it still incorrectly stems them, and it still ignores some keywords completely. I also wonder why almost no web forums I use are coming up in results at all, despite their robots.txt allowing indexing. Feels like Google is becoming a bit like East Germany...
AlexThrowAway 4y ago
As a loyal Google user from 1999-2021 that has now fully decoupled from all of it's services, it's a deeply tragic loss. If Google is so large and so arrogant that they can't even take feedback from internal employees then it's probably game over for them. They certainly aren't listening to developers and power users on forums.
gsibble 4y ago
The search engine is significantly worse than it was even a few years ago.