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They very much killed the golden goose. It's a real failure to think in terms of systems. Google relies on a healthy open web, yet as arguably the biggest singl

They very much killed the golden goose. It's a real failure to think in terms of systems. Google relies on a healthy open web, yet as arguably the biggest single influencer of the web it has completely failed to maintain that let alone improve it.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
amelius 3y ago
Perhaps you are simply not the target audience any longer ... I mean, if they can make billions by serving 99% of people, why would they spend billions on making the remaining 1% happy?
- BirAdam 3y ago
  Clicks and impressions do not necessarily need to be human clicks or human impressions.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  One would think that given the purported depth and breadth of our economic system, it would be possible for that system to address all audiences instead of just catering to the most common denominator. But we've been on a race to the bottom in most sectors for a long time now.
  - therealdrag0 3y ago
    How could any system address all audiences of anything? Human wants are unlimited and unfixed. Might as well chase fairies.
- hooby 3y ago
  You are totally right. Google makes billions from advertisers - the companies who pay for ads, the companies who create those SEO-optimized marketing-pages. Those are the target audience, that Google wants to make happy. Why would they care about us users? We don't pay for search.
Loquebantur 3y ago
As commercial enterprises currently are set up, they have no incentive whatsoever to preserve the ecosystem they are thriving on. Worse, they profit more when harming it. As seen here with Google, that is true irrespective of the nature of the affected system. It's not just the quality of websites that is negatively hit either. The real victims are us, civil society and our future. The information realm that is the internet should provide not only some basic tidbits, it should inform to the full extent of human knowledge. Even more than that, it should provide us with the freedom to discuss among ourselves and reflect on ourselves, humans and humanity, about the future of society. Without such self-reflection, there is only stagnation and retardation. We cannot change what we do not understand and we understand ourselves the least.
- candiodari 3y ago
  I don't get why this is supposed to be Google's fault. I mean it doesn't matter of course: this is happening, and the only real question is if it will continue, maybe if something can be done. Who's fault it is ... Google is doing a lot to preserve the web. It's not enough, perhaps. Probably. But it's quite unclear to me what they could do to reverse this. Plus we've all seen what this has lead to in meat-space. Information is one sided. BBC is supposed to be the paragon of neutrality, for example, and while it is pretty neutral on the situation in many places, it's not exactly neutral on UK and Australia political issues for example. And it suffers from the same problem as pretty much every other meat-space information source outside of libraries: the only information you can get from it is really quite superfluous. Their recent "is AI evil?" series, for example, is neither neutral nor does it give enough information for people, even if someone wanted to go really in-depth on the issue, and have a really well-considered opinion, the only place where you could collect enough information to do that would be Youtube imho. With some blogs and maybe a scientific paper or two. Oh wait 3 out of those three work with a lot of help from Google (just try finding scientific papers without Google scholar) I agree the situation is bad. But frankly, while Google perhaps has some blame in this, I'm very sure the situation would be 10x worse without Google.
  - Loquebantur 3y ago
autoexec 3y ago
> They very much killed the golden goose I suspect that thanks to android phones collecting all of our offline data, and chrome collecting everyone's browsing history, Google no longer needs our web searches to collect the most intimate details of our lives which is why they aren't interested in spending time and money on their search product. In fact, the more useless google search is the more google can make companies pay for ads placed at the top of listings because if those companies don't pay up, their customers may struggle to find their site at all through all the spam.
freediver 3y ago
This is basically the premise of "The Age of PageRank is Over" blog post that is now sort of a Kagi manifesto. https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over
- yunohn 3y ago
  Honestly, this blog post made me think Kagi has no clue what they’re doing. Nobody in 2022 would claim that Google uses raw PageRank and doesn’t do “user personalised queries”.
episiarch 3y ago
In the fable it is not a golden goose. This is significant because killing a golden goose would result in golden flesh. The (not golden) goose lays golden eggs. The recurring time-based nature of the eggs is the key aspect of the fable.
- joelanman 3y ago
  You're right! Mistake on my part

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

amelius 3y ago

Perhaps you are simply not the target audience any longer ... I mean, if they can make billions by serving 99% of people, why would they spend billions on making the remaining 1% happy?

BirAdam 3y ago
Clicks and impressions do not necessarily need to be human clicks or human impressions.
JohnFen 3y ago
One would think that given the purported depth and breadth of our economic system, it would be possible for that system to address all audiences instead of just catering to the most common denominator. But we've been on a race to the bottom in most sectors for a long time now.
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  How could any system address all audiences of anything? Human wants are unlimited and unfixed. Might as well chase fairies.
hooby 3y ago
You are totally right. Google makes billions from advertisers - the companies who pay for ads, the companies who create those SEO-optimized marketing-pages. Those are the target audience, that Google wants to make happy. Why would they care about us users? We don't pay for search.

Loquebantur 3y ago

As commercial enterprises currently are set up, they have no incentive whatsoever to preserve the ecosystem they are thriving on. Worse, they profit more when harming it. As seen here with Google, that is true irrespective of the nature of the affected system. It's not just the quality of websites that is negatively hit either. The real victims are us, civil society and our future. The information realm that is the internet should provide not only some basic tidbits, it should inform to the full extent of human knowledge. Even more than that, it should provide us with the freedom to discuss among ourselves and reflect on ourselves, humans and humanity, about the future of society. Without such self-reflection, there is only stagnation and retardation. We cannot change what we do not understand and we understand ourselves the least.

candiodari 3y ago
I don't get why this is supposed to be Google's fault. I mean it doesn't matter of course: this is happening, and the only real question is if it will continue, maybe if something can be done. Who's fault it is ... Google is doing a lot to preserve the web. It's not enough, perhaps. Probably. But it's quite unclear to me what they could do to reverse this. Plus we've all seen what this has lead to in meat-space. Information is one sided. BBC is supposed to be the paragon of neutrality, for example, and while it is pretty neutral on the situation in many places, it's not exactly neutral on UK and Australia political issues for example. And it suffers from the same problem as pretty much every other meat-space information source outside of libraries: the only information you can get from it is really quite superfluous. Their recent "is AI evil?" series, for example, is neither neutral nor does it give enough information for people, even if someone wanted to go really in-depth on the issue, and have a really well-considered opinion, the only place where you could collect enough information to do that would be Youtube imho. With some blogs and maybe a scientific paper or two. Oh wait 3 out of those three work with a lot of help from Google (just try finding scientific papers without Google scholar) I agree the situation is bad. But frankly, while Google perhaps has some blame in this, I'm very sure the situation would be 10x worse without Google.
- Loquebantur 3y ago

autoexec 3y ago

> They very much killed the golden goose I suspect that thanks to android phones collecting all of our offline data, and chrome collecting everyone's browsing history, Google no longer needs our web searches to collect the most intimate details of our lives which is why they aren't interested in spending time and money on their search product. In fact, the more useless google search is the more google can make companies pay for ads placed at the top of listings because if those companies don't pay up, their customers may struggle to find their site at all through all the spam.

freediver 3y ago

This is basically the premise of "The Age of PageRank is Over" blog post that is now sort of a Kagi manifesto. https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over

yunohn 3y ago
Honestly, this blog post made me think Kagi has no clue what they’re doing. Nobody in 2022 would claim that Google uses raw PageRank and doesn’t do “user personalised queries”.

episiarch 3y ago

In the fable it is not a golden goose. This is significant because killing a golden goose would result in golden flesh. The (not golden) goose lays golden eggs. The recurring time-based nature of the eggs is the key aspect of the fable.

joelanman 3y ago
You're right! Mistake on my part