5 ms·

Can you imagine if they'd skipped all of that and put the effort into keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it? Or even just skipped the second part?

janalsncm 2mo ago
What would that even look like? Paid search engines exist and they are niche products.
yodsanklai 2mo ago
> put the effort into keeping Search profitable The company would have ended up like Stack Overflow? I don't think there was an option for them.
- mattstir 2mo ago
  If they focused on keeping search results genuinely high-quality, I think the outcome could have been very different. Basically everyone I know slowly began shifting their questions to something like ChatGPT because Google search results were only presenting irrelevant SEO'd garbage with 12 ads shoved into every page. Slapping the lowest quality model at the top as an "AI Overview" and removing the one genuinely useful part of search at that point (widgets like the dictionary) was the final nail in the coffin for me at least.
  - zbentley 2mo ago
    No, even if Google search of old still existed, LLM Q&A would still be trouncing it. This is because people don’t like to click/follow links, they don’t like to read, and they don’t like to have to comparatively evaluate multiple pieces of information.
phoghed 2mo ago
Lmao then they’d be completely irrelevant instead of mostly
aurareturn 2mo ago
keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it I don't think Google had much to do with it. It has way more to do with the internet concentrating into major communities where all the content is private. Even Reddit content is going this way. Most FB and Instagram content are private. All of Discord is unreachable by crawlers. Prior to this, just about everything on the web was open for crawlers since content wanted to be found.
- underlipton 2mo ago
  Google caused this by pushing people towards "brands" rather than individual pages. Those platforms only exposed the data necessary for SEO and Google refused to punish them for it.
  - aurareturn 2mo ago
    Did Google cause Facebook?

janalsncm 2mo ago

What would that even look like? Paid search engines exist and they are niche products.

yodsanklai 2mo ago

> put the effort into keeping Search profitable The company would have ended up like Stack Overflow? I don't think there was an option for them.

mattstir 2mo ago
If they focused on keeping search results genuinely high-quality, I think the outcome could have been very different. Basically everyone I know slowly began shifting their questions to something like ChatGPT because Google search results were only presenting irrelevant SEO'd garbage with 12 ads shoved into every page. Slapping the lowest quality model at the top as an "AI Overview" and removing the one genuinely useful part of search at that point (widgets like the dictionary) was the final nail in the coffin for me at least.
- zbentley 2mo ago
  No, even if Google search of old still existed, LLM Q&A would still be trouncing it. This is because people don’t like to click/follow links, they don’t like to read, and they don’t like to have to comparatively evaluate multiple pieces of information.

phoghed 2mo ago

Lmao then they’d be completely irrelevant instead of mostly

aurareturn 2mo ago

keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it I don't think Google had much to do with it. It has way more to do with the internet concentrating into major communities where all the content is private. Even Reddit content is going this way. Most FB and Instagram content are private. All of Discord is unreachable by crawlers. Prior to this, just about everything on the web was open for crawlers since content wanted to be found.

underlipton 2mo ago
Google caused this by pushing people towards "brands" rather than individual pages. Those platforms only exposed the data necessary for SEO and Google refused to punish them for it.
- aurareturn 2mo ago
  Did Google cause Facebook?