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The Man Who Killed Google Search (www.wheresyoured.at)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

136 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Edward Zitron has been reading all of google's internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ's antitrust case against google.

This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.

The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.

HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

Right, so with all me very specific troubleshooting questions I should go where exactly?

Ecosia? Very limited search results

Yandex? More obscure results, probably not what I'm looking for

Bing? Ok on general stuff, not great on very specific questions

Yahoo? Never tried it, heard the enshittification has become bad

Duckduckgo and similar? Proxying Google

Edit: apparently it's proxying Bing and not Google. Idk if that's better but I got that wrong.

There is no way to get around Google. Everything else is either highly specialized, very limited or unusable in general.

Also feel free to chime in with your experience, I'm so down to hear what everyone has to say.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

I'm pretty sure Duckduckgo proxies Bing, not Google.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I've been enjoying Kagi, although it also proxies google and others, and you have to pay for it, and I was dismayed to read on Lemmy recently that the CEO may be a sea lion. So yeah, the search for good search continues I suppose

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

As a concept, paid search engines is actually a good idea. It incentivize the company to produce great result so their users won't search over and over (which reduce their profit), unlike google which incentivized to reduce search quality so their users have to search over and over and see more ads (per the article). If it's not kagi, I hope other paid search engines start to appear in this space. Indexing the web is expensive, and after seeing what happened with google, it's clear that free ad-suported search engine is not the way to go now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There’s an awful lot of things where if the incentives were to keep paying users happy instead of keeping advertisers happy we would see very different results from the service. Unfortunately, for an awful lot of these services people don’t want to pay for them, or at least don’t want to pay what it costs to make them financially viable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The high cost of housing is squeezing people all over the globe and we're seeing a spike in homelessness in first-world countries from USA to Australia, where the affordability of housing is out of control, on top of explosive inflation of food costs.

It may not be that they "don't want to pay" but simply not enough people have enough discretionary income to pay enough to make the business financially viable.

I mean, that's what happened to Beeper and while I was a very early on their sign up list I decided to never give them any money. When it became clear they weren't able to keep things going on how much money they were making from paying users: Micigovsky sold to a larger company.

I think it's an issue that the services they're offering actually cost more than the market is actually effectively able to bear and they're trying to hide that fact with advertising and data sales to cover operating costs.

More simply put: Consumers don't actually have enough money anymore to be able to support a business, and businesses essentially now must rely on other businesses as customers to be able to functionally exist financially. Only other businesses have the finances to support new business.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

For folks not understanding the sealioning reference.

https://d-shoot.net/files/kagiemails.txt

I think this is petty and sad behavior from the CEO of a company and I think this is a man that does not understand boundaries at ALL.

And you know what I truly believe? I already thought this before based on seeing his responses to feedback, but I believe it a thousand times more now that I've been on the receiving end: I think it genuinely eats him alive that someone doesn't agree with him or doesn't think he's doing great work, and he also truly believes that if he can just keep explaining himself to them they'll OBVIOUSLY see it his way. He cannot accept that someone might think Kagi sucks, to the point where he has to reach out to someone like me to try to argue them into Thinking Correctly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Just for some perspective, if you want to know how little reach the fedi post with the link to this blog post got: the first post in this thread already has more likes and boosts after less than a hour since posting it than my blog post ever did that he felt the need to confront me over.

The author is probably weren't aware that their blog post get a huge engagement on hacker news and the ceo got a lot of flak there, which was probably why he felt the need to reach out and "correct" the author.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Searx exists and is decentralized although as for the quality of results that's up in the air