Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.

    • sadreality@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      The Internet has been slowly getting gutted since at least 2015.

      It is to the point that a regular search engine is useless for actual research unless you are a power user and even then it is censored.

    • Neato@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I instinctively scroll down 1-2 screens now to get past all the ads and promoted pages. It’s like Amazon the few times I use that. Fully enshittified. I just use Bing most of the time which isn’t any better.

    • parrot-party@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It’s not all Google’s fault though. With the obliteration of online news and forums, there just isn’t much indexable content out there that isn’t trash. It’s only getting worse with AI spitting out garbage remixes of the same crap on pages that post more ads than content. Reddit was a bastion of real content written by real humans delivered in a mostly friendly way.

      So at this point, what is Google supposed to even serve? No one wants the trash content. The next “best” thing is Quora and that’s entirely hostile even if it manages to accidentally contain valid content.

      Corporate has managed to destroy the Internet.

      • btaf45@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        So at this point, what is Google supposed to even serve?

        Google has the entire Deja News (Usenet) archive, more valuable than Reddit except for the older age. And they don’t let you access it anymore.

      • Widget@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        DuckDuckGo manages it mostly fine. At least, the results are more consistent, even if there’s the 1-in-50 chance it misses something Google would get.

        The cynic in me suspects that Google makes their real results worse to increase ad results which are “close enough.”

    • Addv4@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Not even joking, I was trying to search for something just slightly niche the day before yesterday and I got so fed up with Google that I actually used Bing. And you know what? It was noticeably better. We truly went down the wrong pantleg into this universe.