It’s all good, we both clarified our* thoughts on the matter and to be fair using “ruined” instead of “ruining” or “started to ruin” indicates a completed process or final state instead of a continuous one.
I agree that previously one could construct a search to sort the noise out, but as you stated this has become unfeasible without a sharp increase of queries needed to refine results which has shifted the thought from questioning if Google search is bad to now generally accepted belief - to the point where people are trying to quantify and provide evidence to back up the claim.
If I can go on a tangent: it is conversations like this that continually convince me that I need never go back to Reddit. Not EVERY SINGLE conversation needs to be full of snark and vitriol. Being able to discuss things rationally, calmly, and with kindness is possible, if only people will create the space within which they are allowed to happen:-).
And how that relates is: using DuckDuckGo convinced me similarly to abandon Google:-). Caveats include using Google Images, Google Maps, etc. e.g. to look up the hours of a shop (the SEO optimization there works for rather than against me, although tbf quite often I have to bat away unrelated results vying for my increased attention due merely to having paid for that exact privilege), but overall the results of DDG are just extremely much more worth my time than Google’s.
As an example, if you search for the keyword “Lemmy”, DDG pulls up Lemmy.World as the #2 hit (which notably has ~80% of all active users on Lemmy, so is overwhelmingly deserving of being listed so highly), after the #1 hit being the singer, whereas on Google the first instance mentioned is Lemmy.ml (that has 2,206 active monthly users, compared to Lemmy.World’s 17,122 that is roughly an order of magnitude higher, and also housing the most-used communities e.g. [email protected] has 16.9k active monthly users compared to [email protected]’s top community with 8.44K), and that not until the #4 hit.
i.e., not only are Google results commodified, but as you said they are “ruined” as well - to the point of representing actual & active disinformation (for the sake of $$$) rather than merely misinformation (aka oopsies). We can scroll past one, two, even ten ads, but how do we find our info when the sorting refuses to distinguish between SEO-advanced results and “real” ones? I dunno, perhaps the above one is a poor example (edit: b/c in the past, Lemmy.ml really was the top Lemmy instance, for so very long), but I think you know what I mean regardless:-).
It’s all good, we both clarified our* thoughts on the matter and to be fair using “ruined” instead of “ruining” or “started to ruin” indicates a completed process or final state instead of a continuous one.
I agree that previously one could construct a search to sort the noise out, but as you stated this has become unfeasible without a sharp increase of queries needed to refine results which has shifted the thought from questioning if Google search is bad to now generally accepted belief - to the point where people are trying to quantify and provide evidence to back up the claim.
This article links to a research paper on the topic: https://www.fastcompany.com/91012311/is-google-getting-worse-this-is-what-leading-computer-scientists-say
*Fixed typo of ‘out’ to ‘our’
If I can go on a tangent: it is conversations like this that continually convince me that I need never go back to Reddit. Not EVERY SINGLE conversation needs to be full of snark and vitriol. Being able to discuss things rationally, calmly, and with kindness is possible, if only people will create the space within which they are allowed to happen:-).
And how that relates is: using DuckDuckGo convinced me similarly to abandon Google:-). Caveats include using Google Images, Google Maps, etc. e.g. to look up the hours of a shop (the SEO optimization there works for rather than against me, although tbf quite often I have to bat away unrelated results vying for my increased attention due merely to having paid for that exact privilege), but overall the results of DDG are just extremely much more worth my time than Google’s.
As an example, if you search for the keyword “Lemmy”, DDG pulls up Lemmy.World as the #2 hit (which notably has ~80% of all active users on Lemmy, so is overwhelmingly deserving of being listed so highly), after the #1 hit being the singer, whereas on Google the first instance mentioned is Lemmy.ml (that has 2,206 active monthly users, compared to Lemmy.World’s 17,122 that is roughly an order of magnitude higher, and also housing the most-used communities e.g. [email protected] has 16.9k active monthly users compared to [email protected]’s top community with 8.44K), and that not until the #4 hit.
i.e., not only are Google results commodified, but as you said they are “ruined” as well - to the point of representing actual & active disinformation (for the sake of $$$) rather than merely misinformation (aka oopsies). We can scroll past one, two, even ten ads, but how do we find our info when the sorting refuses to distinguish between SEO-advanced results and “real” ones? I dunno, perhaps the above one is a poor example (edit: b/c in the past, Lemmy.ml really was the top Lemmy instance, for so very long), but I think you know what I mean regardless:-).