this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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...months?
Homie, Google search took a downturn in 2012, then a sharp downturn in 2018.
Months??
Over a decade.
Have you seen it recently? In the last month or two, it feels like they just flipped an enshittification switch and suddenly made the engine completely unusable. Its results are completely fucking bonkers now. Not least of which is because 90% of them are sponsored ads that aren't necessarily relevant to what you searched.
Now even using quotes and specific sites isn't guaranteed to get what you are looking for...
It was so good in 2004. It would find the good shit until people gamed the backlink strategy to the point Google stopped really using it
Yup. By and large, the SEO industry is a cancer.
Everything turns to shit whenever a metric becomes a goal, and multiply that by Infinity whenever that goal involves making money.
Ads are the worst thing about the internet. There's not an option to escape them under any circumstances and when you use things like adblock people crawl out of the woodwork to tell you how you're stealing money from people.
I'm sorry, I'm paying for the service of accessing the internet. How I do so should be my decision and not somebody else's under any circumstances, so long as I am not breaking the law.
I agree in principle that commodifying page rank, and using trackers to identify would-be anons (to market at them or otherwise), and popups, and sponsored results, and in-content-ads, product placement, etc is all cancerous and shitty.
BUT to play devil's advocate, how is it that one should make success of their business without advertising? I agree that most things in advertisement (like I mentioned) are scum of the earth, but I disagree that all of advertising is bad. It is an okay and righteous thing to promote yourself to others, especially where you can provide value!
To go full devil's advocate (I don't believe this but could absolutely debate it) I am going to say that advertising is the pinnacle achievement of art and science. It is by far the most interesting medium of communication -- if you're like an anthropologist, and you come across some bootable server full of TV ads from 1950 to 2020, you'd learn more about society than you would from just about any other medium of art or from just about any discipline that informs anthropologists.
In the last few months there has been the highly visible changes that include adding the generative AI search experience but you are right. Google search has been getting more and more useless as time has gone on