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

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[–] ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works 23 points 8 months ago (2 children)

You just described the categories pages many search engines had before Google. Or proto Web 2.0 bookmark sharing sites like del.icio.us. Sites like Metafilter also existed as a kind of Internet index before everyone was adding reddit.com to their Googling. It's a laudable idea, but these systems all seem to fall prey to market manipulation in much the same way that SEO helped kill Google.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

It's interesting that you mention MetaFilter, because they're literally in the process of transitioning fully to a non-profit organization.

https://metatalk.metafilter.com/26430/MeFi-Nonprofit-Update-March-26-2024

They're the only aggregator that still isn't flooded with ads and has pretty decent moderation policies.

There's absolutely a reason I linked to the discussion over there: because it's quality, and it's the first place I saw the article pop up.

[–] rollingFlint@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

Wow, that's really neat.

Thanks for letting me know about MetaFilter and its transition to NPO. This really seems like a great move for the site.

I've heard of the site before, but haven't had the chance to try it before. Guess a bit late is better than never, right? :D

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I was thinking on something slightly different. It would be automatic; a bit more like "federated Google" and less like old style indexing sites. It's something like this:

there are central servers with info about pages on the internet
you perform searches through a program or add-on (let's call it "the software")
as you're using the software, performing your search, it'll also crawl the web and assign a "desirability" value to the pages, with that info being added to the server that you're using
the algorithm is open and, if you so desire, you can create your own server and fork the algorithm

It would be vulnerable to SEO, but less so than Google - because SEO tailored to the algorithm being used by one server won't necessarily work well for another server.

Please, however, note that this is "ideas guy" tier. I wouldn't be surprised if it's unviable, for some reason that I don't know.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 8 months ago

I think you could do it in Lemmy itself combined with RSS feeds. The mods would curate a list of RSS feeds, and use the keywords to pick the ones for a bot to automatically post (which means if a programming blog did a post about windsurfing, it wouldn't show up as long as the meta keywords didn't match). Mods could take suggestions each week for feeds to add or remove.