this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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It’s truly shocking how a tiny company of a few people can outperform one of the largest companies in the world with search. Google is full of ads though, so it’s more profitable for them if you have to spend more time on their page to see more ads.
That's exactly why Google Search has gone so far downhill that it's pushing people elsewhere. Searches are supposed to be fast at giving you the answer you're looking for. But that is antithetical to advertising. It's why Google has been scraping data for years to build their own internal responses to easy queries like simple calculations, definitions, basic wiki results, etc. since you never even need to leave their site. Can't get faster than that, until those results can no longer be trusted.
Now those quick results can't be trusted, thanks largely to their blind AI fixation. That trust can never be earned back, it is lost permanently. Many users will instead start looking for alternatives that don't feed them bullshit responses and instead just give them the links to good info, like Google used to.
And we have evidence that this is exactly why it happened, too:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
While I'd highly recommend giving either the article a read or the companion podcast a listen because Ed Zitron did some fantastic reporting on this, the tl;dr is that a couple of years ago, there was direct conflict between the search and advertising wings of Google over search query metrics.
The advertising teams wanted the metrics to go up to help juice ad numbers. The search team rightly understood that there were plenty of ways they could do so, but that it would make for a worse user experience. The advertising team won.
The head of the advertising team during this was a man named Prabhakar Raghavan. Roughly a year later, he became the head of Google Search. And the timing of all this lines up with when people started noting Google just getting worse and worse to actually use.
Oh, and the icing on the cake? Raghavan's previous job? Head of Yahoo Search just before that business cratered to the point that Yahoo decided to just become a bing frontend.
Zitron is fond of saying that these people have names and it's important that we know who's making the decisions that are actively making the world of tech worse for everyone; I tend to agree.
Ed is the best addition to the CZM family since Garrison, no shade to James, Magpie, or Jaime Loftus