> Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership.

I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.

Search peaked in like 2009

Maps has only become slower and less informative (I remember when it use to actually display everything that was in a location and not just the popular/paid for stuff) since 2009

Google Docs was incredibly impressive... in 2006 and now almost 20 years later there's been a few QoL improvements, but nothing wow worthy.

And it seems everything else they've done has been shuttered and/or wasn't all that innovative in the first place and usually just trying to copy someone else work but in an uninspired way.

The paperclip maximizer reports steady and heartening progress on converting all available matter in the Earth system to paperclips. Shares of $PCLIP are up 20% on the news.

Most importantly Content keeps exploding. Total available human Attention does not grow.

So how does Adtech generate more and more revenue and sells more and more ads year on year?

Simple answer - Fraud.

> but fundamentally it’s when the advertising guys won the power struggle over the search engine guys

How would that explain Google search results getting worse though?

Ads only get viewed as long as Search is high quality and people don't switch to a competitor.

Ads fill up the top with sponsored results, but they don't affect the organic results. If by "the advertising guys won" you mean they got more sponsored slots, all that means is they got more sponsored slots. It doesn't affect the quality of organic results.

So I don't understand what your theory is here.

"Previously, advertising was a means to fund cool technology (and also get filthy rich)."

What is advertising now.

Is it possible that the "technology" being funded is "the delivery of advertising over a computer network".

Is that "cool technology". If not, then is the "cool technology" serving as bait to lure in ad targets, i.e., is it merely a component of the advertising services technology.

Why not sell or license the "cool technology" for fees instead of hiring "advertising guys". Why can't this unspecified "cool technology" exist on its own. The parent comment implies there is "value" in "the system", presumably independent of advertising.

"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998

it's even earlier.

when the search engine guys won over the diverse team of web surfers.

search engine was the automation of cheap labour. but early search relief heavily on the ranks early sites won by directory era curation.

search engine tech was unknowingly piggy backing on work from the surfers.

it would crumble for sure since there were no more surfers. AI just made it extremely obviously that Its done.

Yeah, you can't talk about the deterioration of Google without talking about the deterioration of the culture at Google.

I didn't like working at AWS for the most part, but I have never seen Google-level dysfunction there. There were a lot of times I disagreed with decision, but I could always understand the reasoning behind it. On the contrary, I can't explain most of the decision being made at Google. The enshittification from the very top has been amazing to watch, even for someone like me who joined only 3.5 years ago. Both senior and mid-level leadership lack a clear vision and the execution has obviously been horrible. Google needs a hard reset if they want to be successful again. I'm not buying the "too-big-to-fail" bullshit.

Thought experiment:

Boeing letting McDonnell Douglas take over

Google letting DoubleClick take over

The stupidifier also rewrites searches for SmartOS, Illumos et al as Solaris just to make sure you get nothing but irrelevant results.

I suspect running a small search engine creates a built-in advantage, because the SEO experts won't be trying to manipulate your results.

Ugh, that thing.

Me: “exactly-this-thing.py”

Google: You misspelled “sorta-related.js”. Here you go.

Me: Did I stutter?!

According to the Kagi FAQ, "our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide", so I don't think they are relying entirely on their own index.

What is this swedish search engine you're talking about?

If you get to scrape competitor results then all you need to do to improve them is strip out the ads. It's not exactly rocket science if that's allowed.

> then I would point out that it’s very unwise to build a business whose success is based entirely on the whims of another business.

When that other business is a monopoly, what choice do you have? The rise of google has effectively killed all other sources of traffic. Web sites used to get their traffic from things like webrings, directories and a variety of smaller search engines. Now? Google, or one of its properties, and to a smaller degree Meta are basically it. The curator and community discovery model is a victim of google, not a solution to it.

In a sentence, the theory is that as search added optimization layer based on ML, after optimization layer based on ML, it's nigh-debuggable.

Put another way, Google launched 1000 experiments that got +0.2% CTR and seemed innocuous, and now they have a system that only wants to give out Reddit and Quora links.

I've seen this story on Google's private Blind section multiple times. Usually, coupled to discussion about a more cautionary approach taken by the pre-2020 head of search, who was worried about this outcome.

IMHO they're feeling out the same outcome without the benefit of the above knowledge. I don't see this theory well-understood outside Googlers, modulo a pair of popular blog posts, whose name I can't recall, that hit the nail on the head.

(disclaimer: xoogler as of oct 2023, didn't work on search)

> I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community, like hacker news or curated;

I'm curious how you'd scale that. Google gets 8.5 billion searches per day. 8.5 billion "Ask HN: Where's the best resource for X" isn't going to scale to that.

Speaking of which, I would love a curated Android app store. It says a lot that you still can't filter by ad-free apps in it.

> I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community, like hacker news or curated

This is how all the subreddits that are remotely related to politics or news got so biased.

Of course I don't know what the alternative is. If I did I would be making that ideal site instead of scrolling HN.

Also the article did a terrible job by confusing LLM and AI query results with Google’s not-LLM search engine.

And yes, like you alluded to, search engines aren’t the only way to acquire your readership or regular customers. Some media outlets basically don’t even use search engines to drive traffic, like so many social media based businesses out there. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that barely have a linktree page.

"I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community" and now you've re-created the original Yahoo search, which was killed off in the original Search Engine Wars by the likes of AltaVista and later Google because it didn't take long for the amount of new content on the web to overwhelm the manual curation process.

A manually curated system can only truly work with a constrained domain of content/subject matter and tolerance for high lag regarding new information. Wikipedia is an example of what that kind of system would look like.

> it is slowly getting planted by LLMs and also for years has been gamified by SEO.

I think that is basically what they are complaining about, from a content creator's perspective. They are upset that their quality content (according to them at least) is losing to ML generated garbage, and that google engineers don't even seem to be able to understand why that happens.

My take on what the author was getting at, is how Google's manipulation of its algorithm has led to poor results and backfired on them. Not just for the users of its search engine, but small businesses counting on being discovered that way.

Arguably, the problem is black-box algorithms and how they are manipulated. The same problem can be faced by any curated community, where there is little to no transparency. Curated can still mean manipulated. People can jump from place to place, but that may not be advantageous, because where they want to be or the most likely places for discovery are not available.

> it’s very unwise to build a business whose success is based entirely on the whims of another business.

Show me a business free of dependencies and I'll eat my hat.

I think you should read the blogpost again. Google wants these smaller websites to come into search results but it can't coax the The Algorithm to do it. That's why they are actively trying to debug these issues.

> I think search in general is becoming a very poor way to discover content as it is slowly getting planted by LLMs and also for years has been gamified by SEO.

Did you mean supplanted here?

It's a problem that rankings changed so dramatically and no-one really understands why.

Perhaps the ranking was terrible before and now is better. Or is it the other way around?

The capability of A/B testing should have made this experimentation a one-armed bandit problem, which is far more ammenable.

You’ve subconsciously altered your search behavior to avoid categories that Google is horrible at.

Any product reviews will be SEO garbage (blogspam too 10 lists). Anything travel will be a page full of ads before organic results, if any. You just know to not even bother so you’re left with the queries that still work.

I was wondering the same thing. I see all these complaints that Google is awful and broken but it generally seems to work fine for me, apart from stuff that all the search engines struggle with.

Some example of something that's hard to find with Google but easy with something else?

I mean some recent global use stats are

Google 89.33% bing 4.15% YANDEX 2.8% Yahoo! 1.33% Baidu 0.83% DuckDuckGo 0.69% (oct 2024, https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share)

If Google is so bad why don't people, myself included click on one of the other ones?

I sympathise with Giant Freakin Robot not getting clicks - I'd never heard of them. But that's different from Google being bad from a user point of view.

I just tried clicking on them all - they all work. Baidu is kind of funny as it's all in Chinese and searching The Sound of Music came back with Chinese which Google translated to "The Nun and the Seven Naughty Children!"

Seriously ! after switching to Kagi along with recent annoying changes to Google search last 2 years , the switch back to google unimaginable.

Recently I realized that i only !g to google from kagi just a handful of times this year and every time to instant regret .

A marked contrast to couple of years back with DDG !g would instinctive and probably half the time and results felt better in google . Sticking with DDG felt idealistic and the quality second class, not so with Kagi, it feels the $10 pays off every month in much improved productivity.

It is to be noted that Kagi uses google search index as a source, so it is not like Google cannot improve the results or UX technically, just not possible institutionally.

Meanwhile, the younger generation barely uses web search

I might be a little out of touch, but what do they do instead?

Google's customers are advertisers. Customers are the people who pay you money. Consumers are just the product.

When I was leaving a job, I decided to start documenting things. I had a solid documentation before I gave my two weeks notice. Then I used the remaining time to refine it, it was a pretty good documentation.

A month after I left, they contacted me and offered contract work, which i declined. For the following year, employees reached out to me directly for help. It didn't matter that everything I helped with was already documented.

My take is there isn't a solution for proper knowledge transfer in companies. That's why I find it fascinating when people get fired on a whim. You lose so much more than an employee.

> Whoa, I better improve the documentation and share my knowledge so that I'm easier to fire

I don't disagree that people react as you say and create knowledge silos with the misguided idea that it protects their job, but I do want to point out the consequences of it for any here who may be considering doing so on purpose. Knowledge silos do not secure your job. They in fact limit your ability to advance, limit your ability to collaborate across an organization, limit your ability to adapt, limit your ability to take up other tasks, limit your ability to delegate, and reduce collaboration and project success thereby reducing your perceived performance within an org. There are a bunch more reasons why knowledge silos are bad not just for an organization but for individual engineers living in the silos, but you don't need to take my word for it, there are multiple studies published on this you can find.

I've seen the opposite effect.

Where people in a large organisations work to make an open source project more resistant to organizational changes (and priorities).

But yes, layoffs certainly has negative side effects.

Yandex is only good if you search in English, because Yandex doesn't care about the English market :D. They only care about Russian and Turkic makers. (Maybe Vietnam? I forgot.)

Yandex is following the same trajectory. Yandex reverse image search used to find websites with an image, a la old Google. Now it’s the same “similar image” crap.

Isn't most of Google from 2006 open source, or at least known in publicly available papers? So someone in the US should be able to re-create Google, and go back to basic page rank.

Is there anything preventing new search engines? Except scale and servers. But what most of us want is just plain old ordinary search as it existed in 2006, so that is probably reproducible.

I know there are some other engines. Like DuckDuckGo, but just found out they are really just Bing.

Which I guess begs the question, if Google Sucks so bad, why doesn't Bing take over??? It isn't as bad, even if not great.

Edit: After reading more posts. Appears Kagi is doing this.

Strongly agree. It's like an alternate internet where Google stayed cool.

I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine, and Yandex as secondary

Yes, 2019. Without any insider knowledge, I remember a Google update at the end of 2019 where they really went to shit, gone from "don't be evil" all the way to evil

It was actually later than I expected it to happen but it seems like distinct enough event that it's had reverberation all the way to the present.

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A quick browse through their website shows only links to original content as far as I can tell

You aren't using the internet, you are using Reddit as a walled garden. This is risky if you believe a decentralized internet is valuable

He probably eats at a food bank so that he doesn't have to touch the money he invested in the stock market when making $250 000. Asking him to touch his nest egg would just be cruel, so I recommend everybody in the food bank to get out of the line and make room when he shows up to fill his duffle bags.

Could be anything. For example, he may have aggressively been paying off a mortgage or student loan debts.

Whatever the next version of information retrieval at internet scale is, I don't think it will involve indexing the web. I think the web's moment has passed.

Maybe the future is something like publishers supplying datasets to train models on? Or like how search was built on top of the web, it will be something more organic and ad hoc.

There's been a pretty massive expansion of bureaucracy in every company in the last fifteen years. And government. And academia.

It seems like the idea of building a lean company has totally fallen by the wayside.

This is only to repeat what has been said by many, numerous times, but —

1. The point of search was no longer to provide requested data, but to generate clicks for Google's ad service.

2. Generating clicks for Google's ad service required that exact text search, boolean searches, & everything else useful had to be excised because giving what was asked for reduced engagement.

3. Ads had to be stuck on the top half of the results page, & the second half of the search results, for more clicks to be earned, had to be filled with garbage sites that did not provide what was sought. This encouraged the proliferation of scrapers & bot-generated text sites. Hand-in-hand with this was the elimination of long-tail results, as digging into results might give useful results.

4. It appears that a decision was made at some point to curate & direct answers toward particular results. While much has been made about certain political leanings being almost disappeared by this move, it appears to be much more likely that this was a result of returning results which generated more ad revenue & clicks (which may say more about the sorts of sites Google runs ads on than anything else).

5. In parallel with the dominance of ad-revenue mining, data mining became a major purpose of receiving search requests. Thus the requests for location information on every search, tied in with the drive to personalize results not for the purpose of giving good results, but to give identified users results they were more likely to interact with to both interact with Google ads & give Google more data to suck down & use.

If we could get them to revert back to the 2006-era search engine, where more than just major sites & bot farms are indexed, we would have something useful. But that's not going to happen.

It’s bad when their shitty ai implantation can find the answer but none of the links that it pumps out have anything relevant just seo spam.

Value extraction.

The web is just much more hostile now. It's not a conspiracy by Google. Over the years the bad actors are chipping away. Now with LLM content it's going to be even harder to pick out the actually useful content, since even humans will have a hard time discerning.

I'm curious if you have a specific query I could type into Google that's instructive of your claim that information has been disappeared. (honest question).

Sometimes small sites show up. Sometimes nothing shows up even though there are matching small sites out there.

Yeah, if you're specific about it and know what to expect it's usually workable. In any case, this blog post is an indicator of what's about to come next.

How do you explain Microsoft though? Even though they lost the smartphone train they seem to be taking all the right steps under Nadella and seem to be adapting well to all the new market circumstances.

To me it feels that leadership matters more than we give them credit for. It's just that most leadership sucks.

Google search results are full of garbage pages populated with LLM generated content (the pages exist solely to serve ads and capture search results).

Search spam is not new, but the use of LLMs simplifies the ability to make pages that look like legit content (increasing the likelihood they’ll show up in search results).

I appreciated the quotes pulled from people this affects, and I hadn't heard of this particular summit.

I've basically moved all my search to perplexity but would like to do something on prem now that I can fit the 70B models on my machine, I still have to choose a search index (maybe I can self host searXNG) but that still relies in part on what Google classifies as worthy of ranking, no?

I hope webrings and reputation networks can make a comeback somehow so my LLM only has to comb through high quality material instead of searching for a needle of useful text in a mountain of spam.

Google Maps search is also acting like that now. The search button searches for “kaffee” but I must change the query to “cafe” to get more results. Even then it misses obvious cafes to return random ones across the entire country.

Sometimes I search the same business type I see under a listing, and it won’t return any results. Not even the business I was just looking at.

Queries like “cafe laptop” returned cafes and highlighted reviews about laptop-friendliness. Now it returns random cafes.

The search experience across Google products feels like this now.

Kagi has been mentioned a a half dozen times in this comment thread.

Kagi. Used it and it is useful.

What is nice, is that it is small enough user base that it is not worth it for sites to spend a lot of effort on SEO for it.

Nowadays I use ChatGPT to search the web. I am very impressed.

kagi : costs about one Starbucks trip per month, and is extraordinarily high signal to noise, unlike Google.

Kagi. Kagi. Kagi. Once you realize how much time you wade through garbage results with google, Kagi pays for itself.

Kagi. It’s completely replaced Google for me.

Not paid, but I use bing and qwant. Sometimes Yandex.

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This. When you also bring in employees whose function is to do only one specific thing, such as editing a CI system, maintaining a google-specific internal tool for decades, they cannot easily adapt or are completely inflexible or incapable of changing.

Anything that requires a tiny bit of creativity of a new change requirement, it is going to be an issue.

The leetcoders moved into management, and have no product vision but immense sway over the direction of the company