2012-2014 ish. I had a job which often involved searching for specific part numbers, and at some point during that job quotes stopped giving me exact results. They’d give me something close but incorrect. Like “ABC123” would show me “ABC456”. The real part numbers in question were much longer, in the range of 20-30 chars, so sometimes it was hard to notice that the search had ignored my quotes at first.
They might have fixed it in more recent years, but to me that was when the tide started shifting in the mentality behind google search as a product/service
The thread seems to be about the opposite problem. The OP can't find the page they're looking for because Google is too strict about whitespace, according to the top comment.
The killer app for AI might just be unenshittifying search for a couple of years.
Then SEO will catch up and we'll have spam again, but now we'll be paying by the token for it. Probably right around the time hallucination drops off enough to have made this viable.
Only the corporate web which values quantity over quality. Have you tried Marginalia Search? It's refreshing, although it doesn't index enough stuff to find what you're looking for, most times.
Too much money in ads, and search is just a huge cash pipeline straight towards it. No way we can have non-ad-infested llm search out in the wild from any major vendor in upcoming future. Google-fu just becomes llm-google-fu, while sometimes it goes off rails and then apologizes in that typical super annoying way (and screws up something else).
Maybe smaller ones can somehow provide almost comparable but ad-free service, heck even mildly worse but genuine results would win many people over, this one included.
When did this happen? I do exact searches on Google almost every day and it seems to honor the quotation marks just fine for me.
2012-2014 ish. I had a job which often involved searching for specific part numbers, and at some point during that job quotes stopped giving me exact results. They’d give me something close but incorrect. Like “ABC123” would show me “ABC456”. The real part numbers in question were much longer, in the range of 20-30 chars, so sometimes it was hard to notice that the search had ignored my quotes at first.
They might have fixed it in more recent years, but to me that was when the tide started shifting in the mentality behind google search as a product/service
At least 2022, if not earlier.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30130535
The thread seems to be about the opposite problem. The OP can't find the page they're looking for because Google is too strict about whitespace, according to the top comment.
The killer app for AI might just be unenshittifying search for a couple of years.
Then SEO will catch up and we'll have spam again, but now we'll be paying by the token for it. Probably right around the time hallucination drops off enough to have made this viable.
I kind of want to become Amish sometimes.
AI automates spam generation so more than likely all hope is lost for the human driven web.
Only the corporate web which values quantity over quality. Have you tried Marginalia Search? It's refreshing, although it doesn't index enough stuff to find what you're looking for, most times.
Too much money in ads, and search is just a huge cash pipeline straight towards it. No way we can have non-ad-infested llm search out in the wild from any major vendor in upcoming future. Google-fu just becomes llm-google-fu, while sometimes it goes off rails and then apologizes in that typical super annoying way (and screws up something else).
Maybe smaller ones can somehow provide almost comparable but ad-free service, heck even mildly worse but genuine results would win many people over, this one included.
The turning point for me was when they changed the + sign first the "" because of their Google+ thing.