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Comment by mapt

5 hours ago

I think it's a warranted attitude to take a failure to implement plaintext search as part of your text search algorithm as enemy action. Yesterday I ended up at Bing for some reason and typed in the unique name of the site I was looking for and it didn't even come up in the first page; All their competitors did, as well as a couple random SEO farms. This is enshittification to the point of unusability, for an application space that we solved in the mid 90's.

My workplace does this to our customers too, where you get worse-than-plaintext-search effectiveness, and I guess it must be profitable enough conning the customer to waste our time as well, as we use the same interface for a lot of customer questions.

We need a FOSS nonprofit search engine that works like 2000s google

  • Arguably we need half a dozen operating on adjacent principles, to fight against engine-specific SEO exploits.

    "SEO is a $100 billion industry" = your opponents have a 12 figure war budget.