Comment by s_dev
5 hours ago
Google as a search engine peaked in 2005. Since then they've become far more profitable, increased revenue by orders of magnitude, brought search to many more areas, increased headcount massively, improved their share price massively, diversified, serve far more paying customers, become more efficient per query, built data centres, devices and chips with more vertical integration etc. But as a consumer product for simple internet search where I type words and get a list of relevant results it has only gotten slightly worse since then.
This is pure observation/anecdotal. I have no measurements to back this up but I think others will share this view.
This comment reads as, "It's been bad forever, but only a little, and look at all the good stuff that happened!"
Let me correct.
Search was good as late as 2010, when they changed the engine to facilitate an "instant search, search-as-you-type" feature. It was decent until around 2015, when a pivot to privileging "brands" poisoned the results. And it's been useless since the pivot to semantic search (in part to facilitate Home/Nest products) and a series of index purges over the past few years.
We had something very good, and we had it for a good while, and it was destroyed by a company that was a blackhole for investment and some of the brightest minds of my generation, sucking up untold amounts of labor and radiating little but "exceptionally deleterious to society" particles.
you did a lot of wind up for a "slightly worse" when half the first page is either AI or advertisement; they ditch pure keyword matching with "feels like you want this" matching which works for serving more ad to more eyeballs for longer. For bland searches, sure, its 'slightly worse' but for the ability to find verbatim results necessary to drill down into a subject it's absolutely worthless.