Comment by bobajeff
5 hours ago
I also like their AI Overview (though just like all the other LLMs it confidently tells me wrong info all the time). Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system where you could give it a string of text and it would find just about anything I was trying to remember having seen somewhere before.
> Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system
I think a large part of the blame is not on Google but on the websites themselves. The Internet has been enshittified by a gargantuan amount of spam sites and content mills created just to generate clicks and boost SEO.
At least AI offers a way to filter out the noise at the cost of relying on how it was trained and what the creators thought is good data.
The blame for this is 100% on Google.
They constantly reward websites that are on a hamster-wheel of chasing the latest SEO trends, while penalizing websites that have actual information for not jumping through the same hoops.
A company I know operated TWENTY THOUSAND blogspam blogs out of a single server/IP. Google knew all along that this was happening (the companies had strategic partnerships) and never did anything about it.
The last thing they did anything significant was when, Panda in 2011?
At this point it's clear they're a monopoly and only care about websites who cater to their whims + making money. Search be damned.
Google knows exactly what it is doing. The downranked .edu domains which always ranked high in 2005. They want to feed people with rage bait and SEO websites, since the persons who read that garbage are the only ones who react to advertisements.
google literaly makes the rules for SEO and discoverability and penalise you for not following them. Hense all websites end up with slop content now.
That one is 100% on Google. They intentionally enshittified their own search so that you spend more time in it. And they made it harder for genuine sites to be found unless they play the SEO game.