I haven’t used Google as a default search engine for 15 years, so odds are I haven’t witnessed its enshittification as gradually as most people. To me it is a surprise when I see new bugs and errors.
Have these errors simply increased so imperceptibly over time that people just accept them?
This might explain why everything else is so buggy if the world’s number-one website (apparently! How?) is like this.
It’s still offensive when a bot asks if I am human—and you have to solve three of their daft puzzles before you get anywhere. (If a few pixels of a ‘crosswalk’ appear in a square, do you select it? Five years ago you should. Has this changed?)
If I hadn’t done it 15 years ago, I sure would be abandoning Google’s search engine as a default now out of sheer frustration.
Altavista didn’t have to get this bad before we left it for Google. But now we seem content to stick with subpar websites. Once again it shows the need to have a more diverse web space—assuming you can find it.
In real life, if someone let you down this much, or showed a lack of ethics to the extent Google does, we’d go out of our way to dissociate from them.
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It took me a while to come to the realization that Firefox was totally using Google for search ( I wasn’t paying attention), and though back in the day we were getting a lot of traffic to our websites via keywords and phrases, these days if you use a succinct search terms you’re either going to get an AI response (which I’ve turned off) or something that’s still not telling you what you’re actually looking for. I’ve changed my computer booting up Firefox direct to instead bring up Duckduckgo, mainly because I like being able to change colors and fonts, and Brave is I want more privacy since, as far as I know, they’re the only service not tracking its users… though I’m holding my breath, just in case.
How the heck did it all come to this… I’m asking, is it only money that’s ruined things of ineptitude?
I would say, ‘Follow the money,’ dear friend. Google was still cool even when they first listed on the stock exchange—but it didn’t take long before they became just another corporation and all their edginess disappeared. I think you are right. I believe Brave has some connection to crypto, so I have avoided them, and these days I use Mojeek as my search default (I’ve written quite a bit on Bing here, and I can no longer trust them, and unfortunately when their index fails, so does Duck Duck Go’s). The Google “AI” results are annoying, since you can’t trust those either, and they take up real estate on the page so lazy people won’t scroll down; hence Mojeek and DDG are definitely better for trying to get to the information you want.
I’d never heard of Mojeek, so I checked it out. I put in a specific search term related to my consulting business (which I’m not really doing any longer, but if I get the right call… lol), and I came up first; that made me smile. Then I put the same term in DuckDuckGo, and not only am I not in the top 30, but the guy who came up first is someone I know locally, who’s doing double duty because he’s also president of a health care organization at the same time. I decided to check Google, and I’m not in the top 50 there either. Thing is, for about 18 years, the main search terms I used to show up in search engines were always in the top 5; for 10 years I was #1. I guess time and money bypasses everything else… sigh… lol
This is what I like about Mojeek: it works as a search engine should. The others are all about pay-to-play. When I switched over to HTTPS for my work site, the wisdom was that secure sites were ranked more highly. Back then it was number one or number two on Google for a search of my name—fair enough, the site dates from 1995. What really happened: Google demoted it to 32nd or lower. I should have left it as an insecure site.
Then the computer geeks who like defending Big Tech and accusing me of being wrong said: oh, that’s just temporary. Google will realize and put it back to where it was.
That was 2022. It is still not back to where it was. I think the highest I’ve seen it is ninth on Google.*
Mojeek, however, behaved exactly as the geeks predicted. It follows what is pretty reasonable logic. Though once again I was interested but not surprised to note that the Big Tech sycophants were wrong.
* PS.: Now seventh, the highest it has been since 2022.