Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. The story begins

Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.

This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.

The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.

HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation

  • hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Right, so with all me very specific troubleshooting questions I should go where exactly?

    Ecosia? Very limited search results

    Yandex? More obscure results, probably not what I’m looking for

    Bing? Ok on general stuff, not great on very specific questions

    Yahoo? Never tried it, heard the enshittification has become bad

    Duckduckgo and similar? Proxying Google

    Edit: apparently it’s proxying Bing and not Google. Idk if that’s better but I got that wrong.

    There is no way to get around Google. Everything else is either highly specialized, very limited or unusable in general.

    Also feel free to chime in with your experience, I’m so down to hear what everyone has to say.

    • SleepyWheel@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I’ve been enjoying Kagi, although it also proxies google and others, and you have to pay for it, and I was dismayed to read on Lemmy recently that the CEO may be a sea lion. So yeah, the search for good search continues I suppose

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
        02·
        2 months ago

        https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

        For folks not understanding the sealioning reference.

        https://d-shoot.net/files/kagiemails.txt

        I think this is petty and sad behavior from the CEO of a company and I think this is a man that does not understand boundaries at ALL.

        And you know what I truly believe? I already thought this before based on seeing his responses to feedback, but I believe it a thousand times more now that I’ve been on the receiving end: I think it genuinely eats him alive that someone doesn’t agree with him or doesn’t think he’s doing great work, and he also truly believes that if he can just keep explaining himself to them they’ll OBVIOUSLY see it his way. He cannot accept that someone might think Kagi sucks, to the point where he has to reach out to someone like me to try to argue them into Thinking Correctly.