i’d rather go back to browsing the 1998 internet on a webTV box than this modern bullshit. no offense to anyone.
the modern internet is a heavily propagandized mild abstraction of real life. the old internet was ‘the internet.’ it was a playground for nerds, misfits, shut-ins and the regular folk who made the mistake of logging on and trying to talk to the rest of us.
Mild abstraction?
That is far too kind.
Wildly corrupted and monetized via algorithm.
My mom told me never to click “I’m feeling lucky” because she thought it had something to do with porn because it’s a phrase people would say about sex.
That’s hilarious, especially when the the regular search button had almost zero filtering.
My mom was weirdly prudish in the '90s and early '00s, I don’t really know why. Like she wouldn’t let me watch Dexter’s Lab because she thought it was gross or something? Idk. Weird time.
Same here. She stormed into the room to make sure I wasn’t up to no good because she heard me say “hardcore” once.
Her reasoning: “hardcore is a kind of porn” lol
yeah it was cool back then. but like everything online, profit motives drive idiotic changes
Don’tbe evilWhat is funny is that its not even better now compared to then. It used to be super fast and found everything on the web in an instant.
And today, well, you know how Google search is…
“Here’s ads, misleading ai slop we generated from stolen content, and forty links to AI generated content that’s probably even worse. You might find something human on page 7 of the results. Oops it’s a dead link lmao.”
A former high-up at Google has stated that they intentionally made the search engine worse a few years ago so that people would see more ads and click on more sponsored links. Now, the best result is #15 in the list, on average.
I don’t remember his name, but he got moved to the education department.Someone else had the link.
Google once stated that their primary goal was to get you off of Google property as quickly as possible- IE deliver your search result and get you where you want to go. That was the exact opposite of every other major website at the time (search engines, ‘portals’, etc) which wanted to keep you in.
It’s what made Google great. They were laser focused on the best search experience.
Now their search kinda sucks, it’s all AI and fuzzy logic and whatnot and even with quotes and Verbatim it STILL doesn’t just search for what I typed in not what you thought I wanted
I think the problem goes farther back than that. That might be when it got worse, but the place where Google search started to lose its way (IMHO) was when they removed + as an operator so it wouldn’t screw up searches for Google+ (their social network at the time). That was the first time they truly put something else ahead of search.
It was also before 2019 that Google search stopped doing what you told it- trying to infer what it thought you meant rather than what you typed in. Verbatim mode makes that better but it’s still not perfect.
I don’t think anyone’s made a better search though. And to be honest I don’t think it’s possible anymore without MEGA resources.
It’s what happens when companies go public. The ideals of the company go out the door and they care about is profits
become a monopoly by roleplaying as ethical and efficient
fuck your userbase because they don’t have nearly as good alternatives
OpenAI had the same playbook.
i’d argue that that playbook belongs to anthropic. everything about claude’s font and color scheme screams “ethical, productive, efficient, humanist” (we all know that’s far from the case)
I remember before ai I would just find what I needed with the.first link. Now I need to scroll past 3 ad links. Even duckduckgo has sponsored links.
Even without the ads, I can’t get past the SRO or AI slop. I don’t even understand how to search things anymore.
I was looking for tips on picking blackberries and the top 5 results were 10 page long essays of mindless garbage with one sentence in the middle somewhere that said “wear gloves”. No fucking shit eh.
Yes. I miss the days when the Wikipedia article was the first result. Now, even with ddg, to get to the Wikipedia article I have to add wikipedia to the query… This is so sad…
You can disable the AI settings in options. Or manually set “noai.duckduckgo.com”
You can just search on Wikipedia…
Duh! 🙄
Doesn’t change the fact that you used to find the (arguably) best result on top, and nowadays you don’t.
DDG allows you to disable ads and AI in the settings!
laughs in Kagi
SearXNG is really easy to self-host
They’ve gotta pay the bills somehow. If you’re not paying for it, someone else is, and that mean either selling ad spots, or selling your info.
Not really the case with Google though, at least not anymore. They have more money than ever. They could very well go with less ads, but they instead shove more and more down people’s throats.
Google has been an advertising company for over two decades. Everything else that they do is to feed AdSense.
I mean, I get it, servers cost money, traffic costs money.
But there’s a little gray zone between going broke and sucking out every cent possible. Isn’t making enough money enough?
Shareholders need ever increasing value or they will sell their shares. In the US at least, it is illegal to not provide shareholders with value. The only way to reliably get value is to fuck over your customers at every turn and fire half of your employees every few years
That’s the reason we should get rid of publicly traded companies.
Then you would still have private equity firms fucking everyone over, but with even less regulatory oversight.
I think publicly traded companies should be nationalized under an independent and thoroughly-audited oversight body accountable to the taxpayers, and any profits generated should be distributed to fund public works, social services, welfare benefits, and civil sector orgs.
And the idea of infinite growth needs to be abandoned entirely. These major internet companies need to be viewed as a public utility, and their goal should be to provide stable, reliable, quality services rather than churn an endless profit. This can only be done after nationalizing them though.
We might be able to get the left-libs on board by using tax incentive structures and laws to make it way more attractive for big investors to seek steady profit levels, which would also reduce the necessity to nationalise companies. Windfall taxes are one way, where you take almost every piece of profit above a certain ceiling.
Obviously we should still nationalise natural monopolies like Amazon and Google. Internationalise them, even.
One step after another, and don’t look down.
The US can’t even ban elected officials from trading stocks. It has a president who openly brags about his own grift and nobody does a thing. I don’t think it’s going to happen soon…
The old is new again with same bastards in suits. Just like the 19th century railroad craze which had some hedging their money but then lost the investment game.
Are you exaggerating with the “illegal not to provide value” part?
No. Like, go to jail illegal.
I have no words besides “wtf”
In the word of Jim Stephanie Stirling, “They don’t just want a lot of money. They want all the money.”
See, this is why I would suggest to switch to the post-scarsity model of Star Trek. Then they can have all the money, but it’s completely worthless.
Then why does quark charge latinum at the bar?
Because he’s not part of the Federation. All the people’s needs are met with replication technology.
When you’re a Trillion Dollar company, you don’t need MORE money. You make enough to make everything run without additional income.
But obviously a trillion dollars is still not enough. We need more.
Yeah, that’s how the internet worked out. Everything started out awesome to attract huge numbers of users, then slowly started collecting more and more of our data to use and sell while ramming in more and more ads.
Back then running on FreeBSD 2.X.
And no Kubernetes cluster needed to serve a search box. 😉
Don’t Be Evil ☝️
Lemmy is better than Reddit.
For now.
Unlike Google, Lemmy (and Mastodon etc.) are FLOSS, so if one instance enshittifies, we can move, even to different ones, fediblock that instance, and continue on. This is the problem with Bluesky: You cannot (realistically) self-host all the ATProto infrastructure, or federate with anyone while not using some service from Bluesky.
Google (www.google.com) is a pure search engine - no weather, no news feed, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. For now. Give it a decade.
Back then when human rights were cool
Back when humans cared about humans instead of money.
Ha. Stone age?
Nah, like the 1990s
right lol.
there was at least a balance between profit and caring about the human experience, even if it was on some small level in the name of profit.
i hate zoomers who never experienced past decades being like ‘lol nothing was good.’
bullshit. go and watch home movies in a burger king shot in 1995 and really pay attention to what you see.
“everyone is happier” should be the main takeaway, even the employees.
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Dude I grew up in the 90s. My parents had shit from the 60s-80s that they still own today. Consumer products were made to last because if they didn’t the company would go out of business. Now every company and their dog is enshitifying everything and if they go out of business, the government will just bail them out, rename themselves, and carry on making garbage.
There’s a reason Nokia phones being indestructible is a meme, because they genuinely were. I had one as a child.
Obviously profit was the end goal, but making good shit people wanted would get more money for the company. Now it’s just quarterly earnings by all means. Longevity doesn’t matter as long as line goes up this month.
