From the «the modern WWW is a trash fire» department:
Feed: Slashdot
Title: Are We Seeing the End of the Googleverse?
Author: EditorDavid
Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2023 11:34:00 -0400
Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/09/02/0557232/are-we-seeing-the-end-of-the-googleverse?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

The Verge argues we're seeing "the end of the Googleverse. For two decades,
Google Search was the invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online
content. "Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question... all
around us are signs that the era of 'peak Google' is ending or, possibly,
already over." There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as
accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was. The rise of
massive closed algorithmic social networks like Meta's Facebook and Instagram
began eating the web in the 2010s. More recently, there's been a shift to
entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a
primary search engine by a new generation of internet users... Google Reader
shut down in 2013, taking with it the last vestiges of the blogosphere. Search
inside of Google Groups has repeatedly broken over the years. Blogger still
works, but without Google Reader as a hub for aggregating it, most publishers
started making native content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and, more
recently, TikTok. Discoverability of the open web has suffered. Pinterest has
been accused of eating Google Image Search results. And the recent protests over
third-party API access at Reddit revealed how popular Google has become as a
search engine not for Google's results but for Reddit content. Google's place in
the hierarchy of Big Tech is slipping enough that some are even admitting that
Apple Maps is worth giving another chance, something unthinkable even a few
years ago. On top of it all, OpenAI's massively successful ChatGPT has dragged
Google into a race against Microsoft to build a completely different kind of
search, one that uses a chatbot interface supported by generative AI. Their
article quotes the founder of the long-ago Google-watching blog, "Google
Blogoscoped," who remembers that when Google first came along, "they were
ad-free with actually relevant results in a minimalistic kind of design. If we
fast-forward to now, it's kind of inverted now. The results are kind of spammy
and keyword-built and SEO stuff. And so it might be hard to understand for
people looking at Google now how useful it was back then." The question, of
course, is when did it all go wrong? How did a site that captured the
imagination of the internet and fundamentally changed the way we communicate
turn into a burned-out Walmart at the edge of town? Well, if you ask Anil Dash,
it was all the way back in 2003 — when the company turned on its AdSense
program. "Prior to 2003-2004, you could have an open comment box on the
internet. And nobody would pretty much type in it unless they wanted to leave a
comment. No authentication. Nothing. And the reason why was because who the fuck
cares what you comment on there. And then instantly, overnight, what happened?"
Dash said. "Every single comment thread on the internet was instantly spammed.
And it happened overnight...." As he sees it, Google's advertising tools gave
links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform. From that
moment forward, Google cared more about the health of its own network than the
health of the wider internet. "At that point it was really clear where the next
20 years were going to go," he said.

[image 2][2] [image 4][4]

Read more of this story[5] at Slashdot.

Links:
[1]: http://twitter.com/home?status=Are+We+Seeing+the+End+of+the+Googleverse%3F%3A+https%3A%2F%2Ftech.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F23%2F09%2F02%2F0557232%2F%3Futm_source%3Dtwitter%26utm_medium%3Dtwitter (link)
[2]: https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png (image)
[3]: http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftech.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F23%2F09%2F02%2F0557232%2Fare-we-seeing-the-end-of-the-googleverse%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook (link)
[4]: https://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png (image)
[5]: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/09/02/0557232/are-we-seeing-the-end-of-the-googleverse?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed (link)

--
Emojis are for wimps.

In comp.misc, Retrograde <fungus@amongus.com.invalid> wrote:
> Title: Are We Seeing the End of the Googleverse?
> Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2023 11:34:00 -0400
> Link:
> https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/09/02/0557232/are-we-seeing-the-end-of-the-googleverse?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed
>
> The Verge argues we're seeing "the end of the Googleverse. For two decades,
> Google Search was the invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online
> content. "Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question... all
> around us are signs that the era of 'peak Google' is ending or, possibly,
> already over."

Funnily enough, I've decided Google is over and put Googlebot on the
disallow list in my robots.txt file recently. If they want to link to me
from links they've found elsewhere, whatever, but I'm not helping them
anymore.

Elijah
------
added a bunch of things to robots.txt in recent weeks

Am 02.09.2023 um 22:03:12 Uhr schrieb Retrograde:

> "Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question... all
> around us are signs that the era of 'peak Google' is ending or,
> possibly, already over."

I don't think that Google's relevance is really in question. Critism
has been there for more than 10 years, although people still use and
create mailboxes at GMail, they still use YouTube, they still buy and
use Android phones, they still use the Google search.

Discussions about privacy happened, but most people don't care at all
about it at the end of the day.

Companies move to Gmail instead of running their own infrastructure,
Google gets more and more customers.

Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> wrote:
> Am 02.09.2023 um 22:03:12 Uhr schrieb Retrograde:
>
>> "Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question... all
>> around us are signs that the era of 'peak Google' is ending or,
>> possibly, already over."
>
> I don't think that Google's relevance is really in question. Critism
> has been there for more than 10 years, although people still use and
> create mailboxes at GMail, they still use YouTube, they still buy and
> use Android phones, they still use the Google search.
>
> Discussions about privacy happened, but most people don't care at all
> about it at the end of the day.
>
> Companies move to Gmail instead of running their own infrastructure,
> Google gets more and more customers.
>
>

My wife’s a teacher and everything runs on Google, it’s pretty shocking.
District likes it because it’s easy. Children these days are trained to use
their real names online. It’s really a brave new world.

I'm not sure what it says about me or TikTok, but I always am a bit
amused when people say kids are searching on TikTok instead of Google.
Sure, Google results have been garbage for decades, but if I'm ever
searching for something specific on TikTok, I find videos about videos
about the topic, rather than videos about the topic.

For instance, a search for "Mitch McConnel freezes" yields results with
people talking about Mitch, with a still of him in the background, and
almost *never* a video of him freezing.

For my time, I'll stick with DuckDuckGo.

--
~rdh

rdh <rdh@tilde.institute> wrote:
> I'm not sure what it says about me or TikTok, but I always am a bit
> amused when people say kids are searching on TikTok instead of
> Google. Sure, Google results have been garbage for decades, but if
> I'm ever searching for something specific on TikTok, I find videos
> about videos about the topic, rather than videos about the topic.

Keep in mind that the original article was written by a press reporter.
They have a long history of being wrong about everything they write
(usually because they are covering a subject they know nothing about,
so they have no idea when they insert a wrong word that reverses the
meaning of something).

"searching on tiktoc" could very well have been the reporters screwed
up wording for some other meaning.

This is the source of the "Gell-Mann Amnesia" effect
<URL:https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you>
in many of their subscribers when reading their articles.

Am 05.09.2023 um 20:56:06 Uhr schrieb Oregonian Haruspex:

> My wife’s a teacher and everything runs on Google, it’s pretty
> shocking. District likes it because it’s easy.

They especially like it because Google runs it. Running own servers
needs time and costs money for the technicians.