Google officially went online later in 1998. It quickly became so inseparable from both the way we use the internet and, eventually, culture itself, that we almost lack the language to describe what Google’s impact over the last 25 years has actually been. It’s like asking a fish to explain what the ocean is. And yet, 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 has consistently been getting worse in both user experience and search results for years now, but the frustrating thing is that Google has been – and still is – so incredibly dominant, that there really isn’t any viable competition. DuckDuckGo is nice, I guess, and I use it, but in the end it’s just Bing with extra steps, and it shows in its own rather dismal search results. Everything else barely deserves a mention.
While I hear good things about Kagi, their business model just is not suited for someone like me who relies on searching the web more than most people do – I’m a translator, and we have to be effectively experts in so many fields that I almost spend more time searching and cross-referencing terminology in all kinds of fields than I do actually writing down the definitive translations. Add to that the various topics I need to cover for OSNews, and even their 1000 searches a month for $10 is not enough, and paying $25 per month for their unlimited tier – or $300 a year – is absolutely bonkers expensive.
And we all know those prices are only going to go up.
So, online search is in a bad spot right now, and I don’t think adding “AI” to it is going to make it any better – in fact, it’s probably only going to make it worse. There’s definitely a massive opportunity here for someone to make an actually good, no-nonsense search engine, but crawling and indexing the web is prohibitively expensive, so even the pricey stuff like Kagi relies on Google and others for its results.
I wish Google would just focus their search efforts on making a good search engine, sprinkled with some ads in the sidebar or occasionally interspersed inside the results, clearly marked. They have the data, they have the index – why are they making search worse, instead of better?
I hate this headline.
I think this OSS one of those things were perception and reality rather diverge. I do not believe that search engines have become wise. I think search has become harder. The number of web pages one the world has increased markedly since Google was established.
You have to remember that folks are not looking for the number of results returned to grow in line with the growth of the web. The number of search results that most people engage with will have remained fairly constant over time. And so it is a genuinely harder task for a search engine to return that 10 most useful results now than it was way back when.
Blooming autocorrect:
– OSS=is
– wise=worse
It would be easier if search engines didn’t take away the tools to refine the search. Remember when we could use logical operators, and even some nifty ones like “NEAR”?
On one hand search engines became smarter with synonyms and the like, but on the other hand they can be far too aggressive in presenting non-exact results. Now even putting a sentence in quotes gets completely ignored most of the time.
A large problem with modern search is pages arent’ plaintext anymore… a lot of the crap on a page is often a polyfill or other nonsense that a simple text search will never find.
It’s true search has become progressively less valuable. The volume of advertising is especially awful.
I do think, in your specific case, AI will help. We traditionally use human translation for movies and television shows but GPT4 has reached a level where it can do the bulk of the heavy lifting for us, with some modest supervision.
There is really no doubt that the next generation LLM’s will be able to do the bulk of the translation work for most languages.
You still dont’ use an ad blocker? U crazy bro….
It was always crap, imho. It was the least bad for some time, but It never really gave me what I’m looking for. But I enjoy somethings it funded, like google maps, android and chrome. Its always been a battle of google trying to return what you’re looking for vs scumbags using google ads and seo to try and not show you what you want. The only winner is google in that battle.
I wonder if this has something to do with the erosion of quality human resources Google is most probably struggling with. If I were an intelligent and hard-working programmer with some nice ideas, Google wouldn’t be my first choice as an employer. I wouldn’t want to work on a project which will be killed in at most two years. Then I’d be just weeping after those two years.
Google graveyard is not the best reference for the corporation as an employer.
But of course, this is just speculation.
I stopped using the search engines directly a couple of years ago when I got tired of seeing whatever I was searching for show up in facebook within minutes.
I set up a public searXNG instance and have not looked back. It has its issues, but it works more like the old school search engines.
Thanks for Kagi reference. I was looking for sth like this!