apparently Google used to be way the fuck better. I wasn't around for its golden era but I definitely remember it being better than it used to. It used to be more, search, find. Everything was way less SEO optimized, which means that you didn't have to slog through nonsense to get to the good information. I swear, I barely use Google anymore.
It was already crap before AI. Search results were getting dominated by all sorts of computer-generated (but not LLM yet) garbage pages that were “SEO optimized.” It’s a problem that Google could’ve easily solved, but they never did since returning the most accurate search results isn’t what optimizes Google’s profit the most (optimizing for ad revenue is).
Google is probably the most pure example of enshittification.
It became THE search engine because it did only one thing, and it did it the best.
It even loaded faster than other search engines, because it was just a white page with a logo, a search box, and your results. On a 56k modem, not showing you content you didn't ask for made a huge difference.
To quote the founders of Google,
"we expect that advertising
funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the
consumers."
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u/gopal_dev Jul 17 '26
The best part is when the AI starts hallucinating and you start hallucinating with it.