The end of the Googleverse

Google SEO has homogenized the internet with vapid marketing content. The internet is one big commercial. The reason Reddit got popular was because communities found and shared good content and created more by talking about it. Now ads are disguised as posts and memes.

The internet is getting as bad as radio.

The fact is hardly anyone publishes on the web anymore. Every time someone complains about Google search I look them up and discover they don't have a website.

They have an Instagram and a YouTube and a Facebook and a Twitter account, all of which may or may not be accessible to some degree to a logged out web browser. Never a website though.

What do they think is going to show up in a search when all the content these days is published in walled garden social media apps?

The only REAL replacement I'm still looking for is YouTube. Sure, Peertube and proxy sites for YouTube exist. But the amount of content I am interested in is by dozens of decimals larger an YouTube than on any other alternative combined.

And, yes, of course, the search engine.

I like Google products but the search engine really has become shit. I'm not sure there's anything they can do about it though.

I avoid Google products as much as possible these days, especially anything launched within the last 2-3 years, because it will soon be abandoned and unsupported. Their search results are worse than they have ever been. The only Google app I actually like is Google Maps.

translation: Google Search is still an important tool, but it is no longer the only way people find information.

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. 

I hate when journalists use data from Arse Research Institute to boost sensation

But if that last 25 years of Google’s history could be boiled down to a battle against the Google bomb, it is now starting to feel that the search engine is finally losing pace with the hijackers. Or as Marwick put it, “Google has gotten shittier and shittier.”

“To me, it just continues the transformation of the internet into this shitty mall,” Marwick said. “A dead mall that’s just filled with the shady sort of stores you don’t want to go to.”

Worth citing

Dash is one of the web’s earliest bloggers. In 2004, he won a competition Google held to google-bomb itself with the made-up term “nigritude ultramarine.”

DarkBlue.com is not Google
https://web.archive.org/web/20071011225539/http://dashes.com/anil/2004/06/nigritude-ultra.html

In fact, the site’s original name, BackRub, was a reference to the backlinks it was using to rank results.

Oh, I'm so gonna be using the original name from this moment on. "Have you backrubbed it?"

The only thing I still use from Google is their Pixel phones, and then I immediately flash them with GrapheneOS. That, and Google maps which I can't find a good replacement. I've tried every single OSM app and none of them remotely compare.

I wish. Unfortunately it will probably live on for all eternity like Facebook is somehow living on.

It's far from over

I hope it's true, but honestly I don't believe sites and opinions that have to do with google from sites like the verge.
Because sites like the verge are in reality rivals to google. For example verge is owned by voxmedia which has an advertising company and a web advertsing platform. They are rivals to google which also is an advertising company. They hate google because they want google's money lol. I seriously doubt they can be objective especially to google.

We had some good variety of search engines back in the day. Alta vista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Yahoo... Now it's just Google, or slightly worse versions.

I know people say to use DuckDuckGo but I never get as useful results there as on Google. I just have to scroll past a lot more ads on Google to get to the actual links.

I've been looking for a replacement for Google Keep for so long and can not seem to find one.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A writer for the site, interviewed under the pseudonym Michael Hugedisk, told Wired in 2007 that their three-person team linked to a webpage selling pro-George W. Bush merchandise and was able to make it the top result on Google if you searched “dumb motherfucker.”

Per Sullivan’s logic, Google Groups added better discovery to both Usenet and the myriad other message boards and online communities creating proto-meme culture at the time.

Alex Turvy, a sociologist specializing in digital culture, said it’s hard to map our current understanding of virality and platform optimization to the earliest days of Google, but there are definitely similarities.

Alice Marwick, a communications professor and author of The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media, told The Verge that it wasn’t until Myspace launched in 2003 that we started to even develop the idea of internet fame.

In 2004, he won a competition Google held to google-bomb itself with the made-up term “nigritude ultramarine.” Since then, Dash has written extensively over the years on the impact platform optimization has had on the way the internet works.

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.

The original article contains 3,695 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 94%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

there's not enough porn on Lemmy