Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.
The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation
Right, so with all me very specific troubleshooting questions I should go where exactly?
Ecosia? Very limited search results
Yandex? More obscure results, probably not what I’m looking for
Bing? Ok on general stuff, not great on very specific questions
Yahoo? Never tried it, heard the enshittification has become bad
Duckduckgo and similar? Proxying Google
Edit: apparently it’s proxying Bing and not Google. Idk if that’s better but I got that wrong.
There is no way to get around Google. Everything else is either highly specialized, very limited or unusable in general.
Also feel free to chime in with your experience, I’m so down to hear what everyone has to say.
I’m pretty sure Duckduckgo proxies Bing, not Google.
I’ve been enjoying Kagi, although it also proxies google and others, and you have to pay for it, and I was dismayed to read on Lemmy recently that the CEO may be a sea lion. So yeah, the search for good search continues I suppose
https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
For folks not understanding the sealioning reference.
https://d-shoot.net/files/kagiemails.txt
Searx exists and is decentralized although as for the quality of results that’s up in the air
DDG proxies Bing you silly fuck
Use SearXNG