When Did Google Search Become Totally Useless?

[corbe]

When Did Google Search Become Totally Useless?

By: Rich Cromwell
October 22, 2024

When Google launched in the late 1990s, it quickly overtook the market for search engines. Its proprietary method of indexing led users to results they were actually looking for rather than producing the hodgepodge of results offered by other search engines of the time. Within just a few years, it was dominating the market. Today, it is a money-printing machine.

It’s also increasingly horrible at the core mission that produced such success. The company’s leadership may have realized early on that to dominate they needed to maximize the marketing angle of search, but over time that side of the business — the one that produces revenue — swallowed the informative results that drove the search engine’s success.

Now, Google’s true product, its users, are drowning in a sea of partisan slop and sponsored content rather than getting the results we’re looking for when we take to the World Wide Web. By doing so, Google is making it pointless for us to continue to allow ourselves to be the product.

Let’s say you have an artistic daughter who wants some oil paints for Christmas, but you’re unsure about which brand to buy or even what the definition of oil paint is. You head over to Google and type in “oil paint.” Is your first result a definition or even the Wikipedia page? Nope, it’s ads. You have to scroll to get to Wikipedia.

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https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/22/when-did-google-search-become-totally-useless/

[catfish1957]

Noticed this too.  Once in a blue moon, I need Google instead of the Double Duck.  Instead, it became a full fledged gas lit search.  They don't even try to hide it anymore. 

[Free Vulcan]

Noticed this too.  Once in a blue moon, I need Google instead of the Double Duck.  Instead, it became a full fledged gas lit search.  They don't even try to hide it anymore.

Even for non-political things they suck. They seem to want everything to fit into their pink sky propaganda world.

[Fishrrman]

I've tried the best I can to "divorce myself" from "things google" on the computer.

No google searches, no google anything -- although I'll use their maps if there's no alternative, and if I'm not mistaken, isn't YouTube a part of google as well? Hard to get away from that.

Re searching:
I don't know whether or not the Waterfox browser is available for Windows.
But on the Mac, you have a "choice" to open a browser window, then go to the tool bar, and select whatever search engine you wish for that particular search...

[mountaineer]

I use DuckDuckGo for everything, except maps. Google maps are a little better.

[Smokin Joe]

During COVID, it slid into the abyss.
Now, I ask How many of what are in where, and get a Kamala Harris answer, ripe with rabbit holes, but not what I was looking for.

It's a real waste of time.