It's been well over a decade since I stopped using Goggle for web search, for reasons of principle. Everything I've heard about its enshittification since has supported that decision. But this description of the horrifying UX facing people these days takes the cake.
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Me:
> Lithium ion EV batteries are probably no riskier than a tank of extremely explosive fuel
I stand corrected;
"... we're talking about more than an order of magnitude less risk, so at least 20 times less risk associated with EVs than conventional cars."
#DrTroyBailsden, Co-President, NZ Association of Scientists, 2025
https://www.rnz.co.nz/podcast/mediawatch?share=0fc8e854-476a-4b94-a849-ecfac17b8e35
"If you go to Google and type in 'seabirds affected by light pollution', 3 or 4 years ago you would have been directed to our site with an organic link.
Today you get presented with an AI answer that occupies the top thirds of the page, the rest is sponsored links. There might be 1 or 2 organic links at the bottom, or else you're on page 2. And tell me the last time anyone clicked on page 2 of Google."
#JamesFrankham, publisher, #NZGeographic, 2025
https://www.rnz.co.nz/podcast/mediawatch?share=0fc8e854-476a-4b94-a849-ecfac17b8e35
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@strypey James is spot on. I said over 20 years ago now that you have to occupy multiple media if you are to make a go of publishing, because online-only is not going to work. And that was when I first observed the advertising market becoming enshittified (not that that word was coined). I hate to say it but you could extrapolate those trends even then and get to where we are, sans LLMs.
@strypey Google is a hellhole. I almost never use it.
It's been well over a decade since I stopped using Goggle for web search, for reasons of principle. Everything I've heard about its enshittification since has supported that decision. But this description of the horrifying UX facing people these days takes the cake.
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@strypey Fifteen years for me. Every now and then I use it to test it as too many people are wedded to it and I need to see how we are performing. And in 2024 I used it a lot to monitor the disinformation being written about me, as Google is very good at indexing disinformation (ahead of legitimate content). But in normal circumstances, it hasn’t been my default since 2010.
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@jackyan
> But in normal circumstances, it hasn’t been my default since 2010
I don't have a clear date in memory I when I abandoned Goggle Search as I do for FarceBook, because I wrote a blog post about that at the time. But it was probably around that same time, not long after.
I remember noticing the enshittification start to kick in hard around the time Goggle turned off federation in GChat and replaced it with Hangouts, which was in 2013;
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/google-abandons-open-standards-instant-messaging
@strypey I had some Duck Duck Go posts in 2010, which was how I could place the date, though I began de-Googling the year before. I remember having Google Buzz forced on us, not sure what year that was without looking it up. But that was another sign of Google enshittification.
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It was around this time that the Data Liberation Front team seemed to have been frozen in carbonite and handed over to Boba Fett. They still exist, but they seemed to become mostly inactive as Goggle transitioned from an engineer-driven company to a capital-driven, rent-seeking leviathan.
A platform that respond to keywords with "AI" slop and advertising is not a search engine; a neutral tool for sifting through an index of web pages. Which is what Goggle Search offered to build its initial reputation and userbase (myself included), before pivoting to helping fill the web with ad bait.
It's misleading to market misinformation and promotion engines like 2025 Goggle Search as "search engines". They should be regulated as the marketing businesses they are.
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@strypey Now I like where this is going. We should regulate the shit out of them. We should also tax the shit out of them.
Speaking of filling the web with ad bait, it's worth noting that Goggle justified many of its early enshittifications of search by pitching them as solutions to problems caused *by them*.
Once people realised they could make passive income by whacking up a no effort website and plastering it with Goggle ads, they did. In huge numbers. I remember a friend running a bunch of these around the turn of the Millennium.
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@strypey I saw more than my fair share last year with the disinformation sites. Ever since Google began funding them when they acquired Blogger and allowed any moron to feature ads, we have been on this slippery slope. Before Google, ad networks used to check both advertiser and website. They made errors, yes, but on the whole they kept the standards high and we earned an OK amount. Not enough to cover wages but more than enough to cover hosting and some other basics.
These web weeds made more money if they could get more traffic, so that kicked off the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) gold rush. Which quickly became an arms race.
SEO consultants were hired by businesses trying to promote their products and services via these newfangled website things. Prompting the people propagating ad bait weed sites to come up with new SEO hacks, to keep their passive income rolling in.
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@strypey unless the EV is a Jeep 4xe in which case apparently they pop off like nobody's business.
