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Google now offers ‘web’ search — and an AI opt-out button (www.theverge.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It would be nice if they'd make "web" search the good old keyword search we used to have that made Google good, now that normies will just use the AI search and it doesn't have to care about natural language anymore.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Keyword searches stopped being useful years ago. Every site owner stuffed every single word they could think of into that field making the whole thing effectively useless.

It’s like how they’re now returning results stuffed to the brim with AI-written crap. Google can only show what’s on the web and that’s all the web is now.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They could attempt to quantify how gamed the result is and reduce its ranking. Also punishing domains with lower ranking the more they return SEO optimised pages. They could also increase the ranking of older pages.

This doesn’t really help google, it only really improves their search results. Google wants these hyper SEO optimised results with lots of advertising. Additionally, the less relevant the result is the more searches a person does. Each search is an additional set of ad impressions.

Google search is better than ever. Because it generates more advertising opportunities for google. Google isn’t in the business of returning good search results, they are in the business of displaying ads.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

They could attempt to quantify how gamed the result is and reduce its ranking.

When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them were responsible for search, that search was “the revenue engine of the company,” and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was potentially “the new reality of their jobs.”

A day later, Gomes emailed Fox and Thakur an email he intended to send to Raghavan. He led by saying he was “annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.” in a long email, he explained how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically added that they could “increase queries quite easily in the short term in user negative ways,” like turning off spell correction, turning off ranking improvements, or placing refinements — effectively labels — all over the page, adding that it was “possible that there are trade offs here between different kinds of user negativity caused by engagement hacking,” and that he was “deeply deeply uncomfortable with this.” He also added that this was the reason he didn’t believe that queries were a good metric to measure search and that the best defense about the weakness of queries was to create “compelling user experiences that make users want to come back.”

Google's Execs have been degrading the quality of search to increase engagement with ads.

Google wants these hyper SEO optimised results with lots of advertising

Its a bit worse than that, because the goal is to get you to scroll around and look at multiple search result pages trying to find what you want. Every new page you visit contains new ads. So Google doesn't want you to click the first thing you see. The goal is to show you a bunch of bad results and force you to test more and more links, hunting around for what you used to find easily.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

hear hear