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this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Their search has been getting worse and worse for a long time before the Reddit protest.
"Many of us may wonder," yep. Some of us are pretty sure it's because Google is now optimizing searches for profitability rather than relevance. They're very careful to avoid fully explaining how the algorithm arranges search results, but I think the algorithm now has more financial subroutines than software behind it.
You know, that makes me wonder if someone could figure out the old google search algorithm, and use it to make a new, more useful search engine.
IIRC PageRank was patented, so it's public, and at this point the patent is surely expired.
A lot of the cost is data storage. Unfortunately, I doubt any party will replace old Google.
Storage isn't as expensive as it used to be, especially if you were to only store text. I feel like nowadays the main costs would be bandwidth and processing, since there are many more websites out there, and they're much bigger, full of many more scripts to make sense of.
I recently googled "grass" to find out more about different species and the results were all trying to sell me grass.
Grass.
Where I live it's as common as dirt. I wonder how many people Google the word "grass" with zero qualifiers when trying to BUY grass.
Ffs
This made me curious. A while back, I decided that I'd had enough with lousy results. I started trying different search engines, and I landed on DuckDuckGo.
After reading your comment, I went and searched the same term, grass. At the top, it showed a short section of 'products' and one ad. The next result was a store, then Britannica's article on grass. Fourth result was Wikipedia.
I figure that a 'products' link and one ad, clearly labeled, is reasonable. After all, the search engine is free.
"But have you considered special-edition artisanal grass? Guaranteed to impress your neighbors! Practically mows itself! Thrives on zero water! [in small print: made of 100% high grade polypropylene filaments, not suitable for hot climates]." [/s]
For that kind of research, I usually go to Wikipedia, pick a random technical term for the topic I'm looking for, and add that. It doesn't always work, but it does eliminate some of the sales sites. But it shouldn't be necessary, sigh.
Ironically, reddit's search feature was also trash. If I wanted to find something on reddit I just went to google and appended "reddit".
IIRC, they cited google as a reason not to work on their own search, since that's what most of their userbase had got used to searching reddit with anyway by that point.
Reddit also cited 3rd party apps, bots and extensions as a reason to not develop many of the features on their own... and here we are now.
Yeah, what the heck happened? Google can't search for crap, and Amazon can't ship items for crap.