David Revoy | Mastodon | Bonus Timelapse

Transcript

The Degraded Search Engine

A comic in four panels:

Panel 1. Cepper, the gothic sorceress, walks toward a large steampunk machine in the center of the library written “Gooblin” on it, colored letters. The machine resembles a rusty block, with a threadmill on one side, a seat and a typewriter-style keyboard.

Cepper: “A good old ‘search engine’, this is what I need for my research!”

Panel 2. Close up, Cepper types on the typewriter keyboard, looking at the screen.

Cepper: “R.I.N.G. O.F. F.I.R.E S.P.E.L.L.S. enter”
Cepper: “...And voilà.”

Panel 3. The machine spits out dozens of scrolls and books. Cepper reads them.

Cepper: “Wait... Why are these results so bad?...”
Book 1: “(Ad) Ten Fire Spells That Will Change Your Life (You Won’t Believe the 7th!)”
Book 2: “(Sponsored) 15 Spicy Onion Ring Recipes”
Book 3: “(For you) Top 5 Best Engagement Rings”
Book 4: “(ad) How to Start a Campfire: A Comprehensive Guide”
Book 5: “Is Your Fire Spell Not Working? (Try This One Simple Trick!)”
Book 6: “(Sponsored) Cheap Fire-Resistant Panties! (50% Off Today Only!)”

Panel 4. A librarian approaches, their AI Parrot perched on their shoulder, pointing it. Cepper looks defeated, her eyes blasé.

Librarian: “Yeah, they tuned it this way so everyone just uses their Avian Intelligence for searching now...” Cepper: “...How unsurprising.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 4 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

Dev decisions lmao

I guarantee not a single dev wants to optimize for ad impressions, particularly in search where that means you have to make search worse so it would take multiple queries to find your results. No, that's a business decision. Comes from up high. Prabhakar Raghavan may have been a computer scientist early on in his career but he'd been in the C suite on again off again at different companies for well over a decade by the time they deposed the head of search at Google and put search under the leadership of the ads division (Raghavan).

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment