OTOH 20 years ago half of the sites on the internet were not yet made of copy-pasta SEO optimized copies or stolen content designed to get search engine clicks. Maybe the enshitification of the web itself has something to do with it.

True their competition is actually getting much better whereas they just throw BS at you nowadays. It's unfortunate but Google is no longer my go-to for searching.

I was getting decent results up until about a month ago (though partly because I have an extension to block sponsored links and arranges the page as it used to appear around 2010). It was like they just flipped a switch from "good" to "shitty." Can't even find images I would grab off the first page when repeating a search from history, now. It seemed to correlate almost exactly with when it started to generate blurbs through AI at the top instead of just summarizing one of the pages in the top links.

i wonder what will replace it.. maybe some way of AI to figure out which websites are deemed good in the eyes of actual human users, and then human users opting into sharing such score charts with each other?

It's like a dead tree. The material and volume is still there, but it's dead anyways.

I feel like anyone who envies an advertising business should probably be avoided, lol

Mazda is such a weird name to drop there. They must have started with Starbucks and tiktok and had to find a third company that made the total come in just under their number.

He's got a 'we use pizza' hat for them

that's for that link.

Came here to post it too. That article was savage, and I believe it.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Thoughts on a self-hosted SearXNG instance?

Or one of the public ones like this (by 1&1 I believe):

https://searxng.site/

There are uBlock Origin filters that exist purely to filter out certain SEO spam sites from search results. I've been using this one to filter out sites that basically copy/paste answers from popular dev sites that just completely clutter Google search results. I used to have one that included things like W3 Schools and Quora but I can't find it anymore, unfortunately.

YouTube is shit too, they're just the only game in town

I'm worried that Maps will be hit by the enshittification next. We need a good quality maps alternative. OpenStreetMap seems ok, but it lacks a few features, including trip planning.

100 hour weeks are not productive either. That's a mean 14 hours 7 days a week. You cannot stay productive that long and even less so without a single day off. You'll produce shit 4 hours per day and use the first hour of the next just to clean it up.

They still exist at some companies, they’re just a lot less common than they used to be.