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I feel so bad for the younger folks these days.

Way back when, if Google couldn't find it and we did some good Google Fu, it probably wasn't readily available online.

Now, you know it probably is there, just buried in nonsense generated purely by layer after layer of people's selfishness. And they never even knew it could be any other way.

Woah, with 5 years you guessed correct, google decided to kill search accuracy for profits 5 years ago, in 2019

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

It does.

Straight out of college in 2015 I did some SEO sidehustling. We'd get blogs writing for cheap by fiverr people, adjusted it a bit, and they ranked high very easily based on certain keywords for the industry. Those blogs were just random bullshit (AI does a better job for a short story), jargon was on point but the content was just snakeoil. Business went thriving.

But the SEO garbage sites active up to 2023 have updated since 2023 to keep up with each other.

So it works really well.

It has been garbage SEO stuff for a while.

garbabe SEO has been there since almost the beginning. More recently google started to promote sites base on their profitableness.

Remember when you could suppress sites from Google search results? Due to "unknowable reasons", they got rid of that feature. Enshittification is real.

I think the news in 2022 was still pretty hellish. I'm going to go with (before:2013). Some hell still, but a naively optimistic hell

You'd need to go back to pre 2012 for that

Thanks, I hate it.

I know its a joke but using Google dorks has always been the most effective way of searching. There was a period of like 4 or a bit more years where you didn't need them anymore because engines actually got good. Now though they're more useful than ever.

also the shopping tab, if you're actually shopping, is completely fucking useless.

Commercialization of everything.

That's what inevitably happens when you give a mega corp like Google all of that power over you, your life, and your data by simply using their products. Ultimately, they then get to decide who you are and how you act. And it's in their benefit to shape everything, including you, in their corporate image.

People don't notice how much they're getting fucked on an individual basis until the consequences of the actions of millions or billions of people adds up and comes back around in the form of something stupid and obvious like Manifest V3, SEO everywhere, WEI, or the doublespeak "privacy sandbox" comes to bite you in the ass. Enshittification everywhere and even then most people still don't care.

We're their cattle and we're choosing to walk into a slaughterhouse with our eyes wide open. In more ways than one. As fun as the game is, I really do not want to actually live in Cyberpunk.

It's because these are two idiots trying to sound smart. I have used pre-2015 searches, because sometime between 2009-2016 is when SEO in general started being used. The AI generation just kicked it into high gear. Stuff before 2015 at least appears to offer information that isn't just reworded lists of advertisements.

Yeah, tried it when this first got mentioned. Doesn’t do squat.

I set DDG as my default a while back and I'm finding myself having to open Google all the time to get results.

go to the actual site, it's near you.

Is this podcast available online?

I think you've got it backwards. This only excludes new information from the past two years. Literally everything else is majorly improved.

Sadly, most of my searches need more recent answers. Software & hardware (when it comes to coding/tech/IT) and information about local businesses can change quickly and old information usually ends up being just wrong.

Google is really, really letting me down and wasting a lot of my time these days.

Not news. Things like recipes have been put through the AI filter to add a lot of useless crap. Try looking up "how to roast a chicken" and getting useable results.

It's always someone's life story when all I want is a discussion of the cooking process. That content is hard to create. It's a lot easier to just have AI make up a fake life story.