I thought this was somewhat common knowledge, but having the documents on the public record instead of just the word of an ex-engineer should be a big deal.

Godamnit. It's so hard to guess which parts of the world suck from incompetence and which ones from active evil nowadays.

Of course, Doctorow already described this phenomenon in the essay about enshittification. It's no surprise the advertising company will pivot to advertisers and shareholders rather than users.

I had assumed that everyone had already read and internalized this very well written article, The Man Who Killed Google Search by Ed Zitron

Capitalism reduces inefficiency and bolsters competition and innovation they said.

When using a search engine whete you know what site you want info from, you can add site:hexbear.net to the search, for example is communism okay site:hexbear.net would only return results from hexbear

i stopped using google 'as intended' a long time ago, i mostly use it because i can't spell for shit

This has been known since 2008 by marketers. Even Google employees outright stated it at conferences.

Anyone tried any "premium" search offerings? I have a tech friend recommending Kagi and I wonder if anyone here has opinions about it.

Capitalist innovation at home:

I think there's a real chance google could be broken up. They've lost a couple of major antitrust cases in the past year but it remains to be seen what the judges will do. I think it's going to be difficult for everything that isn't ads to survive though if ads is what gets cut out.

:bill-hicks-shining:

This is why we need to go back to personally-curated site directories