Yes. I miss the days when the Wikipedia article was the first result. Now, even with ddg, to get to the Wikipedia article I have to add wikipedia to the query... This is so sad...

DDG allows you to disable ads and AI in the settings!

laughs in Kagi

Shareholders need ever increasing value or they will sell their shares. In the US at least, it is illegal to not provide shareholders with value. The only way to reliably get value is to fuck over your customers at every turn and fire half of your employees every few years

In the word of Jim Stephanie Stirling, "They don't just want a lot of money. They want all the money."

When you're a Trillion Dollar company, you don't need MORE money. You make enough to make everything run without additional income.

But obviously a trillion dollars is still not enough. We need more.

OpenAI had the same playbook.

That’s hilarious, especially when the the regular search button had almost zero filtering.

Mild abstraction?

That is far too kind.

Wildly corrupted and monetized via algorithm.

And no Kubernetes cluster needed to serve a search box. 😉

Google once stated that their primary goal was to get you off of Google property as quickly as possible- IE deliver your search result and get you where you want to go. That was the exact opposite of every other major website at the time (search engines, 'portals', etc) which wanted to keep you in.

It's what made Google great. They were laser focused on the best search experience.

Now their search kinda sucks, it's all AI and fuzzy logic and whatnot and even with quotes and Verbatim it STILL doesn't just search for what I typed in not what you thought I wanted

"Here's ads, misleading ai slop we generated from stolen content, and forty links to AI generated content that's probably even worse. You might find something human on page 7 of the results. Oops it's a dead link lmao."

A former high-up at Google has stated that they intentionally made the search engine worse a few years ago so that people would see more ads and click on more sponsored links. Now, the best result is #15 in the list, on average.

Unlike Google, Lemmy (and Mastodon etc.) are FLOSS, so if one instance enshittifies, we can move, even to different ones, fediblock that instance, and continue on. This is the problem with Bluesky: You cannot (realistically) self-host all the ATProto infrastructure, or federate with anyone while not using some service from Bluesky.

Back when humans cared about humans instead of money.