@briankrebs Today, I noticed that they have largely stopped giving you a "maps" button when searching for an address. They still show the small map thing to the right, but you can't click through to maps any more either.

Nothing happens when you click the mini-map.

I don't know how many layers have to fail for that to make it into prod...

@briankrebs

I suspect it will disproportionately hurt people who aren't already familiar with sources. I'll just go to CMS's website, but G_d help people who don't already know where to look and aren't aware that Google thinks Medicare and Medicaid are the same program, for example.

@briankrebs This is one of those cases where the given explanation for removing a genuinely useful feature doesn't make any sense. I'd really like to know the /real/ reason. Was the cached version avoiding ads too much? showing that what Google crawlers see and you see is embarrassingly different? Taking up too much storage?

@briankrebs I think Google has definitely lost their way, but I don't think we should underestimate the problem of malicious counterparties.

Any search engine that attempts "rank" is going to be gamed, and the biggest search engine is going to face the most games.

This makes challenging Google on search doubly impossible. It would take an incredible investment to catalog the 'net, and then another incredible and ongoing investment to keep out the scammers. They are tryin' every day.

@briankrebs I'm interested but would like to ask that you share an example of how you are searching so I can see this myself. Here, Google web search of [site:asdflkjsdfkjsdf.com] returns zero results with the weird monster ice fishing as expected.
I agree the lack of transparency is frustrating.

@briankrebs

originally, google did care about doing useful stuff. over time, making money became more important but they at least tried to keep the illusion that the "customer" was the user of their software/services.

at this point, they are giving up any pretense of being in service to anyone other than stockholders and advertisers. being of use to end users doesn't exist for them as a concept.

@briankrebs I'm still kinda burned about them killing Google Reader and now they're killing the Google Podcasts app and trying to convince customers that YouTube Music is a legitimate replacement. It's definitely not about the user experience.

@briankrebs Ads ruin mostly everything, but especially when you can't tell where products end and ads start.

Why can't we partition the Internet, at least for indexing and search? What if I don't want any corporate sales garbage in my results? What if I only want to search federated social media? Or academia? Or blogs? Mixing it all together is gross.

Why can't we have a non-profit search company? Or bespoke B corps? How about some diversity?

@briankrebs

LOL! Too big to fail?

Let me remind everyone of the global ruling DEC:

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was the most successful minicomputer firm in history. At its high point, it had multiple large campuses and amazing facilities, and even ran helicopters between them and to Logan Airport in Boston where they had their own gate. Their PDP and VAX series computers were crucial to the development of ARPANET and its evolution into the Internet.
1/2

@briankrebs I'm building a hobbyist site that documents hiking trails, HikerAtlas. I know it's indexed in Google.

And yet, when I search "hikeratlas" (in quotes, no less!), Google shows me page after page of PokerAtlas.com results, confidently assuring me that I must have somehow had a stroke and typoed `po` into `hi`.

It's bizarre.

@briankrebs There could be an upside to Google enshitification. Previously, competing with them didn't make business sense because it would cost fat stacks to create a service that could at best be about as good. Now the same fat stacks could yield a service enough better to motivate users to switch. The remaining risk is that Google would retwist the knobs at low expense to restore the user experience just enough to make the investment be a fail.

Still, remember when twitter was unassailable?

@briankrebs
It's giving us garbage with sponsored links that will start leeching on us, our time, our patience, our wallet.

@briankrebs, I switched to Kagi last year. Worth every penny.

@briankrebs Follow the money. Unfortunately, that's the key to understanding Google under current management, to a degree far more intense than it used to be. Sure, Google has been about making money since the early days, but now that appears to be their ONLY focus. Very sad.

@briankrebs Google used search to collect data to sell ads. Now, Google has plenty of other ways to collect data (Gmail, and so on). No surprise it’s ignoring a resource it no longer needs, but that does leave all of us in the shit.

@briankrebs Sold all my Google stock last year because of stuff like this.

@briankrebs It’s enshittification in action. Google will slowly get worse and worse until at some point, it just becomes useless to most people. At which point the possibility of real competition opens up.

@briankrebs

Google are a company that both wants to decide the direction the web takes and enshitify anything they have made at their discretion.

Google are a malware company. They're just not recognised as a malware company because they operate at a different scale to all others. They're the malware Superman in a web of cardboard.

@briankrebs the other day I did a search on my phone for something. I don't even remember what the term was, but zero of the results that Google showed me were what I was looking for. Instead, they opted for AI results. Something like, "Hey, I see you're looking for a lower control arm bushing for a '57 Chevy. I bet you would be interested in catalytic converters for a Tesla semi"

Like... zero percent of what you suggested was even remotely relevant for what I was asking. ZERO.

@briankrebs

Man... it's about time that someone started a Google alternative.....

Low hanging fruit..... it's worse than Yahoo was when Google started....

@briankrebs Getting rid of the cache is definitely a bad move but also I find I don't need to use the google cache as much these days since we have archive.org and archive.is

@briankrebs Could it be that they are intentionally making their search less useful so they can sell a subscription to the AI, e.g. spicy search engine?

@briankrebs

It is not the same, but some browser at some point had a feature that if you got a 404 page, it offered to try and find the page on archive.org. Is that you @Vivaldi ?

Agreed that google search is getting worse by the day.

@briankrebs so if someone was to takedown Google, global-cyber- security might be better?

Are Google putting themselves in a position where the threat actors want to keep them around? Or, am I imagining corporate strategy where there isn't any?

@briankrebs seems like an opportunity to launch a great search engine to supplant Google.

@briankrebs Decade ago. Delete Analphabet Incorporated. Now!

@briankrebs This is intentional. They want you using Bard/Gemini since despite the inaccuracies it has, it's still more accurate than traditional Google search.

I have no doubt they intentionally tanked traditional search to subtly nudge people into training their product.

Worse yet, if I want any actual information without scouring for hours, I have to do this.

I miss when free search engines actually worked.

@briankrebs DuckDuckGo

@briankrebs this is why I have a few dozen search engines in my bookmarks, everything from more eastern stuff like Startpage, Alhea, Lycos, Presearch, Ekoru, LinkCenter USA, Dogpile and Mojeek all the way to stuff like the Czech search engine Seznam, Slovenia's Najdi, Korea's NAVER or Russia's Yandex and Rambler, and even some internet directories ranging from the US all the way to obscure Belarus ones.

@briankrebs if the banking bullshit from 2008 told us anything, it’s nothing should be too big to fail. Stopping failing fails fails us, not them.

With a bit of light a much better search might crop up.

@briankrebs
No, no, goofle doesn't make things up.
They hired some guy who's a hacker named The Bard.
He's the one they should fire.
But I agree. I have been getting better search results elsewhere. Goofle has become an Ad Egine rather than a Search Engine.
Sad, we had such great hopes for them. They are not "too big [or important] to fail" and they will come a fallin' down someday.

@briankrebs I predict the next attempt to further monetize Google will be a paid subscription access level without ads.

@briankrebs Google offered me free credit to restart an advertising campaign, but unluckily for them last time I tried using their advertising tools it didn't work at all. There's no amount of credit that will make a useless tool work for me.

@briankrebs we have no inside information on this topic, so we're free to speculate

this is what it means to do such aggressive layoffs: features go away because there's no team for them anymore. institutional knowledge is lost. this is the choice management knew it was making.

@briankrebs that's a premium example of Cory Dotorows @pluralistic #enshittification - and it is one that we all can feel each and every day.

@briankrebs so switch.

@briankrebs

Not using gogole anymore for years 🤮

@briankrebs

Google is the Ma Bell of the 21st Century: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

@briankrebs
Lycos is still here. And it's not bad at all! Yeah, i know it sound strange, but seeing is believing:
https://search.lycos.com/

@briankrebs ONLY on ONE of these points: Google removing cache COULD BE SEEN as being worried about not just pointing people to sites, but holding AND disseminating the content of those sites - and thus be in contravention of several laws.

I KNOW this is NOT why they did it, but nonetheless, it is true. indexing the web and storing the documents is a diff issue than storing the web's contents and furnishing them in full from your own servers.

@briankrebs Google's search operations previously seemed to view breaking "black hat SEO" techniques and suppressing meaningless generated content as core work required to maintain their product. But ever since their management decided they should be an AI company, search results have definitely been dominated by the vapid generated trash that used to be down-ranked to hell.

@briankrebs At this point, Google search has become so bad that I've had to switch to paid search engine Kagi. The results are of better quality and I can actually de-rank or block certain sites I know to be crap. Google will eventually implode, there's no way around that. It will be dragged out though. With that much money in the system, the path of #enshittification is a long one.

@briankrebs Not too big to have its back Bane’d by antitrust laws

@briankrebs Add to that: Google want you to think that only way to find a simple fact or procedure, is to watch a Youtube video.

@briankrebs #fgoogle we don’t have free markets we have effective monopoly after monopoly

@briankrebs

there's digital " .. access to say images dot google com and wikipedia ..

and then there's real world shi..
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/why-does-russia-want-capture-ukraines-avdiivka-2024-02-06/

AND WHO WHAT WHERE wtf?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDDQ4WvZh-0 <- idiots imho

@briankrebs but i think it's just getting better! #google #AI

(But not for linux user version of me :) )

@briankrebs

agree. don't even get me started on Microsoft Copilot. it's like the annoying paperclip turned into a high-voltage forceps twisting my brain. why are sado-masochists the ones who invent this shit?

@briankrebs I can name a dozen other ways their search engine has become crap, plus ways they’ve screwed me over.

All that free stuff in the beginning was just to lock us in as their data.

From “do no evil” to “Evil is how we increase stockholder value”

@briankrebs Surely giving YouTube back its sovereignty could help them refocus on their roots.

@briankrebs Google is still the world’s largest advertising company.

All the rest, including all useful technology, was always just a huge honeypot.

@briankrebs Google do be Googling (derogatory)

For what it's worth, DuckDuckGo is great.

@briankrebs
It so often feels like Google is trying too hard to win the race to the bottom...

@briankrebs Several months ago, I asked Google for help with missing data on Google Drive. After hours of talking, I never even got an acknowledgment that there was an issue, much less a fix. Later, news came out that this was a common problem. I'm pretty much done with them, following the Google Drive fiasco, all the services I had invested time or money into, etc. They don't even try to create new products or services.

@briankrebs Bing/DDG does the same crap: "Here are 5 results about the genocide in Gaza and also a link to a discount tire company 15 miles from your approximate location."

@briankrebs Sometimes I was using the cached page when the term I was searching for didn't appear on the page, and it was useful to see if it was actually present in the past but now removed. That would give somewhat confidence that Google wasn't cheating you with the results. I guess that this would play against them at this time when more and more irrelevant results are being delivered.

@briankrebs
What they say: too big to fail
What I hear: we have a financial interest

@briankrebs

Not only google search
The same thing applied to YouTube

@briankrebs Cory Doctorow has a word fot that for that :-)