alt Hacker NewsA big part of what makes Google Search awful is just the usual SEO shitters, trying their hardest to rig the game on any search result that's anywhere close to common or profitable.
Google's main failing there is that they don't put enough effort into their search to keep up with that, and fail to raise the bar on garbage content and search engine manipulation.
LLM output in search results I'm not against. Do you need to open an entire website to learn how to sort an array in JavaScript with a lambda function? For many of the more common and more trivial requests, LLM output is well in "good enough".
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They really could do much better - just look at how much higher quality Kagi results are these days
Well by not opening the blog post or whatever page that nicely explains the JavaScript sort with examples, you just deprived them of page views and probably income. So what will happen in 5 years when you’re searching for human written and thoughtful content on something more complex and all you get is slop?
No we don’t need to open an entire website to learn x simple thing. However we DO need meaningful competition among information providers. I am not looking forward to the enshittification phase of AI.
A big part of what makes Google awful is that they are a monopoly across multiple domains. They have used extremely anticompetitive tactics, and the regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel.
Google owns search, the internet browser, and every point of ingress for the average person.
They transformed the URL bar into a search bar as a way to intercept everyone's thought process and turn it into the largest internet tax in the world.
Brands that spend millions or billions to establish themselves now have to competitively bid on their own established trademarks, because anyone can swoop in and put ads in front.
Google designed the results page such that the top results are what 99% of people click on. Google search is effectively an internet toll on every business.
They own the browsers, they own the HTML spec, they control the web.
To think this doesn't increase costs for consumers dramatically is absurd. This is a tax on all of us.
Not only do they do that, but they also starve informational businesses and news businesses of traffic by stealing their content and showing visitors first. The people that work to build the content are getting stiffed.
Google has tried so many times to kill websites and bring the entire Internet under their control. There was a time when not having a Google-controlled AMP website meant you didn't rank at all. Your content lived in their walled garden. Then Google coerced you to bear their network's ads.
Google has destroyed businesses and entire careers by being allowed to do this.
Don't get me started on mobile. While it's a duopoly, both market participants are subjecting all commerce and all participants to the same Gestapo regime. Everything is taxed, tightly regulated, and kept under thumb. The two titans constantly grab more surface area. I could spend an hour outlining the evils here too.
Google needs to be broken up. Not as one would expect into multiple business divisions (though this would also be wise), but instead into multiple copies of the same business that are forced to compete and stripped of certain business tactics.
This is what we did for Ma Bell. Google is way worse.
>Do you need to open an entire website to learn how to sort an array in JavaScript with a lambda function?
That's exactly what Google is implying, isn't it?
By placing a redirect to an LLM at the top, and following it with bad search results, Google is saying "don't bother with the web, asking an LLM is better".
It is a very shortsighted thing to say, as a company whose moat and expertise is search. Particularly so when LLMs aren't yet proved to be a viable path to profit and there are other players in the game.