The Man Who Killed Google Search

Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

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

Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.

This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.

The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.

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Comments

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rigatti@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Really weird to stumble onto a blog written by someone you vaguely knew in college almost 20 years ago… Anyway, nice job, Ed Zitron.

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- TerkErJerbs@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  He has a podcast too called Better Offline. Just started it up a few months ago.
  
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  - 0x0@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    And has RSS, nice.
    
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- Brutticus@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I know the feeling. I went to middle school with Hillel Wayne
  
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- livus@mander.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’d never heard of Ed Zitron but this is the second good blog I’ve seen by them this week.
  
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slaacaa@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wonder how this isn’t bigger news. The story is shocking, but absolutely confirms my gut feeling that google search has gone to shit in the last few years, and was fine before

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- Nobody@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Prabhakar Raghavan and the McKinsey-inspired management class forced the real tech people out and shit all over the search engine intentionally to squeeze out more short-term profits. Google: An Enshittification Tale
  
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JigglypuffSeenFromAbove@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long for Google to kill its main product over profits. This is in every big company’s textbook.

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boyi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
anyone can tldr?

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- ChicoSuave@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Google internal politics ousted the last of the OG Google guys and replaced him with the same person who killed Yahoo, Prabhakar Raghavan.
  
  The general consensus is that all of the changes to Google since 2019 were driven by profit instead of trying to find things, like a search engine should. And those decisions were spearheaded by Prabhakar Raghavan, who used the training of a data scientist to run Google into the ground for short term financial gain. Sundae Prichai hired Prabhakar Raghavan directly and then promoted him from Head of Ads to Head of Search after firing the guy who had been helping guide Google Search since 1999.
  
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  - TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    replaced him with the same person who killed Yahoo, Prabhakar Raghavan.
    
    Pulled a Boeing
    
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  - boyi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    thx.
    
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  - yamanii@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    and replaced him with the same person who killed Yahoo
    
    Proof that everyone can fail upward.
    
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  - asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I haven’t read the article at all (I plan to) but this basically confirms everything I have assumed as an outsider for years now.
    
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- residentmarchant@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  In this rare case, I would totally suggest you read the article. It has the perfect amount of humor mixed with shocking facts (revealed via email evidence from the Google antitrust case) and it wraps it all up in a way that’s easy to understand.
  
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  - boyi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Hey, I follow up your suggestion - come back and read the article. No doubt, a very engaging read. Thx.
    
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- Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A man named Raghavan has been taken on as a major operational manager for yahoo, ibm, etc. Seems his direction of their operations line sup with a sudden collapse in quality in the areas he was at. Regardless everyone seems to discuss how he is one of the best research’s in field. The dark design and other issues google has been seeing increase for years is basically his direction and, while he isn’t the CEO, he basically runs google.
  
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  - boyi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    thx.
    
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- gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The guy who is now in charge of Google’s search division is the guy who ran Yahoo’s search division into the ground about 10-15 years ago
  
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TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
[deleted]
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- flop_leash_973@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  What it proves is being a greedy self serving prick that will do anything for a buck if given the chance is not the exclusive domain of white people. Anyone can be an incompetent executive.
  
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  - TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Did you see my other comments?
    
    Google under Brin and Page introduced many useful products, Microsoft became a household name under Gates, same with Photoshop.
    
    What have these CEOs done after they took the reins? All I can think of is pushing for ‘cloud’.
    
    Pichai in particular I dislike the most. Hewas heading the Android team. But last few years Android feels stagnant. He could’ve done much more for his supposedly passion project as the CEO of Alphabet.
    
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- victoitor@lemmy.eco.br ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s funny how people will find anything to blame except for the problem itself when the problem is capitalism.
  
  And it’s not like we’ve seen anything odd happen when people systematically blame a particular race/religion/nationality in history… /S
  
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  - TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s not funny. Our culture tells us to bow to authority. Be it old people in house and neighbourhood, or boss at work. We are not supposed to criticize them lest we get labelled troublemaker. Just keep your head down and walk down the beaten path.
    
    These CEOs are just a shining example of these.
    
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- FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This reads like, “the Jews run the media and the banks. Trust me, I’m a Jew.”
  
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  - TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Broadly applicable cultural norms aren’t a thing?
    
    Please come here to Mumbai, try to live as a wagie, and see how far can you go it before the grind breaks you.
    
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- prole@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Don’t worry guys, it’s not racist because he said they’re “his people”.
  
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  - grrgyle@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It sure feels racist. :/
    
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- grrgyle@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think this is just because there are a good number of Indian people in tech. Usually it’s a white person doing this and we hardly notice their skin colour (because of racism).
  
  India actually has a pretty healthy history of workers banding together in collective action, and coming together in mutual aid. I’d elaborate but my social media minutes are about to run out
  
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  - TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    there are a good number of Indian people in tech.
    
    Yes, as grunt workers (myself included).
    
    I legit can’t recall many Indian innovators in tech. Even most tech companies here in India are copies of American companies.
    
    Which again brings me back to my question. What have these CEOs done during their tenure other than rent seeking?
    
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- EnderMB@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’ve no idea why, but Amazon in particular has a huge number of Indian managers. It’s never particularly bothered me, but I do see this sentiment amongst other people of Indian origin - often the most critical of Indian managers.
  
  Is there something specific about Indian leadership that pushes growth above anything else? The sentiment in Amazon is one of ruthlessness, and pushing growth and positive short-term metrics above everything else.
  
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  - Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Trust me, Indian managers are considered ruthless by most fellow indians from what I heard. Our workspace culture is quite toxic compared to the west.
    
    Look at this for a bit more insight
    
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  - TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Is there something specific about Indian leadership that pushes growth above anything else?
    
    Yes. They’ll micromanage the shit out of everything and throw you under the bus to save their own skin.
    
    And the mods have removed my comment for ‘Rule 3’. What the fuck.
    
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- prowling4973@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Ah yes, Jerry Dischler, the Indian.
  
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  - TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That was an ad guy doing ad guy things. Why the fuck the product guy do what he did? Cause he didn’t give a shit about his domain.
    
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- misc@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Bruh don’t be racist its not like americans or brits are not after money india sucks at a lot of things including what you just said but its not like they are the only one’s like that .
  
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  - TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Sundar Pichai
    
    Satya Nadella
    
    Shantanu Narayen (CEO of Adobe since 2008)
    
    Tech companies with Indian CEOs have defined and refined rent-seeking over innovations.
    
    Unlike Brin, Page, Zuckerberg, Gates who had interest in technology and the product, these are just fucking yes men who exist to please the board by trying to keep the line going up, as long as they’re not required to take risks themselves.
    
    They’ll buy competition, give shit pay to employees, and cut costs even if that harns the company in the long run.
    
    Fuck them.
    
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  - Kbobabob@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I don’t see anything in the comment that would insinuate that.
    
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- Pretzilla@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Legit query. and it’s true as a stereotype of many cultures.
  
  And this particular aspect is also at the heart of global capitalism that is wreaking havoc on the world.
  
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masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It overall seems like a good article but this is why I kind of hate Ed Zirtron’s reporting:

For those unfamiliar with Google’s internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A “code yellow” isn’t, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation

Overall the reporting is interesting, but weird comments like this show his naked disdain for everyone and everything in the tech industry which does not make him a particularly trustworthy source.

Like “oh my god, how dare a company choose an arbitrary alert system based on a quirky influential engineer’s practices, what crazy psychos!”

If he sees the code yellow tank top thing as some crazy ridiculous thing that no company should do, then I can’t really trust his interpretation of the rest of the emails and documents etc.

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- TurtleJoe@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It seems clear to me that he hates the people that are ruining the tech industry, ripping off customers, and pumping out shitty projects for short term stuck pumps, and he takes every opportunity to shit on those people and point out their idiosyncrasies. That’s pretty much every tech CEO these days.
  
  It’s also pretty clear to me that he believes in the promise of the industry, and thinks that workers deserve better than the people that they work for.
  
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- frezik@midwest.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Hunter S Thompson wrote a scathing eulogy for Richard Nixon, which I think is relevant here:
  
  “Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism – which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.”
  
  (Non paywalled link: web.archive.org/web/20150213034115/…/308699/)
  
  Sometimes, you need one or two journalists who are in a position to say “you know what? These people suck, and I’m sick of pretending they don’t”. It doesn’t need to be every journalist, and it probably shouldn’t be, but someone needs to say it.
  
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  - masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah, I mean that’s kinda of the whole conceit of Behind the Bastards, the host is explicitly and inherently calling everyone they cover a bastard by default, but if you listen to Ed Zirtron’s appearances, he always just immediately wants to boil them down to a bastard as the root cause of their actions, when the literal entire point of that show is to examine what factors and backgrounds turn someone into a bastard.
    
    Or again, I just can’t understand why he would be flabbergasted by a company naming their alert system after an early engineers’ tank top colour. Yes, there’s value in calling people bastards and scum and villains, but Ed Zirtron does it immediately, every time, which makes his judgement of them untrustworthy. It seems more rooted in some pathological need to boil everything down to simple binary systems.
    
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- jqubed@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s an interesting piece and starts in the traditional journalism mold, but moves much more into opinion and blog. Like going from NewsHour to Last Week Tonight. That’s not to say it’s not an interesting read or he’s not supporting his argument, but it is about persuading, not just reporting. Of course, I haven’t actually gone through all his references to see if they’re mischaracterized or taken out of context.
  
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  - Moneo@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I agree with both your comments, but there’s something so satisfying about reading vitriol about a type of person you fucking hate. I kinda liked that he doesn’t hide his bias or disdain for these people.
    
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- GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  If I hear code yellow, I assume I need to grab a mop and bucket.
  
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  - WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    And an illustrated book about birds.
    
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- raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Overall the reporting is interesting, but weird comments like this show his naked disdain for everyone and everything in the tech industry which does not make him a particularly trustworthy source.
  
  I’d disagree - what this shows is only disdain for everyone who’s fucking up technologies for the sake of profit. And I’m with him there, I found it refreshing to read an accurate account of what pieces of shit work behind the scenes in the industry. Not that I am surprised, but the account of what seems to have happened in detail and in that sequence was new to me.
  
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  - masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    I’d disagree - what this shows is only disdain for everyone who’s fucking up technologies for the sake of profit.
    
    Well you can disagree all you want but you’re clearly and objectively wrong.
    
    His criticism of the code yellow is not because anyone involved in the code yellow procedure, invention, or naming deserves anything, he just hates people everyone in tech so much that a whimsical name must be a bastard move, and not just people at their job trying to make the most of it.
    
    I found it refreshing to read an accurate account of what pieces of shit work behind the scenes in the industry
    
    Yeah, cause you’re accepting his characterizations of everyone as bastards at face value despite not knowing them and despite knowing that Ed Zirtron thinks everyone is a bastard because it makes his world simpler. Yes it is “refreshing” to stop thinking about complex chains of actions and consequences and just think “he’s an evil bastard man and it’s his fault”.
    
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- Telodzrum@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s like a reverse Lara Swisher. Which, though I hate her work and her complete lack of integrity, I don’t want. I totally get and agree with your take.
  
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Buttons@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
As an programmer, I want to think out loud about possible technical solutions.

I would have kept the understandable / hand-made algorithm as the core of search results. If you want to do fancy machine learning, do it on the periphery and we can include the machine output in our algorithm and weight its importance by hand. This would allow us to back out of the decision, because we could lower the weight of the machine learning output as needed.

It sounds like Google jumped strait to including the machine learning in the core algorithm though, and now with a decade of complexity in the core algorithm they are no longer able to go back without huge effort.

In general, it’s important to consider “is this a decision we can easily back out of?”.

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- slumberlust@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Amazon (and I’m sure others) refers to this as a two way door. Good rollouts minimize impact and can be undone easily.
  
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  - sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Exactly, and that’s something my company is aggressively moving toward, even though our userbase is nothing like Google’s. It’s just good engineering to be able to rapidly undo an unfavorable rollout.
    
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- yamanii@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Did you read the piece? This isn’t a software issue, it got worse by design to push even more ads and stop suppressing the ad-ridden fake sites too.
  
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Audacious@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Google should have improved the search with more powerful tools instead of chasing numbers and greed.

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- FenrirIII@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  But that’s not how capitalism works!
  
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reddig33@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I keep wondering who’s gonna hire away Ben Gomes after they read this.

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- REdOG@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Duck Duck Gomes
  
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BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The amount sadness for the loss of Google Search accuracy due to ad infiltration the author writes here shows how much of a corporate brand dick rider a lot of people are.

These corporations do not give a fuck about you, so mourning their loss is so pathetic.

No one cares Google sucks now. If you do, go get a fucking life. Move on. They won’t care if you’re dead, why do you cry when these corporations die?

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- Wiggums@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  it’s not that the company died, it’s that collective progress was sacrificed for greed.
  
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- SloppySol@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Not everyone’s got the capability to make up for the lost utility in the tool themselves. Should they just go fuck themselves?
  
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  - BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yes, SloppySol, they should indeed go fuck themselves.
    
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- ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m not sad that Google turned out to be evil because I care about Google. I don’t care about Google. I’m disappointed in no longer being able to search for and find the things online on any search engine.
  
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- someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Maybe because it’s hard to find stuff now? I don’t care about the company.
  
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lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
[Warning: “ideas guy” tier babble]

It’s somewhat clear that search engines are too prone to go to shit, either due to malice or something worse (like stupidity).

Based on that, I wonder if a user-run, free-as-speech and open source decentralised search system wouldn’t work. Roughly in the spirit of torrents - where anyone can use the system but if you’re using it you’re expected to contribute with it too.

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corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
“emails”

It’s like saying “trafficks” or “firmwares”.

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