Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. The story begins

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/11393245

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.

HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation

  • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
    29·
    7 months ago

    In the March 2019 core update to search, which happened about a week before the end of the code yellow, was expected to be “one of the largest updates to search in a very long time. Yet when it launched, many found that the update mostly rolled back changes, and traffic was increasing to sites that had previously been suppressed by Google Search’s “Penguin” update from 2012 that specifically targeted spammy search results, as well as those hit by an update from an August 1, 2018, a few months after Gomes became Head of Search.

    Search engagement is declining, so the obvious fix is to make the search result worse which means people have to search more to find what they need. Engagement metrics went through the roof! Crisis averted!

    Thanks to this fuck up, competition is a thing again in search engine space. Other search engines are getting better and start to capture the fleeing users.

      • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
        7·
        7 months ago

        Marginalia is interesting because it attempt to search non-commercial contents. this might unearth some contents you can’t find on google. If you search something on google and the result is full of spam or ecommerce product pages, try the same keyword on marginalia. Unlike google, it’s a keyword search engine, so keep in mind not to ask question in it, but put the keyword that might be included in the content you want to search.

        Kagi is a paid search engine. it does use data from other big search engines, but apply its own weighting and filtering and unearth contents normally buried on the big search engines. There is a free trial account if you want to test it yourself to see if it’s better than google for your use case.

        There are also various searxng instances. searxng is an opensource meta search engines, which uses data from other search engine. Each instances may be configured differently, so you might want to test some of them to decide which instance works the best for your use case.

        Some interesting comparison: https://danluu.com/seo-spam/