google was a perfect product. I’m talking early 2000s.
If it wasn’t for the need for endless growth it would have remained extremely profitable and competitive. but every quarter they have to show growth. Either buy making bs services they later kill, or buying profitable businesses then enshitifying them.
No it wasn’t. It was the best in a bad batch of half-conceived search engines. And this was only true for a relative window of time in the '10s, when they hadn’t quite cornered the market on search and hadn’t fully optimized how to maximize their ad revenues.
Google was a massive conflux of investor capital that produced a better-than-average set of tools as loss-leaders to hook you into their Walled Garden. Once you were inside the Walled Garden, what you discovered was Microsoft 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Yeah, for a while there was really good progress on search results serving up the things you’re looking for, and not just by Google. I remember how impressed I used to be by the Amazon search engine. I could put a description of something that I didn’t know the name of into the search box and the first result was usually what I wanted. I could sort by user rating and usually get the best one on top.
Now there are pages of sponsored products that keep getting shown if you keep scrolling. The search engine has become completely enshitified, and so many bots have created positive and negative reviews that the ratings are way less useful.
google was a perfect product. I’m talking early 2000s.
If it wasn’t for the need for endless growth it would have remained extremely profitable and competitive. but every quarter they have to show growth. Either buy making bs services they later kill, or buying profitable businesses then enshitifying them.
No it wasn’t. It was the best in a bad batch of half-conceived search engines. And this was only true for a relative window of time in the '10s, when they hadn’t quite cornered the market on search and hadn’t fully optimized how to maximize their ad revenues.
Google was a massive conflux of investor capital that produced a better-than-average set of tools as loss-leaders to hook you into their Walled Garden. Once you were inside the Walled Garden, what you discovered was Microsoft 2: Electric Boogaloo.
maybe not perfect perfect, just a good useable product that was way better than current Google.
What’s the current product half-life? 10 years before enshittification starts or something like that.
Yeah, for a while there was really good progress on search results serving up the things you’re looking for, and not just by Google. I remember how impressed I used to be by the Amazon search engine. I could put a description of something that I didn’t know the name of into the search box and the first result was usually what I wanted. I could sort by user rating and usually get the best one on top.
Now there are pages of sponsored products that keep getting shown if you keep scrolling. The search engine has become completely enshitified, and so many bots have created positive and negative reviews that the ratings are way less useful.
also the bigger problem that the Internet is now a handful of websites. so search results are basically using Google to find a reddit thread.