alt Hacker NewsIf they indeed made search worse “on purpose”, there should be plenty of alternatives with better results. I’ve tried about a dozen of them, including paid ones like Kagi, and found the quality of results to be universally worse than Google’s, especially for niche searches where it matters the most.
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It takes a huge amount of money to compete with Google in search and all Google has to do to destroy that investment is to dial back the sandbagging. They really did have a moat.
I recently tried Kagi again after not being particularly impressed 2-3 years ago. Swapped it to default after a week. For me it works better than Google probably 80% of the time now.
Google also did 100% make search worse on purpose as this great piece discusses: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Doctorow goes into greater detail on how Google purposely worsened Google search in his book Enshittification. It’s a very thorough chapter and it’s clear what they did. They were chasing “engagement hacks.”
Your logic makes no sense. Just because something is worse relative to how it used to be does not mean alternatives are now better than it.