Fun fact. The property line runs through the middle of this building, so King Charles III in right of Canada owns the left side. I, as 77th Earl of Burnt Bridge Road, own the right side.
"Charles", I said.
"We should round up a posse of Land Rover Defenders and fix up this hunting hodge."
"Would love too", he said. "But I can't seem to find the time. Too many doctors appointments!"
A relationship that begins with mutual annoyance, insults, and an unwillingness to respect each-others' choice of career and place to live isn't likely to end well. At best, the two people can part with civility and seek out more respectful and sympathetic partners.
On an unrelated note, I can't figure out why #Hallmark keeps rejecting my scripts.
Today, Yahoo announces doing exactly that to Engadget: "...the changes paint a picture of an outlet cutting staff to focus on things like Google traffic, SEO, commerce, and affiliate revenue" 😔
Now, I read the article by HouseFresh that @pluralistic referred to in his post. It's a scathing critique of Google and the miserable job it's doing to protect its search results from being owned by SEO-focused publications.
As someone who spent about a decade of his life blogging as a side gig, I can easily relate to the frustrations felt by the HouseFresh team and similar niche publications.
@random_musings seeing this going for a while too. Almost any Google Search is waste as several pages of results are shallow click bait. This irks me especially when trying to find some specific article I read in the past again but even with exact phrasing it only yields pages over pages of BS before showing me that tiny blog with the real deal I was looking for. Search is broken.
…like Popular Science, which began as a magazine in 1872 and became a shambling zombie in 2023, after its PE owners North Equity LLC decided its googlejuice was worth more than its integrity and turned it into a metastatic chumbox of shitty affiliate-link SEO-bait.
Honestly, articles like that one ought to be presented as a justification for seeking a monopoly-breakup of the company. Specifically, summarizing as, "yes, we were mostly OK with you having a monopoly while you were still using that status for the public good, but now that you've decided you no longer need to act in the public interest, you no longer deserve to have a monopoly position".
I mean, fuck: at this point, maybe it's less just "break up Google" than "force Google out of the search business altogether" (and, along with it, forbid anyone from being in both the search and the advertising business ...possibly, even "prevent anyone with an advertising LoB from being in any other LoB that might create a conflict of interest").
I had no idea Popular Science had been PE'd to zombification. I wondered why I had started seeing them appear in search results again and just assumed they'd invested in their web presence, when the truth is much worse. A shame, because they were once a great publication.
@rberger@pluralistic I do find it astonishing to have experienced the entire life cycle of Google, from it's initial launch of a simple, fast, clean search engine with no frames or ads, to becoming the antithesis of everything the internet was set up to be. I hope that these tumultuous times are remembered as the rebirth of a decentralized web.
A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google - which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic - suddenly turned into a pile of shit.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
A viral post by Housefresh - who review air purifiers - describes how Google's algorithmic failures, which send the worst sites to the top of the heap, have made it impossible for high-quality review sites to compete:
You've doubtless encountered these bad review sites. Search for "Best ______ 2024" and the results are a series of near-identical lists, strewn with Amazon affiliate links.
@pluralistic There's a bit in Ready Player One where the characters have to answer a trivia question about video game history in order to proceed. The bad guy has a giant room full of employees working, full-time, to figure out how to solve these puzzles, but at no point does any of them suggest maybe they could just Google it.
My thought at the time was "Wow, Spielberg's conception of futurism is still mired in the 1970s." Maybe he was just anticipating search engines becoming useless.