Oh, absolutely. It’s completely lost its appeal for me. Moreso because a ton of the more technical subs I used to frequent were populated by power users, and a significant fraction of those users have very aggressively and thoroughly scrubbed their accounts. We’re mostly all on Lemmy now :)
That’s more of an inference on my part, judging from how often I come across threads that have a ton of the comments scrubbed to nonsense and/or deleted. It’s more noticeable when you have an extremely particular error or config issue that you’re digging around for. Used to be that you could just dump a part of the error message into google, append site:reddit.com, and usually get a pretty precise answer to your problem. Nowadays, its way harder to find, because much of the really good historical stuff got scrubbed (and, by extension, the users providing those answers are gone), and recent content is much more polluted with LLM-generated crap, which I simply do not trust for stuff like this.
they drove away the back bone of content and replaced with shiti bots to try to drive engagement. it is not that obvious at first but a while a you just feel that it is dead.
SEO killed google search, whatever this shit is deff killed reddit.
Most of you don’t remember, but way back when, ad money was crazy when no one knew how to advertise online. Banner ads could get $2 a click. It collapsed around mid year 2000. I see the same happening here.
“Trump regime with more authoritarian-style controls”
Has sheen been asleep for the last 4 years?
I guess destroying 40% of black-owned businesses in addition to shut g down all sorts of things without actual authority isn’t authoritarianism?
The irony of these pejoratives constantly being lobbed at Conservatives while leftists are actually currently doing these things would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.
One way to edit the search URL is a proxy site like udm14.com, which is probably the biggest site out there popularizing this technique.
When people are making their own entire web sites to make it possible for third parties to adapt around UX issues of your web site (not just a handful, but enough people that there's one of those sites that's identifiable as "the biggest"), you have lost the plot.
Wow, I thought it shut down loooong ago. I wonder if there’s any way to retrieve an archive of your IMs or anything like that? If only I remembered my number…
Damn, if I heard my area was installing facial recognition cameras, let alone for china, I’m grabbing a full face mask, and a bat, and swinging at every public facing camera I can reach nightly.
I’m still salty about Spotify quietly removing support for my Pioneer head unit (along with others) shortly after the Car Thing came out. Luckily I took the hint and cancelled my subscription and haven’t looked back.
The author’s conclusion has me wondering what would it take to build a really good new system? Could we make a paid version, at a cost users would find reasonable to grow to a large enough base, and one that is incentivized to find users the best links quickly? Unlike how Google has been moving in recent years
As mentioned in the article, what it would take is a minimum of a billion dollars a year.
There isn’t a lot of market for a paid search engine. Kagi are trying, and have about 30,000 subscribers, but that’s a tiny drop in the bucket. If all those subscribers were on the unlimited plan ($10 a month), then they are bringing in 3.6 million in revenue a year.
If the search index itself costs a billion dollars to maintain, they also need to cover payment fees, support costs, and of course the cost of building and maintaining a website to actually access that search index.
If we wanted to fund it on donations, we need at least 1,000,000 people to donate $1,000 each per year.
Google had a great environment to start their search engine because the internet was small. Now you have an internet that’s more than half bot traffic and billions of websites generated by AI, on top of all the good stuff. Plus the expectation of real time search results, that Google didn’t have to deal with before web 2.0.
I am not convinced a new traditional search engine can compete. Any true competitor or successor to Google will probably have to do what they did: completely redefine search.
This is Lemmy so I’m gonna hit the screw with a hammer and suggest maybe some sort of federated search with an instance trust model that lets each instance take care of only a small part of the web but have a way of boosting results from more trustworthy instances.
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