this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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I remember when just 'browsing' the internet (google) was a pass time. Like you could just search random things into google and find something interesting or novel. The earliest iterations of google basically functioned exactly how you'd want a search engine to and needed zero improvement. we really do live in a fucked world where a technology or service can be perfected but inevitably made worse over time to the benefit of no one but the top
Ah yes, the early days of google. Back when you could easily find.... Porn.... Of anything. Of everything. Everything was porn.
You're right :( as a kid I could type 'vampires' on Google and get a bunch of cool html 3 websites from random people who also liked vampires and wanted to talk about them on their websites dedicated to the topic. It didn't even matter if the information was false it was just fun seeing new websites. This was before twilight, fandoms etc. It was just people talking about something they liked. They might even make the website black and red and play some music on it to put you in the mood.
Now type the same word on Google and you get wikipedia, britannica, news media (BBC, Nat Geo etc), IMDB because there's a movie etc. You know, just in case you're the one person in the world who knows how to use Google but not Wikipedia.
And that's when Google doesn't outright change your query for something else. At least lenmygrad brings back some of this.
Full of vampire porn.
/j
SEO society and it's consequences
I don't even know if there's even SEO to speak of still after they brought an update ~2022 where the top results are dominated by the usual big websites (mainly wikipedia, britannica, and tons of mainstream media). It's like no matter what I look for it's the same websites. Video game? Steam page. Movie? IMDB. Current events? Al Jazeera (for some reason lol), BBC, Guardian, etc. What is even the point of a search engine if it's only going to redirect you to e-commerce products (this is also a big one I forgot about, every image search now is products you can buy) and the top 10 visited websites in the world. I can also do a search on imdb directly.
And if you type a common word that is also the name of a movie good luck finding anything but the movie. It used to be better and it bothers me that younger people will grow up in a world where me saying this will sound like I'm rambling about nostalgia or something because all they will have known is shitty search engines, but no, it used to work perfectly well!!
Google has also become extremely censored, like to an absurd degree. Search anything on a remotely political current topic and all you will get is pure propaganda from western media, governments and think tanks. It is virtually impossible to find anything else. They just won't show it to you. You have to use Yandex.
That's if you get anything at all. A lot of my searches return no results on Google or derivatives, so I have to use Bing, Yandex, or others instead.
They do return a large number of results on all of those.
15 years ago i could type a half remembered thought into google and find exactly what I wanted to find and it got 20% worse every year from then until now
Even up until 2016 or 2018 search was pretty good. By destroying it, they also teach new generations that we don't know how to make good search. It's going to become on of those things we forget how to do. As you said you could find anything in a few minutes at most. Now they even change your query to give you different results.
Yeah, now it's all SEO and AI slop. At least Yandex helps you with pirating shit lmao
AI is especially bad because as useful as it can be what happens when it's just wrong information? I hate when lies are presented as fact