Obviously google was basically already unusable over the past five years but this is... this is something else. Any subject you want to look up will have the first three pages entirely comprised of procedurally generated fake blogs and websites. And there's nothing there. Just scraped text from articles mashed together with varying amounts of hallucinations on top. Not even selling a product, just to harvest ad revenue.
What's maybe even worse is the steady degradation of image searches too. Joe Everyman generates some slop, the image's metadata tags include a historical artist's name. Some one on pinterest pins it while trawling the web. Now there are fifty gooey generated sludge images when you look up the historical painter.
And its not just artists. Historical figures, animals too. Look up 'baby peacock' if you want a clear example of it.
It's a pretty funny bit google, I hope it keeps going.
Feels like there's a pattern
Shit costs money.
I do wonder if Chinese search engines are outpacing their American peers by being more publically oriented. Or if they're just blindly cribbing from American techniques as Best Practices by habit, and getting similar degraded results.
Or if this really is just a Cold War of bullshit, and the prior method would ultimately be contaminated by spammers in the same way new shit is.
people were gaming pagerank back in the day, anyone who ever hired an SEO person should probably be shot.
Hate the game, etc, etc. You can't really blame folks for wanting their content to be at the front of the Google queue.
I'd argue the real root problem is discrete list-rankings as a means of presenting information. These kinds of search results imply a certain empirical authority to higher ranks sources.
I might argue that a significant move forward on searches would be to present data not in terms of a ranked list, with the Top Item being definitive. Instead, present results as a graph with the Center Item being the result that most closely matches your query. Then you can move in 2D space to navigate results based on multiple axises of relationship and zoom in/out to reveal broader/grainular characteristics of results.
So, perhaps a search for "horse" gives you the dictionary definition. Then you have that result broken into quadrants by results organized as "horse: biological", "horse: fictional", "horse: historical", and "horse: metaphorical". Moving in a given direction gives you more refined data on that topic (so - horse: biological might give you the Wikipedia article on Horse Breeds and a Veterinary website on Horse Health). You can zoom in to get a more granular look at horses broken up by breed or zoom out and get categories of animal within the Equidae family of animals.
This kind of navigation would inevitably also get gamed. But it would de-emphasize the value of the initial results and turn it into a starting point for a search rather than the definitive result.
completely changing web design would've been cool before smartphones, you can still see the legacy of 800x600 everywhere but if they did it now it would just be shit.
your idea is a little interesting but people would just click on the top left and that kind of movie UI goes wrong real fast for actual use.
Maybe. But if I had an abundance of free time and/or some infinite cash spigot, I'd give it a shot regardless.
If nothing else, I think the novelty of a spacial search over a linear search would get people's attention and give the platform more engagement than the Bing approach of being just like Google but pushier.