[jfoutz]

I think there is an easy heuristic, bias against ads.

Google can’t do this. Original sources very likely don’t have ads, scrapes will have tons. But good results are good results. Big g has done an admirable job. They can’t exploit the best metric for quality.

[tannhaeuser]

No they don't do an admirable job if they send you to scraped rather than original content. They're ruining the web. While Google still has fantastic, one-of-a-kind services such as Translate, Search isn't one of them anymore, and we should stop cheering at it and relying on it.

[chewz]

Google Search is polluting the internet giving huge monetary incentives for creating of all these copycat sites. Google could eliminate them overnight but they don't for one reason only - Google gets revenue from these sites and not from the original content that is quite often ad-free.[1]

[1] Content scraped from github, tech discusion forums, personal blogs, unix man pages etc.

[berkes]

I've switched to deepl.com recently for my translations.

It has far fewer languages, but the translations of those it has, are far better in my opinion. Allthough I am also no linguist, just an average non-English speaker.

[jfoutz]

Hmm. I keep getting warnings about responding to quickly. Perhaps my account is under attack.

Setting that aside, google has done good things. Today, not so much. It’s never too late to turn the ship around. Google can still be awesome. Our opinions aren’t that different.

I don’t think big g can turn it around, but I’m rooting for them.

[chachachoney]

I'm struggling to think of a single historical example of corporate entity the size of google that has "turned it around" rather than abusing the good faith of a customer base for the duration of their race to the bottom.

Google can't still be awesome, as they're no longer seeking to disrupt an existing market and burning through venture capital while doing everything and anything (including providing superior search results, and making ethical business practices part of their brand) to attract users.

Rooting for a profit motivated transnational entity in the manner one would for a sports team exposes the insidious nature of brand narratives and the exploitable irrationality of our own interactions with them.

[cududa]

Microsoft is a good example

[luckylion]

> I don’t think big g can turn it around, but I’m rooting for them.

I believe they can, but I don't know if they care to - they're highly profitable after all. What I really dislike about search is that, by treating links as currency, they have broken links. Lots of people won't put plain old links on their site because they fear it would hurt their rankings.

Their overreliance on links as the sole quality indicator has, at least in my country, lead to the large media companies just renting out folders or subdomains - and whatever low quality content is published there ranks at the top.

They still build good stuff, and I'm sure their engineers could "solve" search again, but it appears that their management doesn't want to.

[mirimir]

> Hmm. I keep getting warnings about responding to quickly. Perhaps my account is under attack.

I've been getting those too, lately. I thought maybe that my touchpad finger is developing tremor ;)

[atemerev]

deepl.com supports fewer languages than Translate, but the quality of translation is so much higher.