[rcoveson]

I'm struck by the profundity of this loss. It's almost as bad as if something like archive.org were to just disappear. SaaS is so ephemeral. One day, you have access to a version of Google that works absurdly well. The next, it's gone forever.

I used to use Google so much that it felt like a border collie in those dog competitions. I knew how it behaved, I had a bank of commands/searches that I had half-memorized and which I could use to restore knowledge that had been evicted from my cache. It repeatedly surprised and delighted me with how smart and loyal it was. Like a good dog.

And then that dog got brain cancer. It doesn't know any commands anymore. All it can do is vomit up clickbait-y news stories from the last 4 years. And I'll never get to interact with the old one ever again. You can't archive.org a SaaS application.

[dereg]

It's really sad. There used to be a time when I'd try to recall a specific page on the internet and I'd be able to use a zillion search operators to narrow in to the page that I was looking for. Now, that's impossible.

I've noticed search for everything kind of sucks now as every platform has tried to become curators.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Every platform only wants to return links to sites that run ads or commerce sites that buy ads. Providing useful information is a loss leader that needs to be optimized out of existence so that the C levels get a bonus for a job well done.

[ebiester]

Providing useful information for free is a loss leader. Information may want to be free, but its creation is still expensive.

[annadane]

And there's absolutely no way to talk to the company in question. Both Google and Facebook have become, we will do whatever we want, no you can't talk to a human, no you can't dispute our decisions, no you can't have any control over your life

[qyi]

You can not use Google. The real problem is when you have to do tax or you go to jail and it has to be done with some smartphone garbage (not sure if we're there yet, my country still has paper filing).

[nwienert]

It’s nuts how every search comes up with covid results now. I search for some type of food? Covid. A supplement? Covid. GDP over time for a country? Covid.

They put so much weight on recent * news * mainstream. Very black mirror.

Even searching for explicit contrary takes will instead give you the same recent * mainstream * news.

[qyi]

This is _exactly_ what I'm talking about. You type "directions to adelaide", and you get something about Adele. I don't agree with the sentiment that it seems conspiracyish or "dystopian", though.

On a related note, I find it hilarious that websites - even e-commerece and services that don't seem to have any physical contact - now have a generic COVID-19 popup on top of their cookie popup and privacy police banner.