[ralphist]

Maps is still good. GMail still works. Most of their big products aren't awful. It's funny that Search seems to be going down faster than the others, given that this one actually makes most of their money. I'd have thought they would put the best people on it and been very conservative about changing it.

[Xirgil]

Search is going downhill at least in part because they're dealing with an entire industry that's adversarial to them. SEO companies are spending billions of dollars and countless man-hours with the explicit goal of making search worse. The fact that they've gotten even better tools in the form of GenAI for manipulating search hasn't helped.

[nwienert]

I'd argue a much bigger part is their various nerfs.

Reddit and SO are barely recommended.

Product reviews used to go to higher quality blogs, Reddit, Consumer Reports now are now just all content filler sites.

During Trump they decided allowing anything except for MSNBC/ABC/CBS/CNN/etc on the first five pages of anything remotely news related were the only allowable results. This mirrors exactly the Gemini/OpenAI nerfs for PC.

Given 90% of my searches are for questions about what people think about things, code/food/drugs/health/medicine/etc, and topical events, it's become completely useless without adding "reddit" or something after.

[Xirgil]

I won't deny that there's nerfs, but do you not see how "Product reviews used to go to higher quality blogs, Reddit, Consumer Reports now are now just all content filler sites." and "People trying to sell you things are spending billions of dollars on SEO to junk up your results" are related

[nwienert]

I strongly don't think it's caused by SEO, it's caused by them not liking that having too much reliance on certain sources. There was an update a while back where Wikipedia/Reddit were turned way down suddenly, this is a knob they are using specifically.

[kaliqt]

This propaganda issue also applies in full to YouTube.