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by jb3689
756 days ago
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It's odd. How did search engines trick us into thinking that our home page should be a search engine? The only reason I add "reddit" to searches is because a search engine is my entrypoint on my browser. Even then though, I find that Google tends to pin a particular threads. The most humorous ones are when it pins to a thread with "this has been asked already a zillion times" with no actual meaningful content in the particular thread. Google search was never really good at finding meaningful opinions in the first place. Facts? Reference? Pretty good. Meaningful tradeoff analysis of non-academic subjects? Product rankings and reviews? Opinions? Really poor. It's odd that Google decided to cannibalize the things it was good at. Finding recipes, for example, is terrible through Google because of the emphasis on SEO at the expense of user experience. AI search results are simply Google opting to make itself less relevant. |
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The browser makers started in the mid-90s with web search and news called "portals", either their own or licensed from a third party. By the early 2000s the portals had all gone to shit but we still needed them for web search because we still cared about the web and not just a couple of social media apps. As a result, Google's pristine search and search results pages became popular. When we were deciding on a Firefox start page in mid-2004, Google search eventually won because it was simple and effective, like the rest of Firefox.
(My proposal to our tiny team at the time was to make Firefox Start a page of instructions on how to easily change the start page to what ever you wanted, but that was reasonably shot down as asking the user to do extra work.)