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by burnte 25 days ago
I think it's a multifold problem and they've chosen bad solutions.

1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down. 2. "AI everywhere!" put them in a panic, so they shoved am LLM into results, hoping it could pick through bad results and give good data to the user. 3. LLMs are expensive to run, so they're using a cheap model.

Cheap model + bad results = abysmal user experience.

There are too many groups with opposed interests fighting. Ad groups wants worse results so people search more (not realizing this just drives users away). Search groups want a better product so they stop losing users, and the AI group is being given a bad name because management is using their worst AI product on search. So the whole experience is just garbage.
2 comments
gruez 25 days ago
>1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down.

Why would this work? Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?

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burnte 25 days ago
> Why would this work?

Humans are predictable and hate change. For a short while it DOES work, people are used to great results, assume they're not using the the best keywords, and they'll reformulate their searches. For a while. After a while of all searches being not as good as they used to be, people start looking for other alternatives, which is why DDG is seeing an uptick.

It's called enshittification. It's easier than improving a product.

> Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?

No idea.

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alex1138 25 days ago
I don't know how much control Goog has over Youtube despite owning them but I do note in passing they removed dislikes, removed upload dates (apparently?), removed 5 stars. Easier to trick people into ads

The platform has been various kinds of hostile for a few years now

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