Pluralistic: Too big to care (04 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14100831

"No, seriously. All those things Google couldn’t find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and ov

  • Optional@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    612·
    7 months ago

    Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don’t need to spend money on quality, because we’re all locked into using Google search. It’s cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we’d still prefer Google.

    It’s been easily 15 years since I thought Google search was good.

    • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      151·
      7 months ago

      It was not long after the SSL thing that it became actively garbage. that was what, 2018?

      But yeah, it’s been bad since at least 2012.

        • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          171·
          7 months ago

          Google stopped indexing all websites without SSL certificates in July 2018.

          For example, darklyrics.com is a website I and many others grew up using as a resource to understanding lyrics. They’ve stubbornly not gotten an SSL because they transact 0 data beyond band name searches. However, without an SSL, they do not show up in Google search results.

          This is one of literally millions of examples. Some more reasonable than others, but it still was a massive blow to the efficacy of their search.

          • AnActOfCreation@programming.devEnglish
            11·
            7 months ago

            Hmm I hate Google as much as the next guy and am actively trying to de-Google myself, but I’m not sure I can get behind the outrage here. Certificates are free and easy to obtain with LetsEncrypt, so there’s really no excuse for sites not to accept unencrypted traffic these days. I’m sure Google does lots of things to delist the small guys and promote their big payers, but I don’t think this is one of them.

            • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
              18·
              7 months ago

              Free certificates expose your subdomains. It’s not more secure if you don’t transact data in a meaningful way such as the example I provided.

              I don’t mean to insinuate that the example I provided is the majority of cases, and in the majority of cases, I do support sites with SSLs being indexed higher than websites without them, but I think the interstitial this website is not secure with the requirement of the advanced click followed by The continue anywaysclick…

              Idk

              Especially in 2018. Like, when we look at it from today’s perspective, it’s very easy to agree. And I do agree. But in 2018, it was not this way. Anyone who was a web developer with a bunch of clients, such as myself, was all the sudden in a very interesting hot seat. Not only did I need to try to upsell my clients, but I needed to convince them that not doing so was quite literally at their peril. It was difficult. And certain cases, it was impossible.

              • AnActOfCreation@programming.devEnglish
                51·
                7 months ago

                If your subdomains being public is a security issue then I’d argue something else is wrong. Otherwise you’re using security through obscurity.

                But I appreciate the insight and I see how this was a harder sell back when it happened. Thanks!

                • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  12·
                  7 months ago

                  Not necessarily. Let’s say you’re a known contributor to a closed source project. You don’t want people knowing you have a locally hosted gitlab instance at gitlab.mydomain.com, for example.