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Or You Could Just Make Search Useful Again [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-06-26  

oogle is rolling out a new feature apparently aimed at replicating the experience of adding "reddit" to your search queries:

“Tap the filter, and you’ll exclusively see long- and short-form videos, images and written posts that people have shared on discussion boards, Q&A sites and social media platforms,” Google wrote in a blog post about the feature from May. Based on a video in Google’s blog post, that includes things like TikTok videos, YouTube videos, websites, tweets, Quora results, and Reddit posts. My colleague David Pierce described the Perspectives results as something that looks “more like Pinterest than a typical set of Google results,” and based on what I’ve seen, that feels like an accurate characterization. Google is launching its Perspectives search feed that’s designed to show results from humans - The Verge

Our tech overlords have seemingly given up on the very notion of making useful products. The reason that people put reddit on the end of their search queries -- a trick that drove results from the reddit website to the top of the results -- was not that they wanted to hear the perspective of other human beings. It was because the normal search results have been for use just this side of completely useless.

Google rose to prominence because its search results were better than the competitions. You used to be able to quite confidently find correct information on Google. In fact, when they started, they were so confident in their ability to surface the correct information for you they had a "I'm Feeling Lucky" button in their search page. Hit that, and it would take you to the answer it deemed most correct or relevant. And a lot of the times, they were correct. Those days are long gone -- along with the button.

Today, Google is essentially useless as a search engine. Google has devolved into trying to drive ad revenue above all else, and the quality of its results has suffered as a result. It no longer cares of the material it surfaces is correct -- it only cares if it can capture information about you and if that material can be monetized. Things like locksmith scams -- where people claim to be locksmiths but are actually thieves, sell ads, come and install bogus locks at your home or business, and then come back later to rob you -- proliferate. Google finally did something about that specific scam -- but only after immense legal and public relations pressure and only in two jurisdictions. Google could have taken those steps to protect its users from the start, but that would have cost them ad revenue, so they apparently felt the sacrifice of others well-being and safety worth the cost.

It is too easy for companies to make money in shady fashions. We make it too easy for firms to become monopolies. We barely tax large companies. When we do tax them, we do so in a way that privileges capital over labor, skewing their incentives. We allow them to create products that harm users and escape with no real punishment -- a fine is just a cost. We incentivize short-term thinking over long term planning with things like untaxed stock options and quarterly reports and privileging shareholders over all other stakeholders. As a result, companies stop building products and start investing in financial engineering and at least wink at harm to their alleged customers. In tech, Corey Doctorow calls this enshitification. But it's not just tech -- look at the fraud Wells Fargo comitted recently.

In today's economy, is easier to make money via borderline abusive behavior, incentivizing fraud, and financial engineering than by making a solid product that people want to use. As long as we continue to allow that to be true, our economy isn't going to be an economy so much as a series of mob-like shakedowns.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/26/2177314/-Or-You-Could-Just-Make-Search-Useful-Again

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