The garbage web today is partially Google's own doing. They're the ones who created the incentives for websites to have cruft to satisfy the Google bot. They're the ones who capture all value from news outlets by aggregating and summarizing articles so people don't need to click on links.
Google isn't some dainty little startup. They're the dominant interface (search and browser!) through which most of the planet uses the internet.
Web pages are optimized for the most popular search engine.
If any of Ask Jeeves or Lycos or Webcrawler or AltaVista had risen to the top of the heap instead of Google, then web pages would have been optimized for that respective bot instead.
What you say is true, but it doesn't excuse Google for failing to take steps that mitigate what we're seeing today. All it would have taken was some restraint: some combination of being less dominant in the market (i.e., optimizing for a 90%-market-share search engine is different vs. 60%-market-share) and giving users more control over search results (e.g., allowing users to blacklist entire domains for themselves).
We have a garbage Google-specific web because websites didn't have to satisfy anyone else; not other search engines, and not even the users themselves. Instead of Google delivering customers to websites, Google positioned itself to be the only customer.
While it would be absurd for me to say that an advertising behemoth like Google has no influence on the decisions of users, it would also be absurd for me to say that Google is somehow empowered to force users to do...anything, at all.
Free will still exists. Nobody from Menlo Park has put a gun to anyone's head to make them use Google to search the web instead of Bing or DDG or Yandex or whatever.
> All it would have taken was some restraint: some combination of being less dominant in the market (i.e., optimizing for a 90%-market-share search engine is different vs. 60%-market-share)
So, let me get this straight: The idea is that Google Search sucks, and the suggested cause for this level of suck is that it is so popular that it causes many publishers to deliberately poison the well using Google-optimized SEO. (Or, more simply: That Google has reached critical mass, and that this is problematic for Google users.)
And, well: I don't disagree. That does appear to be the state of things.
But the apparent proposed corrective action is for it to somehow make itself less popular? By doing what, exactly? Sucking harder? Does it not already suck hard enough?
What a confounding paradox.
Wouldn't a simpler and less paradoxical plan of attack -- that anyone can accomplish completely and absolutely, starting right now -- be to just not use Google search at all for one's own dealings in life?
I agree, but I remember when I was a university student I was easily able to search for answers for my queries. I was actually reliving some of my past and I tried to find the same info for a useful epiphany from many decades ago, and I couldn’t find it (even though the same engine gave me the answer decades ago)
Very much this. It kills me when I search for something that I know for a fact still exists on the web, and there is no way of finding it through google. I used to comb through page 10+ regularly for hits for things related to my search, and now I’m pretty sure google doesn’t even compile hits after the first few pages.
One of them was looking at my old AP US History tests. I don’t have the exam question right in front of me, but I remember getting the answer wrong. I found the correct answer on Google pretty quickly. It was on an obscure fact of some former president. I didn’t find the answer in the first several search result pages. I remember getting the answer within the first 3-4 results when I had looked up why I got it wrong 22 years ago.
The web was different as well.