Google is quickly approaching a fucking unusable state
So I started using duckduckgo a little over a year ago. At my research job I was advised to be careful about what I googled (versus looking up in reference documents), because Google is data mining all of us and the company is concerned that Google might sell data on what we are searching about to competitors. Which is its own level of creepy cyber dystopian hell.
Anyway I figured I’d just bypass that entire problem by using a search engine which didn’t datamine me, a thing which apparently never occurred to our data security team because Google has sunk its claws into every aspect of our lives. And at first it felt a little bit clunky because it has different searching priorities than Google and I found myself having to relearn subtleties of search term optimization and how to parse results which I never realized were unique to Google in the first place. Meanwhile at home I was using Google and duckduckgo in unequal proportions because I hadn’t really committed to making the switch you know?
And this means I got to be the frog with one foot in the slowly boiling water and one foot in a nice bath of room temperature water for reference as Google rotted from the inside. I don’t know how long this process has been going on and how much I missed. But from 2022 to 2023, Google has gone to hell. It is almost unusable compared to what it was a year ago.
Nonsense pay to play search engine results now consume more than half of the first page, which we all know, but the stuff below that has gotten less and less useful too. It’s gone from duckduckgo being a slightly less powerful search engine (with a bit of a learning curve that compounds the effect) to being objectively head and shoulders better than Google, and it’s not because duckduckgo has gotten better! In just over a year!
I feel almost crazy because I don’t think I would have noticed it if I hadn’t had one foot in and one foot out of Google like I have, simply because of how often we all use Google and how slow that makes the enshittification process from search to search. But it’s real! Google has gotten so much worse! It is eating itself alive!
If I want to buy something, I use Google image search to look at different e.g. novelty doorknobs or flowerpot designs, and that’s fine.
holding my own face in my own hands and screaming “there is no connection without an open heart! you must be brave! you must be honest! you must be true!” in the mirror
