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@futurebird So, I'd been asking people "does Google search seem less good to you?" since about the turn of the millennium, and largely stopped bothering as of 10 or 15 years ago. The problems you are noting now are ones I have had for two decades or more.

Look, a major mental health agency here wound up getting in trouble to the extent the case wound up before the Supreme Court. I learned of this when a friend emailed me a link to the Boston Globe story. Within two years, all the news coverage had basically disappeared from Google Search.

Maybe they hired a firm to erase it from the internet. Or maybe Google Search just sucks that way.

I knew someone who was murdered. Made headline news. It was never solved. Searching her name no longer brings up the news coverage of her murder. Don't think anybody paid to scrub the internet of her name.

There was a profile, I think in the NYT, about an MD with a novel approach to treating a neurological condition...

@futurebird Also! While I am complaining about this:

There was a point where when I searched on my blog URL, I got N (a small integer) results, but if I searched on "[blog URL] site:WordPress.com" I would get N+M results, including, yes, WordPress blog results that really did mention my blog, and really should have been returned in the result set of the first search.

That's the point at which I knew Google Search had become useless.

@futurebird There's a reason Google Search sucks that most people don't know about. (Actually I think there's several, but one that is not remotely on the radar of people like the sort on Mastodon is...)

There is a profound class divide in internet users. Originally this was framed "digital haves and have nots". While that is still there, it has been eclipsed by another dichotomy it's morphed into: People of the Desktop and People of the Phone.

People of the Desktop are people who learned to use the internet on an "actual computer". This population winds up understanding the internet very differently than the other. The socioeconomic factors of who gets access to desktop/laptop computers mean that this is also a filter for other things like likelihood to have a college education and being comfortable with abstractions.

People of the Desktop tend to retain access to desktops, because they find phones wanting, and know what they're missing.

People of the Phone don't.

@futurebird People of the Phone constitute an absolutely HUGE population of internet users. They have very poor understandings of all aspects of technology. They are disproportionately less educated in general and less comfortable (or absolutely not at all comfortable) with abstractions.

I worked for seven years at a clinic where the vast majority of my patients were People of the Phone. Because I work with people with ADHD, and help them leverage technology to support executive function, I had occasion to actually sit with people and see how they used their phones.

Y'all....

@futurebird People of the Phone usually have no concept of any distinction between their phone, their phone's UI, Google, Google Search, the browser, the search bar, and websites.

For them it's one big seamless mass. Which, of course, Google has long been striving to make it! Google has been trying to deliver them an "internet appliance" user experience, where one doesn't have to understand anything (allegedly) to use the internet.

Consequently, People of the Phone use Google Search kind of like an app manager. They want to put a one word search string in and get the obvious "app" back. If they put in "pizza" they want the nearest pizzaria to come up, not a page about how to make pizza or an article explaining what pizza is or a history of it.

@futurebird So the crappy kinds of search results we see today? That's what success looks like for Google, meeting the needs of People of the Phone.

@siderea @futurebird perhaps in addition to this or related to it are people who use voice assistants and those who don’t.

I basically never do because with my frustrations at search these days I have little trust that a voice assistant is going to offer anything sensible for any real use I can imagine.

But I know there are people who passionately feel there is a value and use for voice assistants and use them (on their phones and in their homes/offices)

@killfile @siderea @futurebird

I don't know how important the cultural divide is or isn't, but I think there's a definite consensus that laptop and desktop computers *changed* as a result of expectations that had been set by phones. Windows 10 was a huge step in that direction, and Windows 11 is even worse, but this shift is even older that that and even made its way into the Open Source world, as illustrated by the great Ubuntu / Amazon controversy of 2012 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-amazon-ads-and-data-leaks

@dalias

I would sincerely hope that you wouldn't attempt to decide on the veracity of my assertions based on whether or not you *like* them or think them politically advantageous. Be fully skeptical, do not take my word on it, and go seek out other information, on your own schedule, that either confirms or denies it.

Like, if you have someone you know who never learned internet at the desktop, chat 'em up, get them to pull out their phone and show you how they do things on it.

@futurebird