Google Search Decay, Internet Rot | Esoteric Internet

The decline of Google Search from 'feeling lucky' to 'finding nothing'.

Is Google Search in decline? The question has become so common it is an almost self-fulfilling statement. People do sense the Google of today is not the Google Search of a decade ago. The Internet has always been a library without a catalog, but now even the tools the casual browser uses are not as powerful as they once were. The fear is the Internet is growing into a series of interlinked walled gardens. Machine-generated noise will overtake human-created signal due to the failure of search engines such as google. The Internet is a paradox of being very short lived and lasting forever. Electronic information and how humans access it has changed a lot since 1998.

The lifespan of a webpage is a fragile thing. The Internet is after all an overgrown encyclopedia of electric pages and videos. The infrastructure (binding) connecting the entire multitude though is in constant decay. The decay has become even more obvious after thirty years of the mass Internet. How it truly dried up from a deep to a more shallow Internet though? The persistence and entropy of information is the basic ecology of data and online communities. It moves towards either order or chaos. The worse result for a dead Internet would be an empty Internet.

What will this journey to the end of the Internet find then?

#Google - #googlesearch - #Linkrot
—————
Credits:
—————
Video Sources (Support the creators/uploaders):
—————
Music:
Konami Kukeiha Club (Snatcher OST) - "Pleasure of Tension (Snatcher) / Resistance (SD Snatcher) - MIDI Power Version" (00:00-03:24)
Ben Elliot - "Midnight Dream Oil" (03:24-03:40)
Konami Kukeiha Club (Snatcher OST) - "One Night In Neo Kobe City - Snatcher - MIDI Power Version" (03:40-06:40)
Konami Kukeiha Club (Snatcher OST) - "Theme of Jamie - Snatcher - MIDI Power Version" (06:40-13:35)
Konami Kukeiha Club (Snatcher OST) - "Faded Memories - Snatcher - MIDI Power Version" (13:35-17:11)
Konami Kukeiha Club (Snatcher OST) - "Twilight of Neo Kobe City - Snatcher - MIDI Power Version: (17:11-26:59)
Konami Kukeiha Club (Snatcher OST) - "Game Over - Snatcher - Sega CD"" (26:59-31:19)
Konami Kukeiha Club (Snatcher OST) - "Plato's Cavern - Snatcher - Sega CD" (31:19-34:25)
Konami Kukeiha Club (Snatcher OST) - "Beyond Sorrows - Snatcher - Sega CD: (34:25-36:56)
Konami Kukeiha Club (Snatcher OST) - "Theme of Katrina - Snatcher - MIDI Power Version" (36:56-40:19)
Ben Elliot - "Journey To Paris" (40:19-40:51)
—————
All copyrighted media, images, and music respective owner(s).
—————
—————
+ Thanks For Watching

[lv]

youtube search is also garbage now. i search a thing and i get literally like 6 relevant search results and the rest of the page is dedicated to nonsense or videos ive already seen. as if its actively trying to prevent me from searching new things

[SixTough]

Have you noticed how bad youtube search is? It lists maybe 5 videos and then gives you "recommendations".

[UnitSeen]

One of the worst things is that your results are _personalised._ You tell someone what to search for and they can't find the webpage that's at the top for you. No longer delivering what you asked for, but what it thinks you want.

[bren]

Yea. It's really sad. The internet is dying, everything is curated, censored, manipulated, monitized and sold out.

[RealDevastatia]

I searched for a YouTube channel by its exact name the other day, and YouTube search kept redirecting me to results for a more generic query that differed from what I typed in by one letter. The channel I wanted wasn't in those results. I finally had to dig into my browser history to find the channel I wanted.

[vonbruhh]

man I miss the old web. Forums and blogs about anything you would like to know about, no censorship, no centralization of information on mainstream sites and social networks. Everything was natural and organic.

[PolyesterMoustache]

I remember in like 2008 you could verbatim search on google and find exactly what you were after. Even like a specific youtube comment

[melody]

The worst problem I’m seeing is google’s complete inability to accept “weird” searches. It takes what people search for most often and gets perfect results for that, then any slight modification and you get NOTHING.


Blue chair - you get tons of blue chairs of every kind
Red chair - still blue chairs
chair that is not blue - blue chairs


Like that

[hope-cat]

I hate that they force trending topics onto you unless you log in and choose to opt out of them. I don't like the fear mongering those trending topics can create, and I don't feel like being distracted anymore than I already am on a day-to-day basis.

[KenderGuy]

My favorite is when I'm looking up a technical issue, and every answer is 8+ years out of date
so when I filter for "this year" (not last year, or 365 days, so early in the year you gotta specify the month of last year)
the results get completely randomized. It's like, because I'm not part of the herd asking the same question, my results are intentionally obfuscated
So instead I join a Linux Discord server, or other troubleshooting community, or simply give up and search Reddit instead, and I hate Reddit

[migoreng]

the death of blogs really is sad to me, i used to be active in niche communities back in late 2000s, very early 2010s and when twitter became more popular, i already noticed a shift in clicks - people prefered to just read tweets from a person vs their longer blog posts. tumblr still is going strong but for longest time it was very graphics oriented (gifs, photo edits etc) but now it's way more about memes and long form posts are there but not really on the forefront. tumblr's search engine is terrible and makes finding useful posts so hard... like there was a post about alternate search engines that pull out results like hobby blogs from 2007 that i can't find 💀

[thebreakfastmenu]

Google and by extension Youtube's search functions have been so bad the last couple years that it aggravates me at least once a day when I can't find what I'm looking for, even if I type in exactly what it is I'm searching. Youtube's music search is especially terrible.
Even when doing some online shopping, I get results from counterfeit products half the time before I get a result for the genuine thing I'm looking to buy. And that's assuming the "genuine product" isn't on some sketchy website. And the ads and sponsored content is atrocious, irrelevant, and often contains websites and products and links that have malware or are outright scams.
On mobile, Google can't ever get my location right. It can be hours away, or the next town over. But I'd venture a guess that at least 99% of my searches from mobile are in the wrong town. Sometimes state.
So I often don't click on things after a search because Google just doesn't give me what I search for.

[userequaltoNull]

I barely even use Google anymore, I find that asking questions even in small forums gets more, better, and faster results.

[askhowiknow]

Google doesn’t do what it used to do. I can’t even force keywords anymore. It arbitrarily removes them from the query for some reason and no amount of plus signs or quotes can get around it.

[BlockBusterHomeVideo]

I compulsivley google everything and have for years, I just cannot stand not knowing the answer to a question, but ive noticed a SHARP decline, and especially the last 6 months have felt like its got dementia, most searches dont even almost answer my question until i repeat the key words a few times, on the 23rd of December 2023 I googled "gunshot slang" but couldnt even locate a single result in the spam but "gunshot slang slang slang slang" delivered on the first result

[SiliconChipCookie]

I miss the web surfing days of yore. It was a fun experience as a kid. Now we just go where people are, to the road heavily trodden by. Back then, you can discover different things and curiously strange things. Now it’s all just billboards you see while driving through the finitely yet vast deserts of the internet.

[Avvy]

With the way Reddit is also curating their content, soon adding +Reddit to the search query would be useless as well

[LividImp]

Googles search results are absolutely at an all time low. I'm old enough that I was a web developer before Google even existed. In the late 90s Yahoo was in the same position that Google is today. Yahoo's search had been the best, but was quickly rendered useless by the SEO jackals. When Google came along with a better search algorithm, it killed Yahoo over the course of just a few years. Yahoo was (much like Google now) too arrogant to see themselves losing market to a tiny upstart that advertised on SF's NPR station. Google's usurper isn't here yet, but when it comes Google is going to fall as hard as Yahoo did. Because much like Yahoo they are ignoring the problem.

[Elias___]

It's crazy how the advertising industry continues to make the worst choices for their success and humanity. Everyone hates ads everyone avoid ads yet the advertisers double down and make ads worse for everyone and everything.

[stackflow]

>search with quotes
>get results that literally say they don't contain the quoted text

THEN WHY ARE YOU SHOWING ME FDJGHSDK