Search Engine Wars

How the fuck did google fumble so hard

Idk if yall have tried searching google recently but it’s actually such a goddamn nightmare that it makes me spiral. first of all u get absolutley cockslapped by their new fucking ai feature that gives u an answer that makes sense like 43% of the time. then u have to scroll past 72 sponsored links that u cant trust bc they’re literally paying to be at the top of the search. For me, if you’re a site that is advertising, i immediately get pissed off by that shit and scroll past. So at this point at least half the first page of results i’ve totally skipped over. And then there’s the little drop down section that has a bunch of adjacent questions to your initial query but doesn’t answer your actual question. And then u finally see a site that has a text description under it that has the majority of ur answer but the preview ends with “…” before the full thing, literally edging u to oblivion.

So u finally get into the website that you KNOW has ur answer somewhere bc u literally saw it on the preview. You’re almost fucking there and are literally overflowing with anticipation and precum. But wait, u now have to go through literally 16 paragraphs of text to get to the one excerpt that u need. So much of the time i have to resort to using CTRL-F to get the answer to something like “Barney Stinson body count”. Way too much work for a search like that. Half the time i give up.

Idk if bing is better for niche searches like that bc i refuse to use that fucking dumbass site made for fossils and imma be real idk if other web search engines exist so i think we’re stuck with google for shit like that.

However, there’s certain searches that google is fucking cooked for. Restaurants, activities, DIYs, food recipes, a specific video that you saw years ago and just got reminded of, etc.

Literally every time u try to look up a recipe on google u have to pore through a 60,000 word article from Almond Mommy Granola Gretchen’s Kitchen Corner where she talks about how roasted chicken takes her back to her first eating disorder and how she got thru it and named her children Karsyn, Kayleigh, and Kimberleigh (KKK). Fuck u gretchen all i wanted to know was what temperature to heat my oven to so i could make my stupid ass chicken breast i got from kroger. Tiktok is so much better for anything food related its not even funny.

I fear i may be later on this phenomena than most because of the fact that im pick me and never got into scrolling tiktok (im a ig reel and twitter goblin), but nowadays whenever i need a restaurasnt rec, or food recipe (ya daddy cooks) i go straight to the tok. It’s perfect, the results are up to date, i get visuals from it, and i dont have to listen to some dumbass epilogue before i get what i need.

Activities and date ideas, go to tiktok. if you go to google you have to take advice from some 44 year old virgin on yelp about what to do. Fun fact, no one who posts on yelp fucks, ever. But google still pushes those losers to the top of the search results for whatever reason.

Use youtube for DIYs or finding an obscure video, their search algo for that is actually crazy. You can just type a quote from the video and youtube fucking spawns ur video from the ether its awesome.

Now, some of you may think that instagram has comparable pull to tok due to the fact that reels are basically the same as tok. You’re wrong. First of all reels are funnier. Second of all ig search feature is dogshit. Also i think tok just has way more content so its more encompassing.

Twitter: not calling it X because im not a mongoloid. twitter genuinely may have the worst search feature of all time. This is me searching up don on the night of the debate

Ya no for sure i want to look up dongji island and also donations goals z event laink. idek what the fuck either of those things are. This isnt even elon’s fault the twitter search feature has been horrible as long as I’ve had an account (2012 btw no big deal or anything).

Back to the main point though, google hasn’t made any real improvements to their search feature and have just been relying on the fact that everyone uses them and just coasted by. sometimes that shit works but in this case they’re legit losing a huge chunk of users to the china app. probably has a lot to do with the fact that big tech jobs are literally fake and just want to coddle CS degree holders from berkeley with a TC of 600k to do 12 hours of work a week as they spend the rest of their time drinking matcha and playing pickleball on their respective tech campi (plural of campus).

Im probably gonna write a stack about tech jobs that is inherently born out of an insane level of jealousy so ill stop my rant here. Google sucks ass. Thanks