Google's enshittification memos
Google's enshittification memos
When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.
When it comes to Google, I find it completely absurd how people are OK with a giant ad / spy company saving and profiting from their private searches. Their entire lives, every sensitive query, stored in their databases. Why is this accepted? Completely shocking actually.
They are basing their entire profit model on spying on users privacy and selling it to advertisers. Doesn't that make you sick to your stomach?
How do you look stuff up?
I use duckduckgo but wouldn’t return good results sometimes.
Big fan of kagi.com. rock-solid privacy policy (seriously, I am one of those guys who read them all, this is probably the best I have seen), excellent search results and very nice features (lensed to search in specific contexts only - say, programming, up/down ranking of sites as you prefer, automatic rewriting of urls, custom bangs). The cons, is that it's a paid service. I am personally a customer since November 2022, never looked back.
Damn. This makes so much sense but is also so disheartening.
They had essentially a perfect product and a total monopoly over their market. Apparently, even that isn’t enough for some executives.
What’s even the point of trying to double or triple dip at that point? Maybe they made more money in the decade they got away with it, but the product is considerably worse than it used to be and now their dirty laundry is out in the open.
Shit’s depressing.
It would be nice if a monopoly would lead to the user getting the best possible product, but that is unfortunately not the case. Companies rise and fall through the enshittification and other companies have the opportunity to fill this gap. There will always be someone to fill the gaps. And is that so bad when companies only have a limited life span and new companies get a chance and bring in fresh air?
Well that was a good read.
Pure enshittification, squeezing both sides. I had no idea on this part but that would explain a lot, fuckin wild
Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads – because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).
Here we see surpluses being taken away from both end-users and business customers – that is, searchers and advertisers. For searchers, it doesn't matter how much you refine your query, you're still going to get crummy search results because there's an unkillable, hidden search term stuck to your query, like a piece of shit that Google keeps sticking to the sole of your shoe.
But for advertisers, this is also a scam. They're paying to be matched to users who search on a brand name, and you didn't search on that brand name. It's especially bad for the company whose name has been appended to your search, because Google has a protection racket where the company that matches your search has to pay extra in order to show up overtop of rivals who are worse matches. Both the matching company and those rivals have given Google a credit-card that Google gets to bill every time a user searches on the company's name, and Google is just running fraudulent charges through those cards.
It's terrifying that the only way to win these days is to just never have been born. Even if you don't play, someone you interact with online is and you get taken in that way.
All to sell you ads for things you don't need or care about.
Glad I came back to read this one after passing over it earlier.