I use the bang “!m” to force Google maps
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Look. I read a bunch of things here and I haven’t read the Zitron article but I will.
The headline takeaway is wrong though. One power hungry executive did not ruin Google search. It’s been enshittened since 2003 when they were preparing for their IPO and signalled to investors that they would discard search reliability by dropping the page rank number and moving to ever more secret and unreliable approaches.
As a couple of promising young researchers explained, the difference between their approach and others was they were based on the Science Citation Index approach and advertising was fundamentally incompatible with search.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016975529800110X
Promising young guys those, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I wonder what happened to them?
I gave the paywallwd link but there are hundreds of copies of it online if you want. Appendices are enlightening.
It’s not this guy, it’s not Sundar Pichai, it’s not even Eric Schmidt that ruined Google. There is no magical class of engineer not managers that is enshittening tech. The rot is within right from the beginning.
An “idealist” in a technical discipline is a fucking Ayn Rand living shithead.
Saying you want to get into the US global tech industry to make the world a better place is as cynical and risible a statement now as saying you want to go to Wall Street for that reason.
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Surely that depends on whether you’re going to Wall Street with a few enthusiastic friends and a supply of molotov cocktails.
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Now I’m imagining a bunch of hipsters with horn rimmed glasses, beards, and tight pants in a coffee shop making positronic brains…
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Yup, Google really is unusable now.
Just now I wanted to post a follow up to the story I posted in the buildings thread while it was ongoing: the fire in the Copenhagen Børse. I have read Danish and German articles that had information that I thought people might be interested in, such as that almost all of the artwork was saved due to passers-by and conservators from the nearby National Museum or the fact that the facade collapsed in the fire (which hadn’t happened yet when I posted the original article while the fire was ongoing).
I’m currently in Germany, so all my Google results are in German. It used to be enough to search in the language in which one wanted the answers to be written to get answers in a specific language. However, Google “helpfully” translates my English query into German and only returns German results. There is no way to limit results to one language in the search interface, either. If I add “English” to the query, I get the same German results plus a helpful Google translate box translating my English query into German.
I gave up and used Duckduckgo. It gives you a drop down list of countries you can limit your search to.
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It’s been like that in Japan for a long time now, but it used to be that you could get around it by typing in google.co.uk. Now that doesn’t work and it’s hard to find anything about other countries.
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vpn maybe? ( though that seems like a ridiculous step to have to take. )
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