At one time my job could not unreasonably be described as searching a particular Tech manufacturers web site, and reading the results. It was a frustrating business. For example, I often found myself with a document fragment in hand and being unable to find the original using either the vendors own search or public search engines.
Then came Google. Total transformation. A decently selected phrase from any document always found it. After the *first* time I tried it I used google for every search. Of course I mostly searched for documents I did not have part of and it worked very well for that too.
Over the last few years I felt that google search was degraded. It is of course hard to pin down but I was pretty sure it was badly broken. My long experience of google search made me somewhat confident of my judgement.
I recently found an explanation. It seems that Google execs were concerned that they were going to miss their ad revenue targets for the quarter and they had a crisis meeting. They realised that if they degraded the search results returned, that people would be forced to search again exposing them to more ads — so they did it. Now of course they can never go back to it working.
Cory Doctorow calls this process of degrading user utility in furtherance of other Corporate goals Ensh1ttification (usually spelled without a digit). I find it worth keeping an eye on his writings.
I had to use TinyURL because the actual URL contains spelling that is too indelicate for the sensibilities of pprune.
(digit "1" substituted to protect pprune)
"The American Dialect Society selected ensh1ttification as its 2023 word of the year. The Macquarie Dictionary named ensh1ttification as its 2024 word of the year, selected by both the committee's and people's choice votes for only the third time since the inaugural event in 2006."
https://tinyurl.com/5n8635uw The specific process by which Google ensh1ttified its search
https://tinyurl.com/228kxmhr Google’s ensh1ttification memos
https://x.com/doctorow