Internet Search
“Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users…we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers…Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.” (Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (Founders of Google, 1998))
Search results obtained through Google have become practically useless, in my own case. After years of users gaming SEO, automatically scraping or using ML algorithms to generate content, zombie websites (full of stolen cut and pasted content or a generated mishmash) and paid-product-placement now dominate the first few pages of Google results, seriously undermining the effectiveness of Google's Engine when it comes to finding important and actionable information.
A quick overview of the problem seems to indicate that the worst results tend to crop up whenever looking for product/service reviews or "best of" lists of any sort. Another issue: as the public has widened, its desire to query with imprecise natural-language (example: "What is the best restaurant in Paris?") has caused the engine to make assumptions about what (the common denominator of) users mean, rather than taking the input into the search bar in its literal sense.
To me, the problem goes beyond the fact that advertisement space is what Google actually sells. The fact of the matter is that I've been using many ad blockers for over a decade now and that doesn't change the fundamental problem that, for many questions, Google tends towards the unusable now in a way that feels fairly recent. The problems — because they are many — seem systemic beyond the physical and algorithmic structures of the Internet. We can't have a digital space free of commercial opportunism, Spam, and noise because that's not how our economic system is designed.
It's not just Google---the World Wide Web itself is rapidly becoming a defunct protocol, the culmination of a decades-long shift in the Internet's center of mass away from browsers and towards centralized and commercialized apps---from personal web pages to LinkedIn/GitHub/Twitter handles, from the ubiquitous WordPress blogs to YouTube videos and Medium posts, and from forums to Tweets and subreddits.
The useful information on the Web is now concentrated in a few places---Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, etc. When I want reasonable search results, I search there instead of the Web as a whole. (And even many of these services are in the late stages of the Silicon Valley life cycle---desperate monetization and engagement-increasing gimmicks---with uncertain futures.)
Wikipedia, bless its heart, lurches on as a cathedral to early Web's dream of information democratization. It stands as a wonder of the ancient world: incomplete, built from technology few now understand, and reflecting values and priorities that no longer quite align with contemporary culture. But it persists thanks to its inertia and the undeniable sense of awe it invokes even today. (Source: HackerNews)
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