Google Search? You might think it's getting worse but nobody is accessing the internet with raw URLs any more. Everyone uses search.
You can also say what you want about FB/Instragram doing many bad things but you can still be "friends" with people you know and stay up-to-date with them in a pub/sub style (which didn't really exist outside of christmas cards before social media was thing).
Google/Apple Maps are a great resource still.
Apple produced and still produces smartphones which have massively changed society. Those aren't going anywhere
Smartphones enabled app-based services for banks and other institutions and such with a ubiquity that did not exist in the desktop and dialup era.
Like it's so easy to look at how the world has changed in the last 15 years that I have trouble taking your claims that nothing lasts seriously.
Doesn't help that Google search is increasingly useless, across the board. Text Search sucks (yeah sure, you only got 8 results, I don't believe you stop lying to me Google), Image Search sucks, Maps Search even sucks now it refuses to find a direct ask I know is on the street I'm focused on and instead zoom out to highlight something 10 miles+ away on the other side of the city. YouTube search sucks shows like 3 results then starts showing things you've already watched or are just 8+ million views unrelated viral or gross out videos.
In retrospect it'll be obvious why Google wont be relevant at all in 15 years.
Google search gets worse and worse every year. It's actually becoming painful to search for things now. It gives me nothing but spammy low quality results unless I restrict resuts to reddit and HN and other old school forums where people actually talk about stuff and exchange information.
Google and search in general is definitely worse than 10 years ago. It seems like I can’t find anything useful now. Years ago a few searches could turn up very arcane and niche data. Nowadays it’s like it never even existed.
Google search has gotten worse over the years though. Perhaps that's because the amount of information is growing exponentially. So much of the search results seems spammy these days.
Google is getting worse and worse. It's harder than ever to find real information. All you get is seo scams trying to lour you in and sell you stuff. It's tragic. I miss the old internet.
Eh...Google even 5 years ago was 10x more useful to me than they are now. No exaggeration.
Even Search has become markedly less useful, a common story around here, to the point where even nonbubbled proxied Startpage.com searches are disappointing.
Maps becomes less reliable all the time from a user perspective (in my immediate region, to cover my ass I guess).
Chromecast and YouTube, in general and in conjunction, have become...bloated, buggy, user-tracking-first embarrassments of their original versions...don't get me started on Gmail.... if you're gonna take all my info, at least be good at your services. Especially the ones I pay for.
Has there been any actual analysis showing that Google Search is getting worse nowadays? All I'm seeing are anecdotal reports and feelings, and your link shows that this sentiment has been around for more than a decade.
This general trend of deteriorating UX in widespread services is extremely exhausting and depressing.
The accuracy you could get with Google searches in 2005-2010-ish was amazing. Knowing how to Google was a secret weapon of computer literacy, you could find anything. Now I save links on a small server (I work on many machines) unless something is posted here on HN, as it's one of increasingly few places where I can search and actually find things.
Same story with YouTube, searching for a video there has become an exercise in self flagellation.
I don't know if it was Netflix that started the ball on nonsensical, avant garde categories followed by thousands of auto-playing calls to action, but combined with intrusive ads and obfuscation the day-to-day experience on mainstream internet really sucks the joy out of whatever amazing content that lurks in the cracks of what is actually a set of amazingly marvelous technology.
Search is not as reliable anymore because everything is locked up in an app, walled garden or javascript monstrosity now.
The major players like it that way and marketing/business/finance people seem to only care about the data you get with the app now, though no one but large big data third parties knows what to actually do with it. This movement has worked so hard to commoditize technology/data that only major players can exist, everyone else just sharecropping on platforms and algorithms that they can no longer compete with.
For many companies, web is now an afterthought, de-prioritized. A bit like audio/sound in games, a major part of a product but not enough time is given to it.
We lost touch with why the web was amazing, at the root it was basic text/markup, hypertext protocols, that anyone or any company could compete on, and it was searchable outside the walls. That land has now been claimed by bigger owners, locked down, and able to be leased.
Not everyone is still using it. It's been a few years now since the quality of Google search had fallen to the point where I just stopped using it entirely.
The two biggest problems I’ve seen develop with Google are that:
1. The quality of the search algorithm’s ability to sift through nonsense to find “the good stuff” seems to have gotten progressively worse, and that’s largely fueled by:
2. Google is only really searching the “public” Internet but that’s increasingly a wasteland full of garbage where all the “good stuff” is now behind walled off gardens that Goggle doesn’t report on. For example, rather than finding an amazing article written by experts in a long-standing publication you’ll get some rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate nonsense. Sure there are exceptions to that, but it’s clear what direction the tide is going.
The “good old days of the internet” where the best stuff was just a Google search away seem long gone.
You can also say what you want about FB/Instragram doing many bad things but you can still be "friends" with people you know and stay up-to-date with them in a pub/sub style (which didn't really exist outside of christmas cards before social media was thing).
Google/Apple Maps are a great resource still.
Apple produced and still produces smartphones which have massively changed society. Those aren't going anywhere
Smartphones enabled app-based services for banks and other institutions and such with a ubiquity that did not exist in the desktop and dialup era.
Like it's so easy to look at how the world has changed in the last 15 years that I have trouble taking your claims that nothing lasts seriously.
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