Yeah if you back too far it sucked. If you go to far toward the present it sucks too. Bell curve of performance which is not what I would have expected, but it’s what we got. Paid optimization has really fucked it.
The peak was during the period you could say “If you search on Google for ___ you get ___.” Back when it was predictable. When they started personalizing results was the moment they sliced society’s brake lines.
I remember…I had a Windows 8.1 machine, I needed to SSH into a Raspberry Pi. No Powershell, no native SSH client, the easiest way to get one was to install PuTTY. So I googled “putty”. All lowercase, search engines sometimes get fucky when you start doing caps and punctuation, etc. I got an entire page of results for and about the TTY client, and nothing about drywall spackle or non-newtonian children’s toys. Because I often search for stuff like that, it made a bet and went all in.
The horrifying part of that is, that innocuous example makes it sound great. I didn’t have to overcome the “why did you name it that?” problem and refine the search by adding “tty client” or something like that. By getting to know me it took me to exactly what I wanted to find. When trying to find utility software, that’s okay. That’s not all people search the web for.
Now it’s hooked up to the “You’re right to call me out on that” machine, we’re sliding down the mountainside upside down on fire.
Yeah if you back too far it sucked. If you go to far toward the present it sucks too. Bell curve of performance which is not what I would have expected, but it’s what we got. Paid optimization has really fucked it.
The peak was during the period you could say “If you search on Google for ___ you get ___.” Back when it was predictable. When they started personalizing results was the moment they sliced society’s brake lines.
I remember…I had a Windows 8.1 machine, I needed to SSH into a Raspberry Pi. No Powershell, no native SSH client, the easiest way to get one was to install PuTTY. So I googled “putty”. All lowercase, search engines sometimes get fucky when you start doing caps and punctuation, etc. I got an entire page of results for and about the TTY client, and nothing about drywall spackle or non-newtonian children’s toys. Because I often search for stuff like that, it made a bet and went all in.
The horrifying part of that is, that innocuous example makes it sound great. I didn’t have to overcome the “why did you name it that?” problem and refine the search by adding “tty client” or something like that. By getting to know me it took me to exactly what I wanted to find. When trying to find utility software, that’s okay. That’s not all people search the web for.
Now it’s hooked up to the “You’re right to call me out on that” machine, we’re sliding down the mountainside upside down on fire.
Yeah, I used to type “putty download”, click “I’m feeling lucky”, and go.
It worked 100% of the time. I wouldn’t try it these days, even if I needed putty.
Well how prominent will plumber’s putty or silly putty have the word Download on a page?