'Google says I'm a dead physicist': is the biggest search engine broken?

I renovated and reopened an old theater in San Francisco years ago. Google maps still lists my theater as “Chinatown's 1925 cinematic home to kung fu & opera films is closed but reopens for film festivals.” Which has not been accurate for a decade. I’ve claimed the location and updated everything I can of the Google maps description but this seems editorialized and there’s no place to edit it or mark it as invalid. I’ve tried reporting the listing multiple times but there’s no way to get a response from a human or get any changes made.

I know it’s not that related to the article but Google is broken and so many little ways, it’s not surprising it adds up to a slowly crumbling quality overall.

It has been intentionally vandalized.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Yes, definitely. This is the reason the summary box is telling you to eat glue - that’s what the top search results say, and the LLM dutifully summarizes.

Google has fucked up search so badly it is fucking up their AI ambitions. Very karmic.

It’s probably basically google-bombing for the modern era underneath. But the point is that search is now so broken that it can be pretty trivially google-bombed in 2024, at the exact moment the world needs it for RAG.

> Nayak apologised, saying the panels were created automatically using algorithms and sometimes they messed up: “These are the kinds of things we’re constantly improving.”

A process or invention may be "constantly improving" by small and meaningless amounts without ever reaching a point that offsets the damage it does over its lifetime.

"Our toaster now uses 5% less asbestos, and we're passing on the savings to you!"

I once switched to Google, one day in '98, when they were basically ad-free, with good results.

I once switched away from Google, one day in '23, when the first seven results for many queries were 'sponsored', and shitty.

These days, I let LLMs answer most of my questions. They are sufficiently easy to use. For regular surfing, I rely on Kagi. Both services are pay for play, but my lifetime is not unlimited, and can be spent better than shifting through advertisements.

Yes, and it’s been broken for a long time. The crossroads of siting on one’s laurels and conflict of interest have resulted in Google’s results not being particularly good.

The only reason they remain on top (IMO) is that the dynamics of search, how information is published, and how people discover new information are rapidly changing.

This is why I help my family and friends switch to ddg.gg https://spreadprivacy.com/is-duckduckgo-a-good-search-engine...

I depended a lot on Google search. Since Google start moving to the dark side, I was wondering when could I remove the dependency. It turned out the dependency removed itself.

I have a relatively uncommon name. Way back in the beginning Google thought I was an 18th century English criminal. Then for a while in the 2010s I gave a shit about SEO and got my own website ranked first for my name. Then I quit caring and last time I checked, Google thinks I'm an 18th century criminal again.

Broken if you're trying to search for things, working great if you're an advertiser buying traffic.

Yes, it's broken.

But when Google was young and wonderful, the web was a relative paradise, and rich with truthful (or at least well-intended) information.

Now, the web is mostly an SEO-optimized, Terminal-Stage Capitalist hellscape. Even the very best talents and intentions would find it extremely difficult to create a "good" search engine these days.

I mostly use non-Google search now. Even when it ain't better, I can imagine that I'm boosting the "people looking for less-sucky-than-Google search" stats.

https://you.com/search should be more popular.

My condolences.

> When I searched my name, there it was: a picture of my smiling face next to the text “Tom Faber was a physicist and publisher, and he was a university lecturer at Cambridge for 35 years”.

Good grief. Pal, you've got a name with 8 identifying alphanumeric characters. Of course it is going to collide with other identities on the openly-indexed internet.

Even a stopped clock will be right twice per day. Google will be right about this eventually.