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Comment by gerdesj

"Google has turned into a cesspool."

That's a bit harsh but I agree that it is starting to fail to live up to the expectations I had with Google when it came out and destroyed Altavista in a spectacular shower of sparks.

Could I tender: "uBlacklist" as a stop gap, amongst others as we await Google being given a right old kicking?

Despite being a staunch Arch Linux user I have to deal with rather a lot of MS Windows related stuff. Being able to filter out that bloody awful Microsoft Social thing gets me closer to decent results. The majority of the next 10-100 results will be CnP clones of someone's blog but a human is able to get in reasonably quickly. I'm toying with blocking Stackoverflow and other cough slatwarts to see if results get better for me.

In my opinion: the www has hit a crossroads or perhaps a Spaghetti Junction or a Magic Roundabout for the last five years or so and continuing. However the exits are connected to the entrances on these road systems (take a look at them - they are real junctions. The MR is particularly terrifying but it works really well.)

I still won't use words like cesspool for this but I am increasingly losing my patience over the standard of results from Google. Those featured things (not the Ads - that's fine) at the top which add #blah_blah to the URL to colour search terms yellow is not working for me. The quality of the returns featured in a box are often rubbish too. It would be nice to be able to turn all that stuff off.

I understand that Google are trying to "be" the internet to try and keep the stock ticker pointing north but there seems to be a point when they have overreached themselves and I think that was passed several years ago. I also increasingly feel that Google thinks that it knows best and has removed many choices from their various UIs - that comes across as a bit arrogant.

Many years ago I left Altavista behind for Google. I will move again if I feel I have to. Of course that's not much in the grand scheme of things and I'll probably only take around 100,000 people with me but they have friends - still probably not a big deal.

parent gerdesj 5 years ago

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