I’m sorry this is a sad post. I wish things were different.
I believe the “golden age” of Internet search is a thing of the past and it’s utility is suspect. Even the most “we’re not evil” search engine is inferring semantics from search terms. I get it – it’s what most people want: figure out what I’m asking.
That’s mostly fine.
Alas, now if I enclose the search terms in quotes, which was once a sacrosanct feature of using Google et al, wherein I would be shown all of the locations that literal text existed on the Internet – all 90 pages of results, instead I’m now led to believe there’s never been anything anywhere on the internet that ever had those two words concatenated.
I can’t fathom the utility of what Google serves up in their results:
How did we get here? This once immensely powerful and valuable utility is incapable of acting as a tool with explicit constraints and instead beholden to masters unnamed.
Cory Doctorow has a fairly informed notion having kept track for a few decades.
unhillbilly 