Has Congress Codified Trump's...

Meanwhile, the results from Bing made sense, and Yahoo's looked like it just focused on the word "Trump".

Google search got to the position it is in with its accurate results and predictions, along with paying Mozilla and Apple to put Google as the default search engine on their web browsers. But for the last several years -- as Google forces its Bard/Gemini project into everything -- people have been saying that Google's suggestions and results are just getting worse. In fact, searching "why are google's [results|suggestions]" returns some interesting results showing people are not too happy with the way Google is doing things these days.

This process is nothing new. Cory Doctorow referred to this as "enshittification" back in 2023 when writing about TikTok manipulating what people see on their "for you" pages -- curated lists of recommended videos to watch -- by artifically inserting promoted brands or partner's videos. He described what it is with "how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die." Essentially all of big tech are on at least stage 2. Locals.com is on at least stage 2 now too, it seems. X seems to have acquired its stage 2 position from Twitter, and hasn't changed much there since.

Google's results used to be a lot better, but that changed as "personalization" became a thing, and the results, as seen above, are not much better when personalization is turned off. Google wants people to use their Google Bard/Gemini service. Perhaps the quality of Google Search decreasing is to promote Bard/Gemini? But as it stands, Google has a bit more to worry about these days. Especially given its's recent antitrust case loss against the U.S. Department of Justice, there may be some further changes coming to their search, whether good or bad. All most of us can do at this point is hope for the best possible outcome.