I’ve taken to asking my coworkers if they feel like “search has gotten worse over the years” to my surprise most have said… no.

The only exception was the other CS teacher. How do your friends feel about how well search works? I feel like I used to know where everything was and someone rearranged my house— it’s not really my house of course but yeah.

@futurebird So, I'd been asking people "does Google search seem less good to you?" since about the turn of the millennium, and largely stopped bothering as of 10 or 15 years ago. The problems you are noting now are ones I have had for two decades or more.

Look, a major mental health agency here wound up getting in trouble to the extent the case wound up before the Supreme Court. I learned of this when a friend emailed me a link to the Boston Globe story. Within two years, all the news coverage had basically disappeared from Google Search.

Maybe they hired a firm to erase it from the internet. Or maybe Google Search just sucks that way.

I knew someone who was murdered. Made headline news. It was never solved. Searching her name no longer brings up the news coverage of her murder. Don't think anybody paid to scrub the internet of her name.

There was a profile, I think in the NYT, about an MD with a novel approach to treating a neurological condition...

@futurebird ...which entailed "microdoses" of melatonin. Well, you can no longer put "microdose" into Google search and not get a flood of results about psychedelics.

All this is why I am so hardcore about bookmarkers, and save every damn thing I might want to see again some day.

@futurebird Also! While I am complaining about this:

There was a point where when I searched on my blog URL, I got N (a small integer) results, but if I searched on "[blog URL] site:WordPress.com" I would get N+M results, including, yes, WordPress blog results that really did mention my blog, and really should have been returned in the result set of the first search.

That's the point at which I knew Google Search had become useless.

@futurebird There's a reason Google Search sucks that most people don't know about. (Actually I think there's several, but one that is not remotely on the radar of people like the sort on Mastodon is...)

There is a profound class divide in internet users. Originally this was framed "digital haves and have nots". While that is still there, it has been eclipsed by another dichotomy it's morphed into: People of the Desktop and People of the Phone.

People of the Desktop are people who learned to use the internet on an "actual computer". This population winds up understanding the internet very differently than the other. The socioeconomic factors of who gets access to desktop/laptop computers mean that this is also a filter for other things like likelihood to have a college education and being comfortable with abstractions.

People of the Desktop tend to retain access to desktops, because they find phones wanting, and know what they're missing.

People of the Phone don't.

@futurebird People of the Phone constitute an absolutely HUGE population of internet users. They have very poor understandings of all aspects of technology. They are disproportionately less educated in general and less comfortable (or absolutely not at all comfortable) with abstractions.

I worked for seven years at a clinic where the vast majority of my patients were People of the Phone. Because I work with people with ADHD, and help them leverage technology to support executive function, I had occasion to actually sit with people and see how they used their phones.

Y'all....

@futurebird People of the Phone usually have no concept of any distinction between their phone, their phone's UI, Google, Google Search, the browser, the search bar, and websites.

For them it's one big seamless mass. Which, of course, Google has long been striving to make it! Google has been trying to deliver them an "internet appliance" user experience, where one doesn't have to understand anything (allegedly) to use the internet.

Consequently, People of the Phone use Google Search kind of like an app manager. They want to put a one word search string in and get the obvious "app" back. If they put in "pizza" they want the nearest pizzaria to come up, not a page about how to make pizza or an article explaining what pizza is or a history of it.

@siderea @futurebird I'm on the fence about whether this claim is accurate or whether it's a narrative for tech folks to feel superior to everyone else.

@dalias
> a way for tech folk to feel superior
That danger is there, it is tempting mind-candy. But
@siderea does seem to be talking about big tech depriving people of a clear view of tech possibilities.

@strypey had thoughts on this, that "People of the Phone" view tech as just another convenience.

Somehow, we blame Google for how it made Android but not Apple for how it made iOS. Did Apple do it right, as it claims?

@futurebird