Remember the numbers from 10 years ago, how 80% of the search traffic is outbound, and only 20 is internal? I checked my ratio, and it shifted heavily; it’s 50/50 now. Why?
I have collected a big case to prove that we have a much worse search than we had 10+ years ago. But it’s not even disappearing links, endless ads, deplatformization, DRM, or other aspects like moving from 0,38-second search results to waiting for a 20-second Bing chat reply that hurt me personally. It’s just the boredom of the search.
Google search became a touristic cruise - everyone has a typical “user journey,” averaged to median experience, that ML algorithms can measure, improve, and turn into promotions, achievement in CVs for developers, and profits. User problems solved, they all get a smooth and tedious experience. It’s like with games - Doom by version 3 degraded into a tunnel shooter, for which you can write a 20-page walk-through guide.
34 years ago, Star wrote her piece “Power, technology and the phenomenology of conventions: on being allergic to onions,” where she analyzed how McDonalds cannot serve untypical customers who want a burger without onion. Because mass products and mass service omit exceptions, they are expensive to serve.
There are two built-in types of search - looking for cherries (Instagram or YouTube search over feed and recommendations), and goal-oriented looking for prey (what Google used to be and what libraries offer). And sure thing, the first type of search in terms of market share beats the second. Kids, for example, don’t hunt; they eat strawberries. And TikTok delivers this to the convenience of the audience.
Now I am using a ridiculous level of analysis before making any meaningful search. I need to put much effort into taking myself off the tourist route. Still, I rarely have time and energy for this, so my search over the Internet is primarily dull, so I more often look for insights and new ideas in local files and notes, not on the Internet. Dropbox Dash could be a fantastic tool, but the license agreement is so bad. So I am still building a more operable setup (Rewind, maybe?). Feed is not for me; sometimes, I must track and hunt.