• apotheotic (she/her)@beehaw.org
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    5 days ago

    Well with all the money they pumped into ai they could have instead worked on making their search engine better at returning relevant and accurate results. Then when people clocked the fact that ai was giving them 50% bullshit, they would realise the juice is worth the squeeze with actually getting accurate info

    • BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk
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      5 days ago

      Google hit as big a market share as they could, so their way to grow the search machine was to increase the market.

      How do you increase the market? By pushing the most relevant links further back, so people have to go to page 2, 3 or 4. So it’s unfortunately the best financial decision, short term, to enshittify their main product

      • EliteCloneMike@lemmy.zip
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        4 days ago

        Their main audience isn’t the end user, but the shareholders. All that matters is they can say they are still “growing”. Which is why they don’t care about making things worse. Same goes for Meta. If something succeeds, it’s a happy accident secondary to the goal. Each of these companies did have a good initial idea that was fundamentally good and better than the competition, but ultimately will not last forever for reasons like this. Something else will eclipse them in time. History is full of corpses the likes of these companies. Recent tech ones include IBM, HP, and Microsoft. All big (or moderately big) players today sure, but not what they were at their prime and not close to the “main” ones anymore.

        • BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk
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          4 days ago

          I do not agree Microsoft is in that category, but they’re mainly a B2B player today.

          A little less than 20% of revenue per earnings '25 was from consumers - The rest for business offerings. I’m curious to hear which selection of companies you consider the main ones. Because Microsoft is still top 5 within Tech when it comes to power.

    • Auli@lemmy.ca
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      5 days ago

      Very true search is basically useless these days especially for technical stuff.

    • MagicShel@lemmy.zip
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      5 days ago

      making their search engine better at returning relevant and accurate results

      This isn’t the goal. The goal is monetization. Giving good results is useless to them if they don’t make piles of money doing it.

      Which ironically means you’re getting 50% bullshit from Google as well, but AI delivers it much faster.

      (I’m agreeing with you if that isn’t clear.)