LIVING IN A POST-GOOG WORLD

Things on the web move quickly. However, as I am no longer at the age where I rush to adopt every faddish technology (and have no one pushing such things my way) things tend to move when there's a deliberate effort on my part. I periodically check for useful utilities to replace my aging ones, but unless they are showing signs of deficiency, there's no need to pick up $shiny_new_thing just because. That's dumb.

But some people like to play that game, and more power to 'em. I'm in the business of having several pieces of kit readily available that just fucking work. My days of spending entire weekends trying to get some random piece of hardware or software to work are well and truly over, and they aren't coming back. I'm too old (and wise, I'd argue) for that shit.

Anyway, consider that a random preamble for the actual subject matter of the post. Back in.... well, the late 90s I guess, search was in a decidedly bad place. People were desperate to find anything on the web, and resorted to link pages, webrings, you name it. Discoverability was low, and our curiosity was high. Eventually people adapted and metadata-based search engines began to dominate, but this was a slow burn. There were plenty of people who used Lycos, Yahoo, or whatever they were familiar with, instead of dogpile or Hotbot. It was a fucking mess, for sure.

One day I stumbled on a link that took me to a Google search (which was completely unheard of in my cohort), and I was immediately drawn to how quickly the page loaded, and in general how good the results looked. I wasn't blown away, but I made a mental note to come back in a few days and give it another shot. My curiosity had been piqued. The next time I tried Google, I was hooked. I never once looked back. The results were clean, concise, and fast as hell. Google also indexed pages faster than anyone else in the business, and you didn't have to pay anyone to do it, or resort to using shady services that would submit your page(s) to two dozen search engines, shotgun style.

For the next 13 or so years, it was pure bliss. Google search got so fucking good that, around 2012-2013, every single search I put in was correctly satisfied by the first or second link on the results page, every time. It was ridiculous -- borderline magic. Every. Single. Search. I could find anything that was publicly indexed with minimal effort. I felt empowered, which was really damn weird considering how corporate entities are universally shit-heels, and Google had gone public years earlier (to my great despair).

But.... all good things must come to pass, and so it was that Google announced in ~2013 that they were going "mobile first" and optimizing their search results for the great unwashed masses that simply wanted to use their phones to shitpost on facebook or twitter. I knew this was the end; what I couldn't foretell was the speed at which the enshittification would occur. It took a minute, to use the parlance of our times. Eventually the search pages were cluttered with things that were of no interest to me: youtube links, twitter feeds (for fucks sake, you miserable cunts. FFS.), and blog spam. There was no open effort made to remedy this.

This continued unabated, the search results waning in quality with each passing year, until the results themselves became unreliable. For the first time since 2005 or so, I actually began to wonder if I'd be able to find things, when I went searching for them. What a revolting development, to be certain! Over the years I had experimented with alternative search engines, but they were all positively primitive compared to the pre-mobile Google experience. There was no reason whatsoever to consider them.

Until today. After the right and proper bloviating I've just executed, it was all to explain that I've been using DDG for the last week, and while the results are (as I understand it) primarily derived from bing (just mentioning a Microsoft technology can be enough to induce vomiting, so I have to tread carefully), they.... don't suck anymore? Frankly, I'm a little shocked at that, and after doing some comparison searches, it's clearly outperforming desktop Goog searches without breaking a sweat. I'm speechless.

Also, for the avoidance of doubt, I must confess I own MSFT stock, so I find this amusing. Microsoft is perhaps (read: certainly) the corporate entity that I loathe beyond all others, but I have a policy of investing in corps that make my life miserable, under the theory that as they are assuredly going to ruin my world regardless, I may as well get something out of their asshattery. 

So I've spent a week in a post-Mozilla and post-Goog world. And you know what? It's better. The king(s) are dead. Long live the king(s). What a fucking joke the web is.