Considering the recent revelations about the shady, scummy and unethical business practices by Honey, I can’t say I’m surprised that one of the co-founders is doing more shady shit with their new endeavor.

It’s all good, we both clarified our* thoughts on the matter and to be fair using “ruined” instead of “ruining” or “started to ruin” indicates a completed process or final state instead of a continuous one.

I agree that previously one could construct a search to sort the noise out, but as you stated this has become unfeasible without a sharp increase of queries needed to refine results which has shifted the thought from questioning if Google search is bad to now generally accepted belief - to the point where people are trying to quantify and provide evidence to back up the claim.

This article links to a research paper on the topic: https://www.fastcompany.com/91012311/is-google-getting-worse-this-is-what-leading-computer-scientists-say

*Fixed typo of ‘out’ to ‘our’

Public in this term has nothing to do with intelligence, but rather people outside of companies working on AI/LLMs or doing AI research. It’s why I mentioned it entering the zeitgeist.

I never mentioned a hard cutoff but said they ruined it before LLMs were in use by the general public. Essentially I’m referring to the starting of the degradation of Google’s search which they made conscious decisions that deliberately put profit above all.

Avid Amoeba is right that Google ruined their own search before LLMs entered the public consciousness (this does not mean LLMs didn’t exist before this, but that they were not widely available for the general public to use or became part of the zeitgeist).

If you don’t agree please listen to the Better Offline podcast episode “The Man That Destroyed Google Search”. The episode goes through the rollbacks/changes Google made to their search Algorithm well before AI was commonplace.

Better Offline: CZM Rewind: The Man That Destroyed Google Search: https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/czm-rewind-the-man-that-destroyed-google-search