>Not to sound alarmist, but this is beyond Manhattan Project-levels of "maybe this won't turn out well for us."
Yep, but I feel like we're past the event horizon and all we can do for now is enjoy the spaghettification. It already feels like the internet isn't real anymore, Google has become unusable for real search except to find user reviews on reddit or other consumer things, it says it has a billion results but stops at page 40 and everything it shows is from big news sites who all write the same way, the comments on reddit all look the same and if you put an ip address collector in a link in any political sub like r/politics or r/news most clicks on your link will come from AWS servers, Youtube doesn't show any counter culture videos and you have to dig hard to even find videos from people you're subbed to, etc. Now you have politicians supporting this censorship, AI advanced enough to converse with you and deceive you without you realizing it, and tech leaders willing to play ball, so yeah nothing we can do anymore except for taking it.
I still remember when comformist was an insult, now people outscream each other to show who's more of a comformist.
Almost no one goes to the second page. Nobody goes to page 40. As others have pointed out, if you actually do hit page 40, it means you should have refined your search terms. It's not censorship, it's just practicality and common sense.
I've often found that a particular search goes sideways for me, but I think (hope) that's because my standards have increased over time, not because Google has actually gotten worse. Or because there's simply more to choose from.
Interestingly, I still remember one of the searches I used with a friend to validate that Google was better than Alta Vista and Excite: to find out how the level of the ocean is different across the Panama Canal. No other search engine could answer that back in 2000(?). Today I search for:
different levels atlantic pacific Panama canal
And find plenty of information on the subject, regardless of whether I use Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Yahoo!
Swisscows returns reasonable results, if fairly down the page.
Yep, but I feel like we're past the event horizon and all we can do for now is enjoy the spaghettification. It already feels like the internet isn't real anymore, Google has become unusable for real search except to find user reviews on reddit or other consumer things, it says it has a billion results but stops at page 40 and everything it shows is from big news sites who all write the same way, the comments on reddit all look the same and if you put an ip address collector in a link in any political sub like r/politics or r/news most clicks on your link will come from AWS servers, Youtube doesn't show any counter culture videos and you have to dig hard to even find videos from people you're subbed to, etc. Now you have politicians supporting this censorship, AI advanced enough to converse with you and deceive you without you realizing it, and tech leaders willing to play ball, so yeah nothing we can do anymore except for taking it.
I still remember when comformist was an insult, now people outscream each other to show who's more of a comformist.