Google Slush

I'm on my way to the airport right about now, so I've set this post to publish automatically. I'll be blogging on Sunday (one day only!) from Dublin.

I heard an interesting discussion on the "QAnon Anonymous" podcast the other day. The podcast, despite its name, is very wide-ranging and goes beyond merely talking about QAnon. The hosts discuss related conspiracies, the peculiarities of right-wing politics, historic incidents of misinformation, manipulation of information and many other topics. I love this podcast. It's a little like sitting around with friends in a college dorm room and bantering about the world's craziness over too many beers.

Anyway, the hosts were talking about Google in a recent episode titled, "Why Google Sucks Now." They started from the proposition that Google has deteriorated, returning less useful search results than it used to, largely because money has corrupted the original Google algorithm. What was once designed to return high-quality search results now returns results that are paid for or otherwise gamed by professional "optimizers," feeding us a lot of junk.

I hope Google doesn't cancel my blog for saying this, but I must admit I find Google results pretty dismal sometimes -- there's nothing I hate more than asking a question and being shown a bunch of Quora threads where other people have asked similar questions but NO ONE seems to have an answer. Or at least not an answer that works. What's the point of that? It doesn't help me to know that other people are merely wondering the same thing I am.

(There are supposedly tricks to get around this. Some people suggest searching a topic and including the word "Reddit," which will then take you to Reddit on the theory that users there will have better filtered out an answer. I have no idea whether or not this works. Why would Reddit be more reliable than Quora?)

The contention is that Google could have stopped this devolution, but opted not to because it was more profitable than efficient search. Ultimately the podcast discussion led to a rather dark place, a future data quagmire, where it's nearly impossible amid a flood of AI-generated word slush to gather any useful information.

As a blogger, I find that pretty bleak. I'd like to think my little blog could still be found someday by someone looking for something I've posted. (What that could be I'm not sure, since I mostly write about my dog and overdue library books.) I have searched for my photos via Google with mixed results. A lot of stuff comes up before me, mostly Alamy images that have to be purchased.

Anyway, that's what I'm thinking about as I write this post and set it to publish while I'm en route to Ireland!

(Photo: Architecture near the Battersea Power Station, in late February.)