Before Smartphones, an Army of Real People Helped You Find Stuff on Google

I suspect billions of people will be happy to receive their answers to complicated queries directly on the search results page, uninterested in where the information comes from, so long as it’s accurate enough.

But to everyone who depended even a little bit on web search to have their business discovered, or their blog post read, or their journalism... See more

However, I don’t think it’s right to say that Google search completely sucks . A lot of things we search for now, we take for granted. For example, searching for the nearest cafe that is open right now, getting directions to an unfamiliar place. As the Yellow Pages, Google is great. I often jump off Duck Duck Go if I want to find more information a... See more

A big component of the surprising durability of Google's growth is that the use cases for search keep broadening. Search used to be more about finding reference information, but over time turned into a way to take specific actions (search queries including the phrase "near me" are up 100x in relative terms over the last decade—the feedback loop bet... See more

I think if we had wanted to build a search engine company 5 or 10 years ago, it would have been insanely hard and basically impossible to compete with Google because we would have needed hundreds of people and huge amounts of training data to build the ranking systems that we’re building. Now, with a very small – albeit extremely smart and capable,... See more

The search experience on the internet is dying. Google is no longer trying to organize the world’s information. It’s just scraping it, stealing it, and serving an AI generated mashup of everything it steals from human creators in an effort to keep people on the first page of search results, because that’s where their ads are and where they make the

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We examined more than 15,000 recent popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls “direct answers,” which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent.