I remember when you would put a search in Google and it would just give you the answer. Almost psychically, the number one link would probably be what you wanted. Maybe number two.

Today, first of all, you have to be careful to ignore all the fake search results that are actually ads.

Then there’s the problem of spam sites. References to what you want from Pinterest, but no way to get to the original source. Copies of Stack Overflow answers (or whatever primary source) on some scam domain that steals content to show ads. But it ranks very close to the primary source. Gotta ignore that.

My new favorite is Google ignoring what I’m actually searching for. I can search for “objective-c library to do X without Y”.

Google will helpfully give me pages and pages of “swift library to do X”. That is a much more popular search, so clearly that’s what I meant. Forget Objective-C. Forget without Y. Just dozens of tutorials on the far easier/more popular thing I’m NOT doing.

At this point in many ways it’s worse than the old keyword-based search engine like HotBot. They at least tried to find what I asked for instead of guessing what I probably meant based on popularity.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s kind of amazing that I can search Google for “the female comedian who was in a movie with a dinosaur” and the first result is about Tammy and the T-Rex, a truly awful movie with Whoopi Goldberg.

But that’s offset by seemingly simple searches that go sideways for no discernible reason.

I want 2007 Google back.

Edit: and don’t forget the ways they bent the market. Why does every recipe have a 5+ paragraph story to go with it? Because without that Google penalizes the page for having “no content”. So now all recipe sites are terrible, because they have to be to get visitors.

> I want 2007 Google back.

The SEO mess was indirectly caused by Google PageRank and other related optimizations.

Maybe we want 2007 Internet instead?

The AI world will inevitably lead to "content optimization", so the Chatbots that will be asked "questions about life" (as of Today, where people usually search on Google "I have fever/depression/a turbulent child/tomatoes in my fridge, what should I do?") will more frequently answer specific products.

Instead of promoting a single website (Current SEO strategy), content producer will be tempted to produce many texts on a great variety of sources, to reinforce the model on a specific subject.

Time will tell if in 2035, we will want 2023 ChatGPT.

You’re right.

I meant something along the lines of “I want Google to be as effective today as 2007 Google was in its era.”

I know Google and especially their ads are responsible for a huge chunk of what I dislike about today’s Google and the web.

ChatGPT 2026 being trained (probably unknowingly) on the output of ChatGPT 2023 is going to be ‘fun’.

> Don’t get me wrong, it’s kind of amazing that I can search Google for “the female comedian who was in a movie with a dinosaur” and the first result is about Tammy and the T-Rex, a truly awful movie with Whoopi Goldberg.

Google actually gets this one wrong. "Tammy/Tanny and the T-Rex" starred Denise Richards and Paul Walker. You're thinking of "Theodore Rex". Both were in fact truly awful, although I have a soft spot for the dinosaur making a phone call gag.