el Goog, é Morto.

Been watching the antitrust case against Google in the US, while building up my own anti-use case against Google while travelling. It used to be I’d default to el Goog on the road, especially Google Maps, because it was just better. But I’ve found this last month that, while not unusable, it’s not nearly as much use as it could or should be. Especially Maps.

It feels like we’ve gotten a long way from “Don’t be evil.”

Not because the search results are surfacing a shit ton of Nazi propaganda or anything. It’s not Twitter, after all. But I’ve found that every single search I’ve made this trip has thrown up a solid wall of sponsored links that were, for the most part, garbage. Something as simple as searching for a barber or a grocery store nearby results in at least four sponsored links before you get to the ‘organic’ result, which isn’t organic at all, but rather the result of SEO farming. Then you get some more sponsored links. Then back to SEO crap. And maybe, just maybe, on the second or third page, the result you needed.

I’ve switched to Apple Maps for navigation because it isn’t ad-driven. I tried Duck Duck Go for search. And increasingly, I’m sorry to admit, ChatGPT for research. In spite of all the well documented problems with AI, it feels much much closer to old school Google when you ask it a simple research question like “What are the four basic pastas of Rome.”

For the record, this was the ChatGPT response:

The four main Roman pastas, traditional to the cuisine of Rome, are:

1. **Cacio e Pepe**: Pasta with pecorino cheese and black pepper.

2. **Carbonara**: Pasta with eggs, pecorino cheese, guanciale (or pancetta), and black pepper.

3. **Amatriciana (or Matriciana)**: Pasta with a sauce made from guanciale (or pancetta), tomato, pecorino cheese, and chili pepper.

4. **Gricia**: Pasta with guanciale, pecorino cheese, and black pepper, essentially Amatriciana without tomatoes.

These dishes are classics and can be found in many Roman trattorias and restaurants.

Google gave me a snippet, which started out with a Wikipedia extract on the topic, which is fine, but then cascaded a bunch of sponsored links to third party sites and suggestions for related searches like, “What pasta did Stanley Tucci eat in Rome.”

I like Mr Tucci, but he was not what I was looking for with that query.

Worst of all though is when you have to search for a particular business or location. That’s when the sponsored linkstorm really spools up. I eventually grew so frustrated trying to find what I wanted that I… I…. Oh god this is so hard…

I switched my default search engine to Bing.