The Shitification of Google

The Shitification of Google

From Digital Digging by Henk van Ess

October 3, 2024 · 14 min

About this episode

Henk van Ess and Paul Myers discuss the decline of Google and its services.

Paul Myers (BBC Verify) and me, Henk van Ess sat down in London to discuss a pressing issue: the shitification of Google . Yes, that’s right—Google has slowly been losing its touch. But hold on—Paul wants me to clarify that these are his own spicy hot takes, and in no way represent the fine, polished opinions of the BBC ! Shitification —yes, that’s a thing now! It’s the slow, painful, infuriating decline of services we once loved and depended on, now reduced to hollow shells of their former glory. Enter: Google. First, they murdered Google Cache . Once upon a time, you could view a saved copy of a website that’s vanished from the web. And now? That magical button has gone to the place where hopes and dreams die. Why? Because Google said, “You don’t need it, darling!” But wait, it gets worse. How many search results do you get now? 300. Yes, just 300 out of possibly millions ! So unless you’re looking for Disney’s Mickey Mouse , your obscure little website is living in Google’s black hole, probably with those old Yahoo! email accounts we all forgot about. And don’t even get us started on reverse image search . Once a glorious feature, now bastardized by Google Lens, which, let’s…

People in this episode

Host: Henk van Ess

Guest: Paul Myers

Topics covered

  • Google
  • technology decline
  • search engines
  • digital services
  • OSINT
  • image search

Keywords

  • Google
  • search results
  • Google Cache
  • Google Lens
  • OSINT
  • image search
  • technology decline

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: BBC

Products: Google, Google Cache, Google Lens

Places: London

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