More rants of a dead man

In 2003, google says: “Seth Godin Says Google Has Officially Jumped the Shark”

I think that’s kind of a personal decision.

I think google only recently jumped the shark for me.

Google, having amassed vast amounts of information about every or at least lots of individuals can be said to jump the shark for different people at different times depending on the amount and type of data they have for a particular person and how they use it and the results that gathering that information for a particular person has had.

For me, google just jumped the shark.

A few weeks ago, probably months ago now, I forget when it was, google stopped updating the news headlines on their “google news and weather” app.

This is kinda funny because I remember them doing that once before as well, forcing me to abandon my favorite news app for something ‘better’.

Well this is the second time they’ve done that, maybe third time’s the charm.

But it wasn’t, it was the time they jumped the shark.

I replaced the “google news and weather” app with the “google news” app like a good little sheep, just like they told me to. Funny how removing weather from the app somehow was supposed to make it better.

Anyway.

A friend of mine just asked me about something related to politics and I pointed out how I don’t read too much about politics, but it made me realize that this new app shows me lots more in the way of news articles and most of them are political.

There’s the “just for you” page, and the “latest” page which are nearly identical and filled with lots of the latest political hoo-ha. I will admit to reading some of it, but not very much.

But I realize I don’t read many non-political articles, because it just doesn’t show me very many.

I have to look a number of pages in to get an article that is just a current news story about something that isn’t politics.

Then I realized, that this app never shows me sports news. That’s fine, I never follow sports, and I never click on articles, so google got that one right.

But then I thought about it some more and realized, that I do read a relatively large percentage of ‘technology’ articles, relative to all the news I read. And I realized that lately, most of what I’ve seen show up in the technology section of the news app is about games.

I’m not a gamer, I really don’t care about fortnight or why I should click A-B-B-A or this or that game. I have clicked through many more technology articles than political articles, and none of them were about games, yet that’s all google shows me now.

And I realized… google has jumped the shark. They have so fined-tuned their understanding of my interests in news articles that they can no longer show me news articles I’m actually interested in.

Congratulations google, you’ve peaked, you’ve surpassed maximum, you’re on the downside of the hill.

I can’t wait to see who’s going to replace them with a small shell script.

Try finding information with google about problems building gdb.

It’s impossible.

And it’s not because nobody ever has problems building gdb.

When ngate (http://n-gate.com/) refers to joe user, he calls them “An Internet.”

When ngate refers to a web developer, he calls them “A webshit.”

But when ngate refers to Richard Stallman, he refers to “Some fuckwad.”

That made me laugh, so I thought I’d share.

Since the dawn of google you found stuff on the web by searching with keywords.

Yahoo did this organized thing where they grouped the internet into categories. The internet was much smaller then.

Altavista did… I don’t remember what altavista did, but it didn’t work as well as google.

But google does us all one big disservice. It presents links to websites with ads.

Wouldn’t it be neat if there was a search engine that did the same thing google did, but would only show you sites with no ads. Or maybe at least no ads that popped up at you distracting you from the content you were trying to read.

So how hard would that be? Make a webpage with a search box, that hits google’s servers to do the search (probably against some terms of use of theirs) and then filtered out results based on a blacklist of sites with annoying ads.

Where to get that information? Well, the helpful user, of course.

Each link could be presented in an iframe with a little bar at the top with a button that says “click this if you see an ad” I suppose you could automate it by doing whatever adblocker does to block ads, you can just use to detect them, and if you do, flag the page as annoying and it will never show up in search responses again.

Just an idea.

What’s the business model you ask? I don’t really care.  I just find being jarred away from reading something by an annoying popup ad… well… annoying.