What has happened to Google Search?
Many, many years ago Google Search conquered — there’s no other word for it — the Internet. None could stand before it, not Yahoo!, not AltaVista, Not Ask Jeeves. It was brilliant: a single text box, in which one could type anything, hit Return and get excellent-quality results. It even grew smart enough to know individual users.
No more. Today, I had a problem with
sp-kill-hybrid-sexp
(a Emacs command in teh smartparens package to delete the remainder of
a line, respecting S-expression delimiters) hanging in
SLY, so I searched for
sp-kill-hybrid-sexp sly slow. Based on previous experience, I
expected this to result in, you know, relevant results.
I got:
- Release notes for a game.
- The Wikipedia article on tigers.
- The Press Trust of India.
- … and a bunch of low-quality spam.
What the heck happened to Google‽