Well if they served up a high quality site it you'd just go there and might not have ads even. Where the dozen SEO garbage sites they do serve up are all hosting ads google gets a cut of.
That's a very short sighted business strategy if true. Simply liquidating their reputation. Those junk AI results have certainly led to me using Google less.
> That's a very short sighted business strategy if true. Simply liquidating their reputation.
Why should they care? They're too big to fail…
Google controls almost the whole end-user realm through Chrome & clones, and Android, the dominating end-user OS by a wide margin.
At the same time end-users are completely helpless and can't do anything against Googles liking because they don't understand anything about IT tech.
Computers are black magic to most people so they're trapped. This never changed! Especially millennials and gen-z are completely clueless as they didn't had the chance to use personal computers ever, where you had at lest some control over the device and needed to know at least some basics about its inner working. All the younger people know are the tightly sealed black-box devices you don't have any control over, called mobiles, which are fully operated by big-tech. Google search + Android apps are "the internet" for most people. They mostly don't even know there is something else beyond that, so Google can do whatever they want, and this will have exactly zero consequences for them by now.
Google's move regarding rolling out "browser DRM", the next "trusted computing" initiative, regardless of what anybody thinks about is is very telling.
Now they will violently reap the fruits of their monopoly, and likely nobody will be able to stop them in the next decade. People where warned about the consequences of this monopoly for many many years. Nobody cared. Now it's payout day for Google.
When do you think millennials were born? The very youngest millennials were in their tweens when the first iPhone came out, and the oldest were pushing 30. They definitely experienced pre-smartphone computing. In fact, it's probably the defining characteristic of the generation: millennials grew up with modern computing, but before the smartphone. Gen Z grew up in a world were smartphones were ubiquitous.
