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prospective science please

gleech.org · 2,355 words · saved by 1 readers

For now, Google is the premier information infrastructure on Earth. It is the most-visited website. It handles 14 billion search queries a day, nearly two for everyone on earth. As of writing it’s more than the traffic of ChatGPT, Claude, Wikipedia, Bing, and Duckduckgo put together. 1 / 500 of your waking life is spent on this site, probably, and its decisions determine how you spend much more time than that. Google Search effectively controls the epistemology of the world — @atomgardner So… how’s it doing? Is search quality changing? Opinions differ but it does seem to have gotten much worse over the last decade. OK unc, but surely we have actual quantitative studies of something this important? Broadly: no. In the last 25 years, I could only find one major empirical study measuring search quality (Bevendorff et al. 2024). It’s fine, and they deserve huge credit for doing what no one did, but it doesn’t really answer the question and only covers 2022-3, well after the subjective de

Time… burns without leaving ashes — Elsa Triolet Case study: whither Google Search? For now, Google is the premier information infrastructure on Earth. It is the most-visited website. It handles 14 billion search queries a day, nearly two for everyone on earth. 1 As of writing it’s more than the traffic of ChatGPT , Claude, Wikipedia, Bing, and Duckduckgo put together. 1 / 500 of your waking life is spent on this site, probably, and its decisions determine how you spend much more time than that. 3 Google Search effectively controls the epistemology of the world — @atomgardner So… how’s it doin

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