The Man Who Killed Google Search Options

[Christian J]

Interesting read on Google Search's decline since 2019 (though I believe it started many years before that).

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

[pandy]

Could you summarize?

[Christian J]

Nah, but reading is optional.

The most interesting part was that the one being blamed is the same person that allegedly ruined Yahoo Search before that.

[pandy]

A thing that has irritiaed me lately... Sometimes when I search using Swedish terms I get pages in poor Swedish. First thought, it's on of those spam pages that's churned out by the minute. But no, it's a google translation of a legit page in English. I haven't figured out if Google does this striving to be "helpful" as usual, or if it's the site owner that has activated some automatic google translation and Google then find those pages. I confess I haven't even looked closely at the URLs.

[Christian J]

I haven't figured out if Google does this striving to be "helpful" as usual,

I could imagine Google translating search queries to English before checking against its database.

or if it's the site owner that has activated some automatic google translation and Google then find those pages.

Lately I've seen a couple of siteswith a Google Translate toolbar at the top (looked like something generated by a javascript library). The pages were not translated by default though, maybe because of my browser preferences. Or would Googlebot index every translation of the same page?