I read the verge and listen to their podcast. They don’t come across as overly sensationalist and seem pretty fair in other interviews. I think Google knows their search product isn’t as useful as it once was. Not sure about the root causes, but that’s just my impression from using it for 15 years.
>They don’t come across as overly sensationalist and seem pretty fair in other interviews.
funnily enough, they are the first site that comes to mind when I think about all those horrible blogspam articles meant to stroke common argumentative points back in the early 2010's. Android vs. IPhone, barely relevant influencer making statement tangentially related to tech, a growing focus away from tech and towards why the tech industry is actually every -ism under the planet, etc.
I hope they got better over the last 7 years or so since I stopped reading most news sides in lieu of Youtubers or searching for specific domain experts or niche, no-nonsense websites.
>I think Google knows their search product isn’t as useful as it once was.
I honestly think the elephant is too big to see the full picture of. I can 100% believe that the search team has some novel tech to really make the best search engine from a technical standpoint. I can also 100% believe that some other team (maybe in ads, maybe even as high as special fellows) inject into that pipeline and add in stuff purely meant for profit, even if results suffer. Or that some other support team does in fact work specifically with big sites to influence bump their SEO.
No one a Google can contain the entire codebase of such a product. It's all to easy to obfrusate such enshittification into it without the well-meaning engineers being any the wiser.
The primary criticism I have of the verge is they often have pretty non-technical people comment on technical things. It comes through hardest on the podcast where Alex Cranz often seems out of her depth
For me, it started around the end of 2018. It seemed like independent blogs and small sites got nuked from orbit, and articles on sites like Medium took precedence.
My take on what happened is that they decimated a good product in the name of "fighting misinformation" by surfacing content mainly from sites that had moderation policies of whatever sorts. Their way of effectively applying the same App Store style moderation across the entire web.
Things seem to have continued sliding downward in the years since. I won't be surprised when AI eats their lunch.
