Don't Be Evil
#Here's what comes out when I type "esem music" in Google:
And here's what comes out when I type the same in DuckDuckGo:
Let's say DuckDuckGo still reflects the vanilla reality of unregulated unassisted internet, where the order of results is vaguely controlled by meta keywords and whatever the crawler thinks is well and legitimately linked to.
Google obviously tries to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" (their motto) by basically inserting whatever "music" it can dig up from YouTube or Google Play Music, which I don't inhabit, then spits out a link to a page for which it says it has no information. To the right is a blurb featuring links to places where I don't publish anything, like Youtube or Deezer, and the 'esem.name' URL is hidden. And even before any meaningful results, which are well below the fold, there are more Youtube videos. While technically the top-half of the screen is my music, the recordings are neither organised, nor of decent quality. Abysmal opinionated noise-before-signal list that is anything but good quality. Code upon code forgetting what got Google there in the first place - web search.
A tl;dr of this might go "fuck you, Google". Instead, it's well worth inquiring into the nature of their search results and how reminiscent they are of an algorithmic feed. And that to change influence those results, I have to micromanage them via their "Webmaster Tools".
I could accept algorithmic feeds if they were at least in part serendipitous, content on them didn't look like ads so much, and if people didn't game them all the time. Alas, the drive to reduce our user experience to mindlessly and endlessly scrolling through feeds, is coming from every direction, in every app or web service, on every device.
There's a slow but strictly chronological RSS feed to this website, and I'm considering next steps after I shut down my Facebook page. But surely it has to be a healthy endgame with much less fast-food-style content involved, ideally more word of mouth (crazy, I know).