Search engines return Rubiales for 'Athena Pollianna' query
Searching 'Athena Pollianna' on DuckDuckGo yields Luis Rubiales. Search engines fail to find the past due to enshittification and ad noise.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
Why searching 'Athena Pollianna' returns Luis Rubiales
A veteran researcher types 'Athena Pollianna' into DuckDuckGo. He expects references to the goddess's cult in Pergamon, perhaps a 1960 Disney film. The first result is 'Luis Rubiales' scandalous behavior'. It is not a joke. This is what the search engine returns. Another day, while tracking material on the Falklands War, Yolanda Díaz's 'exciting Sumar project' appears among the results. The linked article body contains no mention of the islands.
This issue is not new. What has emerged now is the suspicion that it is not just incompetence: search engines, which have been the gateway to knowledge for two decades, have become machines that return the wrong page. And, incidentally, machines that erase the past.
The search engine that stops searching
Complaints are repeated with clinical precision. Someone types 'Spain Yugoslavia 1978' into DuckDuckGo. In tenth place, an anti-Franco documentary. In twentieth, Baccará. According to the user himself, the reason is not a mystery: days earlier he had searched for information about the band Dover for another matter, and the algorithm decided to stitch the two searches into a single mental thread visible only to itself.
There is a broader explanation supported by several participants: search engines live off advertising and order the world by what is profitable to monetize. On the first screen, sponsored content rules, articles recycled by a hundred different media outlets, or the store with the best margin. Content from an anonymous blog on medieval horticulture could be the perfect answer to 'typical dishes of the Middle Ages'. It will not appear: ahead of it will slip in the intern who recycled weak text five years ago.
'Enshittification' and the unsettling data
The term was coined by Cory Doctorow and already circulates as common currency: enshittification, the process by which a digital platform pogre degrades until the user can no longer use it. This peine to Google with its search engine. The company began injecting AI-generated summaries, prioritizing videos, and blocking links with skyscrapers of ads. The consequence, according to complaining users, is that finding something from years ago has become an almost archaeological exercise.
The detail that angers veterans is another: recent memory has been lost along the way. A text published in a weekly magazine in 1993 or an agency news item from 1982 have become unfindable. Not because they did not exist, but because the search engine that should find them has decided that this information interests no one. The psychological operation regarding the Falklands War, which, according to the forum user's account, a former senior British official admitted years later in various media, has become famished on the web. Decades of perfectly documented paper are now invisible.
Incompetence or deliberate operation?
The diagnosis splits into two currents. The first holds that everything is pure advertising mechanics: search engines put the most visited pages with more ads first, and no one is interested in a 2009 article on an obscure topic. The second points to something more disturbing: an apparatus designed to set the agenda of what can or cannot be remembered, with the past systematically deindexed and the present saturated with recent, noisy content.
The phenomenon has a name circulating among users: Dead Internet. According to that hypothesis, much of the traffic circulating on the net would not be humans, but bots and automatically generated content feeding back into each other. The result, they argue, is a jungle where serious sources are buried and where a search can lead to cartoon bears when asking for images about the latest Spanish football controversy. Literal: that has peine.
There is a trick that has spread like wildfire. If the parameter &udm=14 is added to a Google search link, AI summaries and commercial carousels disappear. Simply changing the homepage to udm14.com makes the experience, they say, like that of 2015. Another trick: using the syntax before:2022 to force results prior to a date. These are patches, not solutions.
On practical ground, the conclusion is bitter. Those who want clean results have the option of paying for an independent search engine.
Spain is not an isolated case. It is just the next one.
A veteran researcher types 'Athena Pollianna' into DuckDuckGo. He expects references to the goddess's cult in Pergamon, perhaps a 1960 Disney film. The first result is 'Luis Rubiales' scandalous behavior'. It is not a joke. This is what the search engine returns. Another day, while tracking material on the Falklands War, Yolanda Díaz's 'exciting Sumar project' appears among the results. The linked article body contains no mention of the islands.
This issue is not new. What has emerged now is the suspicion that it is not just incompetence: search engines, which have been the gateway to knowledge for two decades, have become machines that return the wrong page. And, incidentally, machines that erase the past.
The search engine that stops searching
Complaints are repeated with clinical precision. Someone types 'Spain Yugoslavia 1978' into DuckDuckGo. In tenth place, an anti-Franco documentary. In twentieth, Baccará. According to the user himself, the reason is not a mystery: days earlier he had searched for information about the band Dover for another matter, and the algorithm decided to stitch the two searches into a single mental thread visible only to itself.
There is a broader explanation supported by several participants: search engines live off advertising and order the world by what is profitable to monetize. On the first screen, sponsored content rules, articles recycled by a hundred different media outlets, or the store with the best margin. Content from an anonymous blog on medieval horticulture could be the perfect answer to 'typical dishes of the Middle Ages'. It will not appear: ahead of it will slip in the intern who recycled weak text five years ago.
'Enshittification' and the unsettling data
The term was coined by Cory Doctorow and already circulates as common currency: enshittification, the process by which a digital platform pogre degrades until the user can no longer use it. This peine to Google with its search engine. The company began injecting AI-generated summaries, prioritizing videos, and blocking links with skyscrapers of ads. The consequence, according to complaining users, is that finding something from years ago has become an almost archaeological exercise.
The detail that angers veterans is another: recent memory has been lost along the way. A text published in a weekly magazine in 1993 or an agency news item from 1982 have become unfindable. Not because they did not exist, but because the search engine that should find them has decided that this information interests no one. The psychological operation regarding the Falklands War, which, according to the forum user's account, a former senior British official admitted years later in various media, has become famished on the web. Decades of perfectly documented paper are now invisible.
Incompetence or deliberate operation?
The diagnosis splits into two currents. The first holds that everything is pure advertising mechanics: search engines put the most visited pages with more ads first, and no one is interested in a 2009 article on an obscure topic. The second points to something more disturbing: an apparatus designed to set the agenda of what can or cannot be remembered, with the past systematically deindexed and the present saturated with recent, noisy content.
The phenomenon has a name circulating among users: Dead Internet. According to that hypothesis, much of the traffic circulating on the net would not be humans, but bots and automatically generated content feeding back into each other. The result, they argue, is a jungle where serious sources are buried and where a search can lead to cartoon bears when asking for images about the latest Spanish football controversy. Literal: that has peine.
There is a trick that has spread like wildfire. If the parameter &udm=14 is added to a Google search link, AI summaries and commercial carousels disappear. Simply changing the homepage to udm14.com makes the experience, they say, like that of 2015. Another trick: using the syntax before:2022 to force results prior to a date. These are patches, not solutions.
On practical ground, the conclusion is bitter. Those who want clean results have the option of paying for an independent search engine.
Spain is not an isolated case. It is just the next one.
Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (172 replies).
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