Arrested development - Digital Threat Digest

I am firmly of the opinion that if Google had fired all their feature developers around 2013 then their 2024 offering would be far superior to the unfortunate guff it has become today. My latest search muscle memory is adding ‘-ai’ as an operator on the end of every query, to remove Gemini’s unhelpful additions to my otherwise accurate search results. It all gets a little meta when you ask Google how to disable AI in Google – Gemini tells you to access the labs beaker menu and toggle off AI overview. Except that option doesn’t exist.

I’m not just lamenting the inescapable advent of AI here – there are hundreds of other little ‘features’ that have made the core Google search product experience tangibly worse. Want to see how many search results there are for your term? Sorry, that’s gone – no more Googlewhacking. No matter what you search for there are only three pages of results now. Remember that muscle memory where ‘Images’ was always the second filter under your query? Oops, that’s now ‘News’. Or maybe it’s ‘Shopping’, depending on what you Googled, just to mess with you a little. Also now we have a new filter called ‘Web’, which you might think you were using automatically, but no, it’s unclear how it differs to ‘All’ and it’s hidden in a dropdown menu, even if you’re on a 4k screen.

While you can use the Internet Archive to view Google as it was in the past, there’s nothing out there that emulates how the product used to function. The functional algorithm, the consistent layout, the lack of AI. You can recreate the aesthetic, but the product is gone forever, joining the other 296 things that Google has killed in the last couple of decades.

It’s not just Google either – there are several cases where userbases mobilise against the platform/service/app they use and force a feature rollback or develop their own alternative. Instagram rolled back the TikTokification of its feed in July 2022 after a week of user protesting. Around 15% of Reddit’s traffic still goes to old.reddit.com rather than the mobile (read: advertising) friendly new design.

Chasing the mirage of exponential economic growth killed Liz Truss’ reign as UK Prime Minister in 44 days – how long will we have to endure the pursuit of exponential feature development in tech?

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Our Digital Investigations Analysts combine modern exploitative technology with deep human analytical expertise that covers the social media platforms themselves and the behaviours and the intents of those who use them. Our experienced analyst team have a deep understanding of how various threat groups use social media and follow a three-pronged approach focused on content, behaviour and infrastructure to assess and substantiate threat landscapes.

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