I’m old. At this point, I honestly couldn’t tell you when I first wanted a Google Knowledge Panel. I believe it was born out of the desire to have things that people did not want me to have: the fact that people always have tried to ‘gate-keep’ me out of their own little sekrit klubs.
According to Google itself, the Google Knowledge Panel probably showed up in May of 2012. And I can tell you what people felt about it: they fucking hated it.
There was a bunch of talk about how people felt that it was largely trying to antiquate Wikipedia itself: after all, the thing largely drew first on Freebase, which seemed to be a wiki-like ‘endeavor’ to create, shall we say, a ‘knowledge database’, describing people. So, basically, what Wikidata is now. Only I don’t think Freebase was anywhere near as useful.
Far as I can remember, Google ate Freebase’s ass in, like, 2010. And then, in 2012, it started trying to sniff Wikipedia’s dick, with this Knowledge Panel thing. As I’ve previously described, nobody gives a fiddler’s fuck about this thing. Nobody famous, anyways.
The problems with Google trying to copy Wikipedia’s ‘homework’ are obvious, and the entire endeavor was replete and bursting with the sort of disinformational splendor one could expect from whatever the fuck things edit Wikipedia. I could probably research a bunch of shit and show you a bunch of links that will, no doubt, one day be deceased, but who cares? I don’t care and you don’t, either. These are my thoughts on this, not the media’s. Anyways, if you give a shit, one of the most-common problems was that the Google Knowledge Panels kept on saying that people were dead, and Google, as per fucking usual, took a fucking dog’s age to correct this. This is probably why Google is now very, very careful of putting dates of birth and other shit in the Panels.
I don’t know what happens at Google. I was once invited to Google, and did not go, because who has the fucking money?. But I have to imagine that their internal structure is something akin to infinite monkeys with typewriters, herding cats. Shit either gets done, or it does not.
Google, on one hand, does not seem to know what the fuck it is doing, on multiple fronts. The Knowledge Panel is one of them. The Panel itself is good for exactly nothing, and largely only functions as some sort of vanity plate. You really want it, if you’re nobody; but if you’re somebody, it’s not even in the top 500 list of your priorities.
At the time of its creation, Google seemed to largely be fantasizing about how it would sculpt the future of the Internet. Google had decided, in all of its ‘wisdom’, that it alone had the right to decide what the Internet looked like. It tried this stupid bullshit with amp; it tried this stupid bullshit by trying to enforce how webpages should be constructed, in order to get ranked; and every single time, the robots just beat it. Over, and over, until the end of time. And then, there’s this.
I use Google’s services. I’m Verified on YouTube. I used Google+, seriously. I even tried to get Verified on YouTube through Google+ (it didn’t work). I have my work e-mail through them.
I fucking hate Google. I only use Google because I view it as the most reliable of all possible services. I do not like it. I welcome its replacement, with open arms. Fuck this shitty company.
Part and parcel of my reasoning for hating it is that Google went to great lengths to shape the web the way it wanted. I don’t appreciate that. I don’t really have a ‘problem’ with Google figuring out a way to ‘rank’ content: being primarily a search engine (one would fucking hope, at least), ranking your content is a necessary step.
The thing is, though, trying to get people to make webpages the way you want, it just diluted the creativity that was once found throughout the entire Internet. There was once a time when no two websites looked the same— and if they did, that was a faux pas! You stole code!. Now, everybody has a fucking shitty-ass WordPress. Even me.
The other thing is, if you get people to all make webpages the same way, then that just gives the robots an easy way to rank to the top. Also also, why should anyone have to ‘fight’ to get what they want, ranked at the top?
For example: my main website is ranked fifth for my username. Why? Partially because I tried to handcode my own website, and Google doesn’t like that. Meanwhile, the WordPress blog for my name? Ranked first, baby. You can’t beat 100 percent.
This website, by the by, was first started (though has now transmogrified into something else) because, the award-winning formula to rank #1 is just to do this. Just get a dot com with your preferred term of choice. Google says that shit don’t matter. I know better.
Anyways, back to my main fucking topic: Why? Why, when you own a Google Knowledge Panel, can you not just put your website right at the fucking top? Why the fuck do I have to ‘fight’ with a sekrit algorithm? Why do I have to guess at how I could rank at the top? It’s foolishness.
How it made me feel
I got my Panel somewhere around April of 2021. It is now June 9th, 2024, in the middle of the night, as I write this. So, we’re going on three years, now.
At two years, I didn’t really feel anything. Like— when I got Verified on YouTube, for a little bit, I felt different. I felt like a winner. If I had gotten Verified on Twitter— well. I guess we’ll never know, huh?
But, that’s just the thing. When you get something like this, the end result is, you don’t really feel it. You get your Cool Leg Degree; you get your Master’s; you get your PhD; you get multiple of these things. They don’t come up off your wall and give you a blowjob or something, to keep you warm at night. They mean nothing. They’re only there so you can get a job. And this, this is something even lesser. This is, but of course, substantially less important than having a pretty lady sitting on my lap.
Like— initially, when I first got it, I felt jubilant. I had won.
Now I look at the fuckin’ thing, and I’m like, eh.
A year ago, I might have been sad on the day when it went away.
Now?
Who gives a shit.
Yahoo!
I can feel it.
When Yahoo! Search was dying, it was pretty fucking obvious. Nobody could find what they wanted; and Google was sitting there, in the background, eating Yahoo!’s lunch.
Yahoo! itself was never good. Google, on the other hand, was so good that it was almost amazing. You could find things!
Now, though?
There are several phenomena that are happening to Google Search, and these things are going to end its usefulness:
- Prior historical results being basically wiped from Google Search when some newsworthy incident happens
- This one is interesting, because it absolutely prevents any sort of research on some trending topics.
- An inability for the source of some information to rank on Google
- I have a shitload of books that are on my website. You have to dig to find any links to them, on Google, even when you search the exact titles— even when you load up their individual Knowledge Panels!
- Malware / spam websites being able to rank on page 1 (this destroyed Yahoo! Search in a single weekend)
- Information older than 3+ years seems to just be gone
- An inability to actually collate information related to highly-searched-for individuals (like how Brad Pitt, for like 2 years, had the wrong fucking Twitter account attached to his Panel; or how Wikipedia summaries used to just stay in the fucking Panels way too long)
And, finally:
- AN INABILITY TO ACTUALLY FUCKING FIND ANYTHING YOU WANT
That’s a double whammy!
How I feel about it, now
I use my writing to put things to bed. And this, my friends, is something that I want to forget all about.
When I released my comic book— something that I’ve been planning to do since I was a little girl— I tried to get it into my Google Knowledge Panel. The comic book is ‘of Two Rabbits’.
It was Hell.
The above little factoid proved to me, one fucking thing: the people at Google are putting at least some of the information in the Panel in, manually.
Because I listed the book as ‘of Two Rabbits’, and it came out as three different things before it was finally corrected. The only way that could have happened (I gave them the title again, and they put ‘Of Two Rabbits’, not ‘of’) was if they manually entered it.
So this entire くそみたいなショー is just infinite monkeys typing.
As someone who writes—I detest the titles ‘Writer’, or, worse, ‘Author’— they place inordinate importance on me— getting my hard work wrong is not something I ever want to deal with, again. Because this was so fucking frustrating!
Every time I place my happiness in the hands of humans, they shit on it.
So I shan’t be doing that anymore.
An addendum: you see the ‘cover’ image for Bhue: the Tricksters? Not only is it capitalized wrong (I JUST noticed this!), but, I’ve always known that the cover is wrong.
See, when you upload your book to Google, they tell you— give us your front cover, your actual book content, and then your back cover. So I did.
It deleted the front cover when I uploaded the back cover (all appropriately named). And it just put that there. And I never fixed it.
Do you think I should?
I don’t think I even care.
Maybe I will!