Search engine protocol:
Ignore first few results (ads)
Ignore next few results (bullshit spam comparison farms)
Ignore really annoying site you think is ok but is a usability nightmare
Ignore subsection of reddit links
Find 0-1 useful links on first page
Regret
Trying to find the tiny “show more results” button sandwiched between the first page of shit results and the weird AI bubbles of shit results just to find semi-decent shit on pages 2-3 makes me wish i was dead every single time.
Could be worse. Could be infinite scroll
The sad thing is the Reddit Links probably contain the most useful answers that google will show you
I know. But I’ll use them as a last resort
Use them, costs bandwidth and CPU cycles.
Yes but it will be offset by traffic boosts for advertisers
Use an adblocker. Unless, you mean people go on the internet without using protection?
They do. Either due to technical ineptitude (like approximately everyone’s parents) or, and that might be worse, with the conviction of doing “the right thing,” like a friend of mine.
That won’t make a difference. Reddit knows how much traffic they get and they use that number to sell ads
Junk data that costs the advertisement without a return on investment
That’s not how it works. Reddit is able to even get interest because of traffic counts. Same for IPO values
If you’re blocking their ads and not logged in, you are costing them.
It really winds me up how results that match every search term aren’t prioritised any more. I often search for very specific pieces of hardware, and it’s been a nightmare since the late 2010s. You now have to pore over each result to check that it’s 100% what you’re are looking for.
SEO exacerbates the problem, but I’d say the root cause is the algorithm itself.
Have you tried putting your search between " " ? It usually helps improve my results.
Thought I’d add for people that may not know, the quotes mean exact match for what’s between the quotes and only give results if it includes that term (unless I mixed something up). Whenever you click on Google’s ‘must include’ it puts quotes around the term. Can be handy or make things worse depending what you’re looking for. Worse is while programming and tracking a specific issue, unless they used the exact words you won’t get a result. Better for part numbers if they never get changed.
Been awhile since I went into the nitty gritty of the searching functions so if this is incorrect please reply with the correct info, been awhile since I really had to think about what quotes does behind the scenes.
The internet is unsearchable at this point. I feel like 99% of websites are fronts.
Product information search is now totally useless. I used to be able to use a part number to find a manual, now it is just scammers Amazon and eBay.
YouTube videos were once good sources for DIY, now the useful shit is buried behind product placement bullshitters.
Or websites showing the first page of a manual and requiring payment if you want to see the rest.
If it could be done, and done right, I’d love to see a couple wiki-like additions to the fediverse, one focused on products and product-specific information and care, with the other focused on the development of a catalogue of methodologies and tech for production and more general repair. Not tech news like the technology instances I’m aware of.
But I guess it’s not suited for the format, nor could we really hope for the task of building anything even close to exhaustive to be a surmountable one for us.
I had some ideas about UI/UX for something like this a while ago, though it wouldn’t work with Lemmy. I could probably find my notes and sketches, but effectively they’re just a bunch of wishful thinking born from my dissatisfaction with the limitations of Wikipedia, the chaos of Google, Youtube, and Reddit, and the ridiculousness that is WikiHow.
It’s been a few years tbat I’ve been crossing my fingers for a positive paradigm shift specifically for the online content about products and DIY.
Unfortunately I feel like if that ever got popular then it would inevitably become tainted by people trying to promote certain products.
There might be some kind of trust system that could work. I have no idea of course but I’m envisioning something like Stack Overflow’s system and a bit of community correction and authority à la Wikipedia.
What’s been pissing me off for years now is googling a specific company and getting a wall of advertisements for their competitors first. So. Dirty.
There’s actually a lot of theory and early work out there on the topic of federated search. While existing search aggregators like Searx and YaCY certainly qualify as federated, search infrastructure built from the ground up with decentralization in mind would look very different. All that to say this isn’t necessarily the end of the line.
If they haven’t gotten into this habit in the last 20 years anyways, I don’t think the SEO spam was that last straw. That ship has sailed.
People are born everyday. Grandma may have had 20 years to figure it out, but kids these days won’t have the opportunity to search the web and find information the way we did.
True, but the people born recently have existed with some kind of search capabilities, unlike grandma. They might not be able to optimize their queries like us, but they’ve still got ways to figure it out. They have habits, just different ones.
Grandma is the one who never bothered making the habit, because she was used to a time when no habit was possible.
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my lil trick is I’d just add “Reddit” after most searches to find others in a similar situation or maybe a solution
Maybe that does work again after the thing with subreddits going nsfw has been somewhat resolved but not sure. It was my thing too. I heard good things about bing of all places. In general search just got worse over the last 5-6 years.
People talk about Bing and duck duck go like they’re good replacements, and I’ve given them honest good faith tries.
I always switch my search engine back to Google after simply not getting the results I’m looking for
you can use Google or Bing from duckduckgo using !bangs. g! (for google) or b! (for bing) then whatever you are searching for. I use g! all the time for non privacy related things. and since duckduckgo doesn’t use trackers and all that the results can be terrible so sometimes I just resort to using g!
Using DuckDuckGo to search through Google seems pretty damn pointless if you ask me. If the search engine is shit and I am just roundabout using Google then why even bother?
I know you said the thing about trackers, but a lot of us don’t really care about that. If the end result is just using Google anyway then I’d rather just start with Google and not use another site to use Google.
I disagree. A lot of the Google search results are based on your previous search history and your advertising profile the company has generated for you, which skews and promotes most of the front page Google search results as advertising links. And unless you’re searching for an actual product, they are not so useful.
Like if I want to search for comments, and all my search results are advertising me telescopes and astronomy software that’s not so helpful.
oh yeah. if you don’t care, there really is not a point to use duckduckgo. I should say IMO because I’m sure a much more technically minded person will have a better answer.
I think something broke with Bing’s advanced search. It doesn’t seem to respond at all.
I used Bing chat to plan my itinerary for my next vacation. These LLMs are the new best way to search, although the recent stories of their results becoming worse doesn’t bode well
2 months ago that was fine.
Now I don’t have an app for that, the website on my mobile doesn’t open my search and instead tells me to download the official Reddit app, or the subs are nsfw or private.
Sigh, so much for easy answers at a type of the finger :(
Not that I’m recommending anyone give reddit any more traffic or leverage, but I’ve been using Stealth app at the recommendation of someone else on here. It’s downloadable through f-droid and specifically is meant to keep you anonymous and avoid any trackers and other trash normally found when opening reddit links. You can’t even log into an account. I use it on the rare moments I’m looking for stuff on there, it makes me feel a bit better about it.
Solid advice m8, I downloaded that 1. Funny thing that the 1st thing I saw on the app once I entered was a message saying “in a few weeks Stealth will end due to end of free API”. Sigh, these last months all these huge internet companies are making such a mess.
Literally the only time I still use reddit
Up until the API debacle, that was my solution too. Now even that doesn’t work. It’s so bizarrely hard to look something up on the internet now.
I use chat GPT 4 for a lot of things instead of Google now.
Same here, for the reason that I don’t have to scroll through crap pages that only exist to show ads.
It’s pretty amazing to search for something and actually see things you searched for.
Does this work any better than DuckDuckGo? People praise DDG, but imo it’s results are pretty shit and I could never end to sticking with it. It can’t even get basic quoted text syntax correct.
Yeah ddg is as bad as google imo. This works like the net used to be.
Oh fuck man, that’s a great find! Thank you for sharing that. It’s actually providing really substantiative results which I haven’t seen from Google for at least 5 years.
I have definitely bookmarked that website, even though I use duck duck go I will probably use that as an alternate now.
Another good search engine that’s less useful for searches but for providing information is of course Wolfram alpha
Damn, I’ve gotten so many good alternatives lately. Thanks for posting that.
Ignorance is bliss, give me some pls
wait until the AI chatbots are optimized with SEO spam.
Google is trash. I guess people suck for doing SEO like asshats
I ran a business, built my website and done SEO according to advice found on the internet practically just using keywords related to my business. My goal was not to be on page 2 or 3 when people look for similar businesses. The site ended up always as a first result. I did not tinker with it, never paid for adwords/adsense. I don’t think I was being an asshole, just trying to make a living.
The problem seems to lie with Google. I remember days when I could search it for topics of interest and get results that were informative and didn’t try to sell me shit. Google is now reminiscent more of a mall and search results are shop fronts in the mall.
Yeah I don’t think businesses doing SEO is really the issue here.
It’s the millions of low-quality, garbage blogspam websites that have SEOd their way into filling the first 10 pages of every single search.
What’s a good canister vacuum? What I can I do for fun in Sparks, Nevada? Why is my cat throwing up? It doesn’t matter what you search for, you’re going to get articles filled with 6000 words of barely-passable English that you have to scroll through, with an add between every paragraph, until you finally get to the part where they “answer” the question with the most common-sense, useless, vague pile of word vomit that proves the author doesn’t know any more about the topic than you do.
But it’s no accident that that’s what Google has tuned their algorithm to prioritize. They’ve got as much of an interest in making you look at those ads as the website, because the ads come from Google and that’s their entire business model.
This. Searching for topic information back in the 1990s could be frustrating because you couldn’t find the sites until you found the one that had that links page that would lead you to a number of others about that topic. Searching today through the modern “search engines” means getting the same regurgitated, irrelevant and/or common sense non-answers from all the “top” sites. I don’t bother looking that way anymore because sites like SearXNG, Mojeek, even sometimes Brave Browser can often do better. It’s like we circled around to the same problem, but this time knee-deep in garbage, too.
Oh shoot, I had forgotten the “links” page
Try duck duck go, brief subject, possibly include the word “forum” or “howto” or “Reddit” (I know I know) and then try to narrow down your search terms from there. Use quotation marks for keywords, and site: to denote specific websites that you want to limit your search to.
And that’s basically the magic right there. Another key term to use is if you get too many results of a certain type, like if you search the word constitution and keep getting the ship, include the term -ship and that should remove those results.
Awesome tips, I’ll give those a try, thanks
I’m finding that those searches will be advertisement for a vet clinic, hotels in Sparks, Nevada and they will all have a blog about this and that in vague terms advising you to spend money on the issue. Years ago I was building a water garden and found tons of useful info, a couple of years ago I decided to make a big pond and all those sites with the useful info are either gone or buried on page 73. What’s at the front is retailers of pond/garden/aquatic equipment with the same drivel about your cat throwing up.
SEO is an inevitable result of capitalism and the existence of search engines. If food and shelter for your family depends on it, you will become an asshat too.
idk - you can’t really blame website owners for optimizing their SEO, it’s google’s fault for using such a game-able system IMO
It’s a little bit of both, but you’re right. Google has had years to improve their algorithms.
But as an advertising company at heart, the more time people waste on those bullshit sites, the more Google profits.
There’s definitely a need for regulation, but I’m not going to pretend I know where to begin.
Nah.
What the average user is looking for is almost certainly gonna be near the top of a Google search.
Reject Search engines, return to shoplifting For Dummies books from the local library
you should shoplift them from the book store instead
Why would you shoplift from a library? That seems immoral
I want to search for recipes that are not blog posts
This is a pretty good aggregator
This is amazing. Thanks for that. Usually when I’m looking up a recipe I don’t want to scroll for miles about the history of the recipe, so this solves that nicely.
oh, cool, thank you!
Often you’ll find a ‘print recipe’ button somewhere near the top of the page. Click on that, it’ll take you to what you’re looking for without all of the crap nobody cares about.
Yeah, I despise that every fucking recipe is a blog post. I don’t care that little Becky loved this soup, I just want to know how much salt I should add.
100% what I do. Print to pdf and then never go to the site, because they’re so over loaded with ads and pictures that will load and cause the page to bounce around.
Firefox+AdNauseam
Watching the numbers on each page go up is entertainment enough. Best part is that it stops the ad popping in the background so your page rarely jumps
How’s that compare with Ublock.origin?
It’s different from the technical end but it works by clicking the ads and filling them with junk to cost. It essentially removes the ad for you
AdNauseam integrates with UBO, so you’d get both. Basically, it virtualizes clicks on ads so ad sellers get charged for the click but it’s all hidden in the background from you.
That said, I kinda have mixed feelings about it. Ad clicks will help support sites you like, so even if you’re blocking ads you’re still getting ‘served’ and ‘interacting’ with them. On the other hand, it tells sites 'hey all these ads you’re serving aren’t making your website shitty and unusable (but they generally are) so keep it up! And it tells ad agencies and the industry ‘oh yeah we sure love clicking ads keep slapping them in my face at every corner’. And if ad buyers are realizing their clicks are all ghost clicks, they’ll stop buying ad space. Which just means shittier lowest common denominator ads in more places.
bbcgoodfood.com is another good one I check often
Half the time I look at a website or article it is just AI generated crap anyway. Oh you want a product review? Here are a half dozen articles that have summarised the Amazon reviews of an item, with no first hand experience.
Google “Best vacuum cleaner”
Top 6 hits: “We evaluated the 5 brands that paid us the most and found that they all suck up your dirt. We can’t really speak ill of any of them because this is an ad and we signed a contract. Please use our embedded links so we can have more money.”
And the website is called something like Best-Vacuum-Cleaners-Blog.com
What’s worse is most of what comes up isn’t even a hands on review, it’s literally someone doing what I just did, which is type “vacuum cleaner” into Amazon and see what came up. Then they give it reviews based on the bullshit in the description.
I want a review from someone who sees these everyday and has a deep hatred of every vacuum in existence. He’s the one who knows that such and such used to be good until they replaced this part with plastic because they have a new CEO, and now it’s no better than a dirt devil.
At least with vacuums however, there’s a few guys out there with carpet swathes, children, and dogs at home that get to take vacuums from work and do youtube tests with them. Unfortunately they usually don’t try to game the algorithm so they’re pretty deep in there.
If you have avoided learing how to use the internet/search engines till now you probably couldn’t learn if you tryed
