What’s your opinion? Does google really “not work” anymore? Are there any better search engines? Why did the quality of search results go down? I honestly stumbled onto this question through this music video, what is ironic in it’s own way i feel…
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The core limitation is that the problem is dramatically more complex than it was when Google started. The number of sites were smaller, there was much less dynamic content, and there wasn’t a sizable portion of the internet committed to an adversarial relationship with search engines forcing everyone else to go to the same extremes just to play catchup.
What this means is that you’re looking for answers in a much larger search space, and the indicators you used to use are much less reliable. You have more resources to try to balance that out, but there’s so much straight trash to weed through that it’s pretty difficult to do.
Nah google definitely still works, it just doesn’t work well or as consistently anymore.
All these companies paying for SEO bumps to remove or highlight their content fuck with results, just like the Reddit protests did. It’s a real mess because google is more of an ad company than an SE company
For me depending on what I’m searching for, I’ll use chat gpt or similar AI with internet access/training or may use google or other SE and use site modifiers to keep results to a somewhat related domain.
I’m really interested to see what people like when it comes to search engines. Duck duck go, Brave, yandex, bing, google, they’re all different states of shit tbh
Even if they give good results they’re scraping your data to sell or use chromium and is therefore antiAdblock anti user, etc.
Mojeek has been an interesting alternative. I do find myself using google as a backup when I’m not getting what I need, but Mojeek does tend to present very different results.
I don’t think any other search engine, including DuckDuckGo, has its own web crawler like mojeek does. DuckDuckGo is security based, but still google in the end (similar to how most browsers are actually chromium). It apparently also uses a different term algorithm so you have to readjust how you search because it doesn’t do anything predictive or “smart” in its searching for results.
map of search engines since i found this website a few minutes ago i consider using mojeek too… and i was surprised how few actual search engine crawlers exist…
this was super neat! thanks for sharing
Yeah I think I was simultaneously surprised about that, and how long Mojeek had been in the game.
Seems to mostly work fine for me. However Google as a company is a fucking mess so doesn’t surprise me people have problems. I have had more problems with my Pixel 7 and Google Maps seems to getting worse and worse.
I’ve honestly been on DDG for years; I very rarely hit Google anymore, unless I need to map something because DDG maps suck.
It works but it definitely censors a lot pf stuff I feel so I use Yandex sometimes.
… you’re worried about censorship so you use the Chinese search engine?
Just use DuckDuckGo
Russian, but yeah
A lot of stuff that don’t show up anywhere else show up in yandex especially piracy related stuff.
Dockduckgo is just bing with diet privacy
Google is broken because AI is making it obsolete. I bet in 10 years google will be a historical footnote.
You’re talking about the AI that provides accurate-sounding results but can’t fact-check and is also used to generate the kind of spam that’s constantly being pushed by search engines, right?
Not exactly. Stupid people with advanced tools make stupid outputs. Venture capital is pushing the propaganda sauce hard and a lot of stupid people are jumping on AI as a corporate trend. These are the idiots.
The tools are next level. We are on the edge of this tech becoming a really big deal. There are several research papers making breakthroughs regularly and making double digit percentile improvements on efficiency and accuracy. The reason it is a big deal is because you can have around 1/4 of the knowledge of the entire internet running on hardware as powerful as a current flagship phone. Sure it lies around 1/2 the time, but these are problems that are being solved. Like, the latest and greatest models are ancient history in a matter of 2-3 weeks. To be honest, have a casual conversation with an offline and uncensored LLM. You may know it is lying from time to time, but if you’re being objective, so are most humans you encounter under casual circumstances. The sociological function and potential value of this tech is pretty powerful medicine. Like if you need someone to talk to, or to talk out an issue in private, this is a way to make that happen.
Well. Some time ago one had similar arguments about manually categorized web site catalogs and algorithm driven search engines.
Today’s ai are not areplacment, but in ten years … rather likely.
AI is driving me mad. Pages and pages of generative text filled articles with nothing to say drive all the humans away.
Ironically, because Lemmy is so hard to index for search engines, it keeps the AI content spammers away. Mostly. So far.
I agree,
human.Meow
Hard agree with you on that. AI generated articles are a disaster for the internet. There’s just no quality control any more, especially when actual authoritative sites are no longer in the top search results. Now we’ve got tons more crap-tier content on the internet and no way to differentiate it from the useful content.
Google is almost impossible to use when I search for solutions to maths problems. The first few pages are dominated by those sites gaming Google’s algorithm and their articles usually don’t help.
Yup. DDG is my go to. Every once in a while I have to use Google, but it’s rare.
Also, buy the Wolfram Alpha app if you want math problems solved easily.
Does anybody else find when using DDG for research that it’s waaay too aggressive about “correcting” your query to something more mundane?
This is why I switched to startpage
Doesn’t it just query Google behind the scenes, though?
Yeah, but DDG uses Bing. I want to switch to Kagi or start a SearXNG server though once I get around to it.
I have been using Kagi for a month. Really liking it so far! I just subscribed to their basic plan. Much better results than DDG.
Have you tried WolframAlpha? It can break down math problems and is a wealth of information for just about everything
My experience with Google search had degraded dramatically in the last 6mo. Just isn’t pulling up relevant results. Sometimes not even close.
It hasn’t worked for a while. Even a year ago it was considerably better.
I can’t believe it, but Bing is now the better search engine. What is happening to the world?!
I agree! I find myself amazed that I’m binging now when for so long that was a joke.
MBAs and VCs
It works but it’s way shittier. I ended up paying for Kagi.
is this an ad?
I find google works fine if I’m just looking for general information on a simple topic, because it will dependably return a link to the wikipedia entry and a few of the most popular sites.
And I find that it’s pretty much useless for specific information about narrow topics, because it’s still just going to return the same general shit.
I’m not sure exactly how the change worked, but some time back (it’s been a year or two now, and maybe more - it’s just something that I sort of slowly realized had happened), they shifted to a system that made Google Fu essentially useless.
It used to be the case that you could define the importance of search terms by the order in which you listed them and make some effectively required by putting quotation marks around them.
But starting a couple of years back, it’s been generally ignoring search term order and quotation marks, and instead giving priority to specific common (and certainly not coincidentally common marketing) terms.
To anthropomorphize, it’s as if it’s developed a cripplingly narrow focus. So if, for instance, you’re looking for the title of some specific movie, it doesn’t matter how many other search terms you include or what order you list the terms in - if you include the term “movie,” that’s what it’s going to focus on. So if you’re lucky, you might get the actual movie you’re looking for, but it’s absolutely guaranteed that you’re going to get streaming services and “18 movies with real blood” style clickbait.
I’ve noticed this even when trying to find the name of a song. I used to be able to search:
lyrics “a specific part of the song I remember” whatever random words I can remember out of order
and it would very reliably find songs, even obscure ones. Now the only way it works is if I happen to remember part of the name of the song, usually it’s full of entries for the same popular song that has one word in the title that I included that is definitely not what I’m looking for.
It sounds stupid, but I really miss that working.
It’s complete shit right now. 5 or more years ago I could quickly find an answer to a very technical question with no problem. Now it is useless for anything. Just today I was looking for a shop near me that can perform a front end alignment on my RV, I searched for “Tractor Trailer front end alignment near me”. The entire first page is either tire shops that do not offer front end alignments, car tire shops that don’t even sell the correct size tires I would need for a tractor trailer, or shops 2000 miles away in various directions. It’s horrible and I think it would be faster to look in the yellow pages for what I need in this case. I never found a shop using google.
Also today I was searching for the tires I need in the shopping tab there were ads for tires that google had labeled as wal-mart but when I would click the link it would take me to a Chinese scam site.
And God forbid you look for anything involving troubleshooting your home network. Good luck sorting through pages and pages of the same copy and pasted article telling you how to restart your router.
“Have you tried port forwarding? Here’s some vague results and a screenshot of a netgear gateway page from 2006.”
From googles perspective, you, the user cost them money. Their revenue comes from ads. The brands don’t was to be associated with anything controversial so the results are tailored to be as PG and clean as possible.
I append “site:Reddit.com” (I know, I know) to basically every search I perform. It’s the only reliable way at this point to see things written genuinely by real people.
That used to work until reddit started a war against it’s own moderators and made a lot of people leave to Lemmy.
Reddit is in a slow death spiral I believe.
And to stop it from guessing what it thinks you really meant, change it to “Verbatim” search mode under the Tools button, bottom right below the search bar.
Thank you! I had no idea that was an option you could change.
I have been having better luck with goddamn BING, ffs. Do you realize how embarrassing that is, Google?
Bing is a good search engine, don’t know why people shit on it.
Cause it’s Microsoft. It’s amazing for porn.
Not like Google is a better company.
