It all of a sudden became TERRIBLE and now I can’t find anything? When did this happen? Why did this happen?
I’ve read somewhere that the Reddit debacle has something to do with it.
It’s been progressively getting worse over the past few years as they’ve continued to “optimize” their search engine for more ad placement and sponsored content. I’d say these past few months, it’s become borderline unusable for finding actual information.
This is the thing. It really has become unusable. Trying to find obscure information is insane no matter the keywords. It’s always the same results and, ugh, YouTube videos. You can’t find parts for older stuff easily, simple answers are gone.
Amazon is similar. Change the keywords all you like you still will get the same ‘amazon choice’ products and recommended alternatives for whatever you searched for lead to the same list. But i have to agree it really got worse unreasonably fast last few months.
Someone posted it on here, it works soooo much better and no ad bullshit
Oh wow i just now saw this reply (thanks boost!) Seems very cool, many thanks!
Thanks for this. Trying it out now.
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Define “sudden”.
This has been a progressively worsening problem for a good while now.
To be fair to Google, it’s not entirely their fault, there’s a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results. But even so, Google has absolutelly lost what made it useful. It’s far too concerned with try to curate for you instead of just doing damn search for the words. That helps them get more bullshit and some ads in there.
To be fair to Google, it’s not entirely their fault, there’s a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results
I disagree, Google has encouraged and profited massively off of SEO, they could’ve maintained the integrity of result but instead they bent over backwards to make sure SEO methods worked as long as folks were paying Google
Can you explain a little what you mean by “a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results”? I’ve never heard of that before and it sounds alarming to say the least
I’m guessing they meant SEO - Search Engine Optimisation. It’s much more complex than this, but essentially finding high volume search terms and writing website content based around those terms so your page shows up higher organically.
It’s why recipe pages or simple how to guides have paragraphs semi related text that sounds like it was written by committee. The content needs to be human readable, otherwise Google flags it as spammy, but at the same time it only serves to drive up clicks based on those search terms.
I’m assuming they’re talking about SEO(search engine optimization). There’s companies that offer it as a service to boost websites rankings so they are closer to the top.
The worsening has definitely been progressive over the last 10 years, but I feel there were some sudden changes over the last couple of months that make it a lot less usable than before. For some searches I get the feeling that there’s some kind of whitelist of websites that are included in the search and a huge part of the internet is being excluded. I was looking for a pretty basic diagram some days ago, nothing too obscure, and there were maybe three dozens of results in the image search. I also find more and more pages that are obviously badly translated English content when I search for German terms. I never had that problem in the past. The same goes for product testing. I tried to find a good office chair, but the websites that claim to test different models obviously try to lead you to one specific product. The texts feel like auto-generated content to simulate real articles about the products being tested, but at the end chair X, and only chair X, is the right one to buy.
Maybe all the deleted and edited Reddit posts and comments are finally syncing up.
ComSci here. Lately Google for tech searches, and especially low level shit, gives a few relevant results on top with the bottom of the first page always being scam sites that my corp firewall blocks. Always sites with just random letters
Yeah… Cant provide an answer why probably ads. I had very good search terms and it should be the first hit but it just resulted in crap. Currently using duckduckgo and i got the first link that i was searching for correctly. Not looking back anymore.
I’ve read somewhere that the Reddit debacle has something to do with it.
Are you sure it’s true? I tried googling it and didn’t find anything…
I’ve switched to using ChatGPT for simple but weird stuff like “give me a list of verbs to describe bird behaviour” or “what part of the leg can you be hit at by a bullet and have a chance to survive for a few days, using a tourniquet” (I’m a writer, lol). Try to google that, no chance you’ll come up with anything useful.
Chatgpt doesn’t give factually accurate information
Enshittification
This
Is it the way? Omg 😱
Use duck duck go
Yes, but it also sucks. I want 2001-2010 google back
Alta Vista!
It depends on which bit you’re talking about.
ChatGPT and SEO optimisation ruined the quality of results so sites who have no right to be near the top spot for particular terms get there by cramming as many pages full of tangentially related rubbish as they can.
The SERPs (search engine result pages, where you see the list of links) have been taken over by Google guessing at what you might be looking for, local results, shopping results, instant answers (which is usually aren’t relevant) and of course lots and lots of ads, leaving little to no room for the actual links you want.
If you are sick of it I would suggest trying DuckDuckGo, the results are a whole lot nicer :)
DuckDuckGo has some of the same problems too. It is mainly just a proxy for Bing search results. But they are less full of ads and crappy personalisation indeed. Also search.brave.com is worth a try.
Don’t use anything by brave
Do a search on mobile and you need to scroll through an ENTIRE SCREEN full of ads (4-5) to get to the first result. And even that might be SEO’d. That’s the current sad state of affairs.
You are not alone, google search results quality has declined.
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