- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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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Google is broken because AI is making it obsolete. I bet in 10 years google will be a historical footnote.
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.
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.
Google is absolutely useless now, nothing but SOE farmed rubbish.
It’s become completely unusable.
I’ve moved over to Kagi 100%
It’s well worth the money for the amount of control I have over my experience. Being able to black list, downplay or uplift specific sources is awesome
Never heard of Kagi but it does sound I intriguing.
You will love it. I switched about 6 months ago and it’s wonderful. When I was using duckduckgo I had to use the !g keyword to search Google sometimes. With Kagi, it’s basically switch and you forget Google exists.
Set it as default and you will see what I mean.
I’ve tried Kagi several times and the results for me are not good. I’ve pretty much gone back to Google unfortunately.
Can I ask what kind of searches you’re doing? I don’t find google all that great, so I’m curious what you’re searching for where google gives you good results.
But it’s paid 😭 I spose I could try it for a month.
Yup try it and set as default in the browser. You will start to see a lot of sites that never showed up in google also. They have these “listacles” in search results where they group relevant sites into a small list, which makes it super simple to go to them for results.
If you want a sample search, try “best tv shows 2023” or something like that.
The way you can blacklist listicles and similar garbage is worth the asking price in the face of it
I haven’t done that but yes, it’s pretty much unheard of that the user can actually control what shows up in search if you come from Google-land.
is this an ad?
More like organic user reviews I would say.
“organic”
But it’s paid
Unfortunately it’s looking like that’s going to be the future of things that aren’t shit on the internet, whether it’s paying for search, or donating every so often to your Fediverse admin to help keep the lights on.
I’ve also used Kagi for two months and can really recommend it! I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo a few years back, but Kagi is just so much faster and also generally has better results.
Being able to black list, downplay or uplift specific sources is awesome
I’ve never heard of Kagi, but yeah, those features sound like a godsend. I’d love it if you could have that on a search engine that isn’t pay to use.
I like the idea of Kagi a lot, but the pricing structure is not yet the right one for me. I fully support the idea of paying for search - I paid for Neeva and now that this has shut down I pay for Brave Search Premium. But I despise having limits, that’s a mental burden I don’t want. And with Kagi that would mean I have to pay $25 a month, and that’s not worth it for me.
You’re not limited to a set amount of searches if you pick a cheaper Kagi plan… the plan is just for how many are pre-paid. You’d have to do six times the pre-paid number of searches on the $5 plan to get billed $25, so there’s no point in paying $25 monthly unless you’re actually doing thousands of searches every month.
But either way, there is no limit.
Idk, that might even be worse imo. I don’t want to go back to the days of surprise bills like you’d get because you went over your alotted minutes/texts/GBs, or to have to think about whether or not a particular search is worth $.
The typical surprise bill would still be a lot less than your monthly payment for the infinite searches option. You probably aren’t going to unknowingly perform several thousand more searches than you normally do without noticing it.
Anyway, your other option is to scroll through infinite ads trying to find the few actual search results.
Pick your poison.
You can set a price point you get a notification, and another price point where there’s a hard cap. So I’ve started on the $5 a month plan which is 300 searches plus 1.5c per additional search. Then I set a $5 limit on the extra searches, so I’ll never be billed more than $10.
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.
Huh. TIL!
Have you tried WolframAlpha? It can break down math problems and is a wealth of information for just about everything
I think google made the web worse with SEO. Sites have to be designed in ways that users and creators do not really care about so that they may show up in search results.
If I have a site about star trek and it has all the relevant information that the user is looking for, then do not derank my site because the text is not a specific length or whatever other unrelated stuff is there.
I think there are some things that are worth while, like I think https sites are preferred over http sites. I think that this is a good thing to promote.
SEO isn’t something google invented, it was just a result of their actions.
As much as I’ve come to loathe Google, I think even that is a bit unfair to them. Search engine optimization is a result of the existence of search engines, because being at the top of the results is always worth good money.
Back before Google was the top dog, there were numerous search engines, and I’m pretty sure people shared tips on how to get further up on the results even then, they just didn’t use the term SEO yet.
Google became the dominant search engine because it gave better results than anyone else, because it wasn’t so easy to manipulate your ranking on the results. But there were always sites that wanted to be on top even when they shouldn’t be. Google stayed ahead of their game for some decades, but now it looks like they can’t or won’t keep it up anymore.
I wonder what it would like if they rolled out the OG circa 1998 page-rank algorithm on todays web. What would that algorithm find if we ran it now? Would it be garbage or would it undercut all the SEO and find good stuff?
I have a hunch that the current search is bad, not because they cannot do better, but because it is profitable for it to be this bad. The most powerful SEO tool is probably your checkbook.
There’s definitely an arms race - if it’s cheaper to pay an SEO to get your pages shown, then you pay the SEO; if it’s cheaper to pay Google advertising, then you pay to play. I’m sure Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm to filter SEO techniques to get better, authentic results, but it seems like a losing battle at this point.
I hate where the internet is right now.
Anyone trying to get information written by a human or decent benchmarks of CPUs is in for a real crap time.
Just tested i5 12400 vs i3 12100f and was met with results in this order:
- Userbenchmark
- Userbenchmark
- CPU-Monkey
- 3 shitty YouTube videos of obviously fake gameplay benchmarks (that’s a whole other thing on YouTube)
- Technical city
- cpubenchmark.net - the first kind of decent result as it’s from the people at passmark.
- versus (dot com)
- gadget versus
- pc Praha (dot cz)
- cpu-compare
- cpu-panda
The crap just goes on. SEO optimised lists of (at best) affiliate link laden spec sheets with no real information form an actual human.
At this point I get most of my CPU/GPU info from GN, HWUB, and derbauer.
It’s so annoying to look for it elsewhere.
I had the same experience when choosing between the Intel or AMD versions of a prebuilt. Went with Intel due to having comparatably better specs at the price. Theading is better on AMD (as a rule?) but I can only have so much fun running multiple VMs.
It sucks. I hope you got the best part.
After some browsing I found another option - whoogle which seems to be a self-hosted search engine? I didn’t look into it too much but this also seems very interesting
You can also check out https://github.com/hnhx/librex I’ve used one of the listed sites several times and it’s been acceptable.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
tl;dw: song about google being broken
“I have to add to word reddit to every goddamn search to read content made by humans”
Oh the ironing. That line won’t age well now will it :)
2min 30sec is too long? Tell me it was the YT ads not 2m30s.
But I did appreciate the reddit irony.
did not expect to see a savannahXYZ video on my feed here this morning, love to see it though.
Has anyone created a firefox plugin that allows you to filter out search results based on snippet and URL rules? That would solve the problem on most search engines as the unwanted results are usually repetitive and obvious.
Not exactly what you’re asking for but uBlacklist is a plugin that lets you blacklist websites from showing in your search results. I’ve only been playing with it for a few days but it seems to work great for Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing. Qwant is a little wonky.
deleted by creator
is this an ad?
deleted by creator
I’ve used ecosia for the last few years I rate it pretty good.
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.
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.
