It’s worse: google.com has started to remove the “also available in English” button and defaults to the localized version based on IP geolocation on every call to the home page. Seriously, I wish that company every bad and rotten thing in the world.
Edit: For now, the only workaround I know is to append /en to the URL
Yeah, here’s a fantastic recent article about it:
The Discussion Forums Dominating 10,000 Product Review Search Results - Reddit’s dominance and the downsides of that https://detailed.com/forum-serps/
Google search was so legendary when it came out, it was able to find me perfect results when I would even type in almost gibberish, it somehow predicted what I actually meant. Over time the results were worse and worse, then nothing but products would show in the results a few years ago. Buy this, buy what,etc. no more research, just trash products in the search results. Google greed killed itself.
The Search Engine became a small part of Googles operations, and then Google became a small part of Alphabets operations.
Turns out advertising is where the money is.
Sales.
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Also, google images sucks now. Try googling for anything specific, like “sand in pc” or “red carb on plate” - all AI generated
How can you tell? Do you think it’s on purpose, or just the result of so much AI art being pumped into the interwebs for the last year?
I have absolutely no idea. But I’ve found out that, the more specific of an image you search for, the higher the chance of it being AI-generated.
What I will find interesting since it seems I find better content on stuff like lemmy. I wonder if we will go back to the model of webrings and human aggregated with a mix of user generated links search like yahoo used to be to combat the AI wasteland that is current search. With a web of trust model.
I wonder if we will go back to the model of webrings and human aggregated with a mix of user generated links search like yahoo used to be to combat the AI wasteland that is current search. With a web of trust model.
That definitely seems to be the way to go. A human-curated (likely bot-assissted) collection of links with a range of ways to find content wouldn’t return as many results but how many do we actually need?
I remember when Google launched and the idea of getting 10 million search results seemed very impressive but, for most searches, we aren’t even going to the second page of results and we may not bother scrolling down beyond the first handful.
We need quality not quantity. The early search engines’ pitch was that humans couldn’t possibly index the web and we all went along with this. However, it’s now clear that, partly because of the influence of Google and the desire to game the system no matter the outcome, the Internet is increasingly shit - it’s content generated by machines to fool other machines into showing it to humans.
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I was just talking to some people about this. I use to be the guy who researched everything now I feel stupid AF because finding what I’m looking for feels impossible at times. Hell there’s times where I search something and Google even says “there’s nothing to find”.
append reddit and if that still brings up garbage like reddit says… Articles
Use site:reddit.com it’ll only show from reddit.com and nothing else.
YouTube as well https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3dSkkEr-wk
This has been so annoying. I look up a video on disk provisioning and get a video of a goose wearing a tiny sun hat that I favorited in 2018. And then get the disk provisioning video three levels down…
It is rather terrible.
No but only because I stopped using google search years ago.
It has been getting worse for the last decade.
I stopped using it years ago because they were going downhill and still collecting your private information. I run my own SearXNG now. It proxies from multiple sources, no ads, no tracking. I really enjoy SearXNG as it’s mine.
Public instances
Yep same here, SearX is clunky and confusing compared to other popular search engines but it actually /works/ once youre familiar with it.
I used searx a while ago but forgot if it has Bangs like ddg. Does it?
It does.
No clue, never heard of Bangs or ddg.
I’d say site blocking is SearXNG’s main selling point. (I switched when it got recommended to me on Lemmy :-).) Blocking just a few annoyances (Amazon, Pinterest, etc) make the search results so much better and relevant.
Also, Google is plagued by censorship.
for many years now – stopped using them back when they started to ignore +include, -exclude, and “phrases”
Same.
Google is crap now.
It was a necessary move to incorporate support for Google+ profiles. /s
So wait, the search operators don’t work anymore? It seemed like it but is that confirmed?
They still work but they search the entire page, not just what’s visible in your browser. A search for
"term"does not implicate you being able to findtermon the results’ rendered pages.So pages are just including every relevant term hidden somewhere like they making resumes in the early aughts with 4pt white text with bullshit at the bottom?
A popular SEO trick around 15 years ago was to put a bunch of search terms in a heading tag near the top of your page markup and just style it to minimize its appearance, because if you completely hid it google would penalize your pagerank score. They test for visibility but it’s difficult to do so in a foolproof and futureproof way so there’s likely a similar technique still seeing some limited use today.
It’s far less effective or straightforward than the modern prevailing SEO strategy; which is using generative AI that have been trained on all the top-ranked pages to produce exactly what google likes and ranks highly. Which has a knock-on effect of causing all these AIs to start eating themselves by training on pages produced by AI, like a kind of human-centipede ouroboros.
I think you can still use the operators if you select “verbatim” under “search tools.” On mobile, you need to scroll to the right past images/videos/news/etc
They still work as intended actually, but most pages are so inundated with SEO garble that they’re effectively useless
And if it limits the results too much they just ignore them to cram more ads in.
Can’t have the bottom of the page spelling gogle.
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They really don’t, though. Inclusion/exclusion operators work most of the time, but it’ll still return results with explicitly-excluded keywords. It also fucks up results by returning entries with similar words to your query, even when you double-quote a part of the search term. Advanced queries that use booleans and logical AND/OR don’t work at all anymore, that functionality has been completely removed. It returns what it thinks you want, not what you actually want, even when explicitly crafting a query to be as specific as possible.
I use Kagi for search now and it’s 1000x better, especially when researching technical issues; it’s like when Google actually respected your search terms and query as a whole.
To be clear, we’re talking about the actual search results themselves and not labelled advertisements or any of google’s godawful widgets that take up half the first page?
Do you have an example of a search that returns excluded keywords?
Not trying to be confrontational lol I’m genuinely curious. There was an article I think last year where they demonstrated that everything was still working, but pages essentially just embedded thousands of keywords which effectively ruined the system
When I’m on a VPN connected through the US, absolutely. When I’m not on a VPN, also yes, but not nearly as bad.
Yea, turns out that without competition companies are lazy as fuck.
Yes. Bring back blogrolls!
