Yes it has. And it’s talked about all over Lemmy. Is there a circle jerk community on Lemmy?
… A metaphoric one, you mean? Because … um … nevermind.
It is getting tiresome. It seems the main lemmy communities are worse hiveminded than reddit.
It takes less effort to poison a smaller well.
Bump me if anyone finds one. That shit was hilarious back in the day.
https://lemmy.world/c/searchengines
Of course dead, even not showing up on my instance
Not just Google. Duck duck go was good for awhile but now also getting worse. Assume this is Ai and other tools screwing with how their web crawlers collect data. Expect it to get worse before it gets better.
General intelligence slowly taking over, curating everything to the point we won’t be able to tell that it needs to be unplugged when the time comes.
But I enjoy the content it gives me about the content I don’t like being incorrect. And I’ll be damned if I ever say I wish I was born 30 years earlier.
DDG recently started to exclude terms from my search query and returns more random garbage and a “search only …” link. So often I search, find nothing, then realize DDG messed up again. Really not sure why it’s doing that.
In this article, we will certainly discuss why the results from Google search engine are declining. But before continuing, it is important to first outline what search engines are and how they present results….
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.
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?
No clue, never heard of Bangs or ddg.
It does.
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.
Public instances
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
On the flipside for advertisers, prices for ad clicks have never been higher. Its so outrageously high now, making Google such an obscene amount of money, that its unlikely to get better, I’d expect it to get much worse.
Yes, and that’s why I switched to Kagi
Kagi
Does it personalise the result based on your tastes, pages you visit and previous searches?
I tried duck duck go but I don’t like how u personal are the results. This last month I switched to bing and it was better. Some years ago I wouldn’t belive that bing could be better than Google.
It does not. It doesn’t even keep track of your past searches. They may make this possible in the future, but already have it set as off by default, should it ever happen. It’s honestly, really, really good!
ETA - you can indicate what sources should filter up higher in your results if you want
I, too, switched to Kagi a while back. I was highly skeptical because duckduckgo etc. never worked for me. Instead of finding crap, I found nothing instead. I tried kagi’s 100 free searches, and decided that it’s worth it. The feature that allows you to block, lower, or raise the appearance of website makes things a lot better after using it for a while.
I don’t blindly accept cookies, and at some point noticed just how many health-related pages link to the same lock-out page after denying cookies. So many pages with different fronts that are all the same on the backend of things. Now, none of them even show up in my search results. Slowly, I can actually find useful results, even when searching for something in a field like health which seems to get beaten in nonsense/useful ratio only by few topics.
It’s paid though? Hmm.
Yes.
Big time decline in the last few months.
YES
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/
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.
Yes. If you do a search on this site for posts about google, you’ll find multiple threads about this. Basically it seems that google is losing the arms race against SEO, and new LLM bots are mostly responsible.
Google chose to ignore the SEO arms race. Winning it is trivial, if you detect anything even remotely grey-hat, blacklist the entire domain. Forever. Then SEO stops being a thing because no one wants to risk toeing the line.
Basically it seems that google is losing the arms race against SEO[…]
What does this mean in particular?
Search Engine Optimization. Not providing the best search result, but tricking the search engine into thinking you have the best result.
If google detected continuing searching after a page visit, then that page you looked at was probably not having the right answer, right?
SEO solution : make super long pages with the history of what you are looking for and adding mumbo jumbo stuff to bloat out the page so you stay there longer. Now google thinks you found what you looked for.
And a lot of other crap ofc.
Ahhh, that’s the goal behind those overly long explanations about how Jimbo Jimboson invented the spoon when I just want to look up soup recipies.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
The technicals of all the ways this is done nowadays are complicated, but basically SEO itself is now a pretty huge industry, just website owners paying SEO companies to show up higher in search results.
Basically the scenario we are now in is that companies that can afford to game and manipulate the way google’s search algorithm works in terms of prioritizing ‘relevance’, ie, what you see first, have been so successful at this that it has essentially ruined the ability to find any website that cannot afford to do so.
This would be something like 99.999% of existing websites are going to be much harder to find without going through pages and pages of results, whereas a tiny number of websites that can afford massive SEO are going to show up on the first page, as well as in search results for search terms they are barely related to at all.
Companies are better at getting their shitty product/spammy pages to the top of search results than Google is able to find high quality pages to show you.
Google has to create algorithms to judge pages based on their content and get good results , companies only have to fine tune their pages to match the algorithm.
IIRC Google penalizes sites if they are detected to be abusing the SEO system. Not sure how effective the detection is though.
Poor, if my google search results are anything to go by
It’s actually very tricky to implement because people have used it to do “negative SEO”. Which is essentially making it seem like your competitors are abusing the system to get their results lowered.
SEO (search engine “optimization”) is how a search engine ranks its results. The more webpages link to a certain result (as determined by a webcrawler), the higher it is displayed. That is why bloggers are often paid by bad actors to publish editorials that link to a scam, virus, or gambling website.
Google popularized the concept in its early years, back when SEO was an organic indicator of a result’s popularity. It made them the single best choice. Then, capitalism happened, and SEO became a resource to exploit.
People with mediocre content using SEO to get themselves higher in the search results than sites with actual information on them. That way when searching for something you need to dig through the shit to get to the nugget of actual useful info.
Search engines tried to rank pages based on how big the chance is the info the user is looking for is actually on that page. SEO makes it so that pages with a lower chance of containing the right info, are ranked before pages with a higher chance. This leads those pages to get more hits and thus marketing thinks it’s done their job. But in reality it just pisses off users, blaming the dumb sites that do this and more often the search engine. Search engines are trying to fight this, but SEO is big business, so they are losing the battle.
Now these days there are more issues, like search engines not having access to a lot of info in so called walled gardens. So more good info gets created in places where it can’t easily be found. Also search engines have become more and more advertisement machines instead of search engines and with this shift in priorities, the user experience deteriorates.
But yeah SEO sucks and has always sucked.
It means if you search for anything, your first 3 pages of hits are the same useless websites that exist to push ads vaguely related to your search rather than real info. Trying to research a broken TV used to return things like AVForums or reddit threads or samsung support sites. Now it’s “TEN BEST TV’s IN 2024” that are nothing but sponsored content and affiliate links to tvs on amazon.
Google can’t figure out how to tell the difference between the former and the latter, and isn’t motivated to because they get paid for the ad clicks, and not for the forum clicks.
Oh they know, they just choose to shovel the shit for money.
What incentive does Google have to even put up a fight? Worse results = more time searching = more “traffic” = more ad revenue. It’s not like they really have to worry about search engine competitors. Please do not try to recommend DDG to me. It is just a different flavor of garbage.
It was bad before LLM spam became widespread, it’s just even worse now.
Yes, there’s a great article I read a while back about how and why recipe web sites became so bad and frustrating. Basically, a good website would show you the recipe, you would read it and leave. However, since you didn’t spend much time on the site, google would rank it much lower.
On the other hand, if you encountered a long rambling story that you had to read through and scroll through ads, before getting to the useful information, then google would rank the site higher because you spent more time on it. That’s why there are so many memes about how bad recipe website are.
And of course, even before LLMs, it was trivial to implement a copy paste bot to create a massive number of web sites.
It is rather terrible.
Yes, google has been badly managed for years and the business model doesn’t make sense for users. I’ve moved to Kagi and am paying for my search (yes, I’ve tried searx and others).
