I know it’s been getting worse over time, but I could still find what I needed after some digging.
Recently it’s been like 10 minutes of adjusting search terms, still getting completely useless or irrelevant results, and me just giving up afterwards. Other search engines seem just as bad.
all of them. the conspiracy side of me says they all want to drive traffic to the ai.
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I tried Google again after a few weeks of DDG and gave up on the first search. DDG has some troubles with German but I can work around that
Ill add something I’ve never really seen anyone mention: it used to be a lot better at staying on topic without ME keeping it that way
For example: this weekend I was playing Blops 3 and googled shit like “Winslow accord bo3” and after 1-3 searches I could just type shit related to bo3 and even if it had relevant pages related to other shit, it’d remember my recent searches and keep them rather relevant even if it was on my phone or a new window rather than the same search bar
At least, it used to work that way. Now every 4-5 searches it suddenly forgets what tangent I was on and I have to start adding qualifiers again to get relevant searches
i’ve been manually curating your search results the past few weeks. Sorry boss, i’ll do better.
If you can’t do better, then at least add some cute cat pictures in it. At least then I’ll feel a crumb of joy with every wasted effort!
Yes. Its AI generated slop. I use SearxNG, and I have it tuned to go to Startpage first, Google second.
I wouldn’t know I haven’t used Google search in about 3 months.
I shed a tear when quoted strings stopped working
You mean when plused strings stopped? Because that was tragic as hell
I didn’t realize. I’m horrified.
What are quoted strings?
A string is just a collection of characters, in programmer speak. When you use quotation marks in your search to find exactly what you want. If your search was:
dog “fast drive”
Google used to show results that only had both the word “dog” and the joined phrase “fast drive” in the same result. Or tell you there were no results.
Now it feels like Google uses that as a suggestion, giving you “dog” and any combination of “fast drive”, “fast driver”, “fast driving”, or whatever else Google thinks you want, instead of what you asked for. Or if they don’t find it, they serve you up whatever they want, with a small message about there being no matching results.
YEAH WHAT THE FUCK
I’ve started to use Qwant a few months ago when bing and duckduckgo started to give me result I had filtered out in my search. But now it is way past this stage. When I look for something I find a lot of related topic but nothing about the topic I’ve searched for.
I notice it was suddently become much worst about 10~15 days agoAs a basic bitch that hasn’t gone to page 2 of a google search in years I don’t really notice a difference.
The ai answers, related questions, and ad results are not especially helpful but at the end of the day I will find what I’m looking for.
People still use Google?
You honestly though the most used search engine has been abandoned by everyone? Maybe share what you’re using instead of just being pretentious?
I totally honestly believed that. I’m just so naive, how do I get by in life? Thank goodness you’re here to set me straight. What would I do without you? How did you get so good at computers? You must be some kind of wizard.
Lmao. Don’t kid yourself, a vast majority do. Id bet 80-90%
Probably 99%. This question was only meant to be taken as “I am above the common pleb, those idiots”
Those poor bastards
This is what I call the linux bubble. People who use linux and are used to alternate solutions, which may offer better performance than the norm. Then they surround themselves with other like minded people. So much so that they begin to forget that they are using alternatives rather than the norm. Despite what benefits they gain from alternatives, some people can’t grasp that they are, in fact, alternatives.
Twitter has 368 million monthly users. I find it to be a cesspool of hate, racism, and right wing agenda.
So you would think mastodon or bluesky would have equal or better numbers.
Bluesky has 9.7 million monthly users, which includes a huge recent boost because of brazil ceasing twitters ability to operate. I think that alone was 2 million users.
And mastodon has 975,000 monthly users.
So yes, despite it’s flaws, twitter is still the default in microblogging. By a LOT. But I’m sure the feeling around here is “who still uses twitter???”.
Everybody. Same way everybody uses google. Same way everybody uses instagram. And it’s not even close to being close.
The fact I’m most flabbergasted about is that only a third of people use password managers by default. An independent American surveysource: bitwarden over 2000 “random” Internet users shows 34% use a password manager. The randomness of this survey is probably skewed, which would make the total percentage even lower in actuality.
Which is insane since they’ve mostly been using iOSs or Androids built in password manager for as long as that’s been a thing on both. Doubt they even realize that’s what it is though.
You can’t actually believe the default search engine in most configurations isn’t used.
My question was mostly a light jab at OP
They fucked it all up with that AI bullshit awhile ago and it hasn’t recovered. I use start page now and am much happier.
SEO became too well known and is now filled with bullshit.
I always feel a sense of dissonance (I think that’s the right word?) when I see posts like this. Everyone seems to be talking about this, but I haven’t noticed a difference. Honestly, when I look up something, what I’m looking for is usually in the first few results. Not really sure how to feel about my experience being so different from others.
Are you pretty consumercentric, or do you have some niche interests as well? Google is great at basic tasks and delivering product results and promoted content, and if that’s what you’re usually looking for it probably works great for you. People have trouble these days trying to find the specific stuff. Google used to really excel at this in the past, but now it’s buried under pages of promoted content or pages SEO gamed to the top but not being very helpful
No, I search for niche stuff very often.
I’ve been using Kagi since ~February and it’s changed my views on Search. Beforehand, if use a combination of Google, Bing, DDG, and Brave and rarely find what I needed in satisfactory time. Now I’m typically finding it in the top 5 without all the cruft + have access to a handful of LLM assistants to choose from for other tasks (when needed).
I’ve also heard good things about SearXNG.
Yes, it’s fantastic!
Might want to give this a read on ol’ Kagi…
I’m aware.
I hope you don’t pay for it then, since Vlad himself said,
Is this how you live your life? Going around telling people how to live theirs?
Jesus christ dude. I said I’m aware.
I have specific use cases that Kagi, and nothing else that I’ve found but feel free to try me, satisfies to a T with speed and value.
Unlike you, I’m aware enough to realize I’m not the average consumer and that not everyone might fall into my bucket, so it was merely a suggestion ALONG WITH ANOTHER SUGGESTION (SearXNG). I’ll leave it up to the reader to do their own tests and see if it suits their needs.
I guarantee something you eat came from Nestle somehow and that something you own or wear was made on the backs of a sweatshop of some sort. Quit with your holier-than-thou bullshit.
LOL
Chill the fuck out, homie. It’s not that fucking serious. I guarantee you will live a lot longer by getting rid of some of that anger in a healthy manner. Hope your day gets better, asshole. :)