I suspect that this is the direct result of AI generated content just overwhelming any real content.
I tried ddg, google, bing, quant, and none of them really help me find information I want these days.
Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
ETA: someone suggested SearXNG and after using it a bit it seems to be much better compared to ddg and the rest.
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Has it gotten worse? They’ve been dogshit for a long time, maybe they’ve gotten worse and I haven’t noticed
There are no search engines besides Google and Bing, because everyone else just uses Bing under the hood.
Funnily enough I’ve found using an LLM to parce the data, then cross checking it’s source as well as my own sources to be superior to previous searches.
It’s annoying to change the way you just mindlessly search, but if you’re upset by it just mindlessly search, end of discussion.
My experience is that search engines are still decent at finding niche information that would normally be hard to find. But for anything mainstream, for instance any household product that should be easy to find information about, instead how about these 300 pages of top 10 lists of Amazon affiliate links buried under AI generated filler?
I often have the opposite experience when looking for technical documentation about programming libraries. For example I will be dealing with a particular bug and will google the library name plus some descriptive terms related to the bug, and I get back general information about the library. In those cases, it seems google often ignores the supplemental information and focuses only on the library name as If I were looking for general information.
What is worse is that the top results are always blog-spam companies that just seem to be copying the documentation pages of whatever language or library I was looking at.
Right on
Roccat Kone Aimo micro switch gives me “500 best mouse 2024” and such BS and that’s it.
DDG and qwant are basically bing
It is, and it’s not just the search engines to blame.
The content out there is incredibly spammy. It doesn’t pay to create good content. It pays to make a pool of AI gunge based on what people search for and then stick ads on it.
Spam sites laden with key words and massive SEO to farm advertising dollars from clicks long predated AI
It doesnt help that big search engines like google have realized people will go as far as page 2 or 3 to find the results, so intentionally worsen their search results to increase ads being served.
I asked Google why search engines are so bad now and its AI summaries its own deficiencies quite well:
Some say search engines have declined in quality due to a number of factors, including:
Search engine optimization (SEO) spam A wave of SEO spam has contributed to the decline in search result quality.
Affiliate marketing Affiliate link sites contribute to the low-quality content that floods the internet.
AI-generated content New technology can quickly produce low-quality content.
Marketing Search results are filled with marketing and links that may not be relevant to the query.
Recommender algorithms Some say the algorithm that recommends content is a mess. For example, someone might be recommended alt-right content after watching a click-bait video.
Ads Google’s biggest business is advertising, and it’s inserting more ads into its products to make more money.
Some say it’s harder to find specific information these days, and that search operators are often needed to filter search results.
I just use chatGPT to search now. I have a super-prompt in its memory telling it how to search and to cite sources and provide links and it is so much better than Google even though it’s using AI, too.
*The future is now, old men!
Not just you.
DDG has deteriorated to absolute nonsense, I’ve used it for years and years.
Recently gave startpage another go - maybe marginally better but still really poor
DDG has also really gone downhill for me. It’s still noticeably better than Google, but DDG nows does a lot of the same shit that originally made me give up on Google years ago. I’m assuming a big part of this is because DDG heavily sources their results from Bing, and while Bing does manage to be better than Google, it’s not much better.
I really need to put some effort into trying out a few more search engines and seeing if they are any better. Last time I looked, many of them were also pulling results from Bing so they all had similar issues.
DDG still mostly fine for me, but anytime I use Google I’m reminded why I left. I wonder how much Googles beancounter enshittification has to do with that…
I switched to DDG right after Google added the ai answers to search and in baffled by how fast DDG seemed to go down hill. Just a few months ago it was still giving me on point results on the first try, now it almost feels like I’m using one of those malware search bars from back in the day.
yes - it’s a recent thing, no more that a few months I think
SEO spam has been a problem for a long time, but AI has allowed it to be accelerated to a whole new level.
Sounds interesting. Care to elaborate that part about AI accelerating SEO spam?
I think OP is referring to the fact that bad actors, who are exploiting facets of SEO (rather then providing “meaningful” content), use to need to programically generate content (pre-AI/LLM).
For a real reader, it was obvious (at a quick glance) this was meaningless garbage. As they would often be large walls of text that didn’t make sense, or just lists of random key words.
With LLM/AI, they’re still walls of text and random key words, but now they grammatically/structurally correct and require no real effort to generate. Unfortunately, it means that the reader actually need to invest time in reading it. You’ll also notice a growing trend in articles (especially in “compare X vs Y” type articles), the same content is recycled and rephrased to “pad” the article and give it a higher SEO ranking.
The other day I googled how long should I broil a ribeye steak and the google AI told me to broil it for 45 minutes.
Broil is the hottest setting on the oven and you’re supposed to broil the meat as close to the burner as possible. This would probably burn down your house.
Huh…Can’t replicate that claim (though I would believe it happening)
On the 20th Sep. I asked my Google Home if it would be raining.
It responded that it would rain. I asked when it would rain.
Home responded with “Today it won’t rain.”Like what? 5 seconds ago you said it would. No weather report reports rain. Where did you get the first response from??
And I could even replicate it (have it on video)I can’t get it to repeat it either but it was definitely an ai auto response thing from google ai overview or whatever it’s called
Now it’s giving distance from burner and everything lol. It’s learning 👀
I don’t even look at that thing. I scroll right past it.
It becomes more and more true every day.
Jesus, the “plandemic” explanation for why the Internet is dying. The Internet IS clearly dying, but this is stupid. Even if we got rid of all the bots and AI, the Internet would still be dying, because open protocols are not as exploitable as walled gardens. The value of capital in the world overwhelms the value of human labour and human interest, and all our social structures conform to the needs of capital over time.
it really doesn’t.
It doesn’t really, it’s just that human activity on the internet is more and more taking place on platforms without any search indexing. 20 years ago, internet forum are where you’d go for advice online. Nowadays, it’s more and more becoming discord servers and similar, which just aren’t indexed by internet search.
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Kagi is pretty awesome
Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
It helps that it gives actual sources, so you can verify them. But yeah, not helpful if all of the sources end up being AI posts.
The whole internet is in the process of being filled with garbage content. Search engines are bad but also there’s not much good content left to find (in % of the total)
The Internet is dead ™
