Google search failed to even find a hollywood movie, even after 1 hour of attempts. I don’t really care about the movie, but I am terrified by the prospect that google now ceased to function on this basic level. Why is this happening?
I understand the explanations of seo and other stuff like spam content. But why are there NO relevant results at all.
I wouldn’t mind having to start wading through results at page 2 or even 10 but now it utterly fails to find even the most basic things.
Things you found on the first attempt even just a year ago. Now they are effectively hidden.
To me functionally the entire internet has now vanished. I cannot access anything that I am searching for. Might as well not exist at all.
Has anybody found a way around this?
Is this on purpose? Is this an attack on the free internet, herding people to just the top 5 sites like facebook, youtube, tiktok, and so forth?
Are there search engines that still work?
Everybody is blaming SEO, which is true - but Google is also hamstrung by walled gardens.
Before Facebook, most content posted to the web was open. It could be viewed by anyone without logging in. Reddit even uses this paradigm.
But then Facebook started putting everything behind their account login and suddenly, Google can no longer spider a significant amount of the conversation going on on the Internet - and it can’t link you to it either, because the link would be dead if you weren’t a logged-in Facebook user. And of course it’s not just Facebook.
This is why appending site:reddit.com has come into fashion in the past couple years. Reddit, being open, viewable without a login, is a fantastic source for finding people who are talking about exactly what you’re searching for.
And it’s another reason why Meta is cancer: all the conversations going on about whatever problem you are experiencing that made you do a search in the first place, if they exist in private groups on something like Facebook - they are useless to you and useless to anyone but the members of that private group. We are losing our giant public knowledge base because capitalism.
You really need to add Discord to this list as it is soaking up gigantic amounts of information about video games as a forum replacement. One could argue for actual community games like MMO’s it is perhaps slightly different, but for the majority it is a huge problem.
In 10 years, when we move off discord for “the next big thing” all that info will be gone yet again. It happened to slack and it will most likely happen to discord. None of it will be indexed too. Fun times.
Where are the data hoarders when you need them?
Tools for backing up servers already exist: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter But unfortunately discord can’t be easily scraped in one coordinated attempt unlike reddit due to the massive number of private servers and existing verification/anti-bot mechanisms. As a result, only the communities that have data hoarders will be actually archived.
Good link, though not the one I used. I’ve already begun taking measures archiving various chats. Even if Discord lives, my account might not.
But u can login to discord and if the room is public you can see the content. Even if ur logged into FB if ur not in the private group u can’t see the content.
Even if ur logged into FB if ur not in the private group u can’t see the content.
Well yes, that’s entirely the point of the comment above: unlike old school forums, discord is just as useless as Facebook in helping search engines deliver useful content.
I think the point is you can’t put a search term into a search engine and get results from some random Discord. No body is going to go trawling through Discords to then use the search function to potentially find information from it. Now, if chats were somehow archived and could then be searchable, different story, but I don’t think that’s what people using Discord want from Discord.
yeah, this is a problem. But in practice i found that if your searching for one niche problem and your only lead is discord, the people there are going to be kind and help.
I know the pain on having to join something’s discord to get info, but it’s usually fast after I join.
But the bigger issue appears when you don’t have a clear place to go. It’s like we’ve gone back to before written records were common. Once that server goes and the people scatter, that information might as well never have existed. 5 years after Discord disappears, the only knowledge people will be able to find of it will be a handful of old messages complaining about
some dude who scammed a bunch of people with low quality ironDoge coin.I get it, it is a problem. But I just wanted to up the mood by saying that “you can get the info”. ig I just made ppl mad :/
I can’t see downvotes, but I imagine that people just took it as you disagreeing and saying that it’s not a problem.
I was thinking of stuff that’s super niche anyways, like if you’re trying to keep a program running that your company’s database relies on that hasn’t been supported since Windows 95 or something absurd like that. For most stuff, it’s still possible to find at least somebody with an answer, even if you have to go to a Discord server for it. But when nobody has documented stuff that’s super obscure? Good luck!
You can see the content, but it isn’t categorized, tagged or organized in any way. If you’re looking for some specific information but you don’t know which server/channel it was discussed on, you’ll never find it.
Yeah I can’t stand discord. Impossible to find anything, constantly feel like I’ve joined a conversation that has been in progress for months so have to scroll up ages to get any sort of context.
I don’t engage socially in random Discord servers, I’m almost certainly just there for an FAQ, to ask a question, or to use Discord’s- pretty decent- search function to find someone who’s had whatever issue I’m having before.
Aren’t you comparing apples and oranges:
If the server is private, then you can’t search it. If the group is private, then you can’t search it.
If it is public you can on either platform but must participate on the platform. That’s what made Reddit unique: lurking was real easy and didn’t require an account.
Sidebar from someone who is probrbly just to old to know: How would I go about finding discords that are relevant to my intrests? I am a member on a few servers, but the discovery was always the other way around: I found the invite-link on a website/community that dealt with the topic I was intrested in.
Reddit keeps asking me to use their app and they are very clearly making the mobile browser version worse and worse.
Just last week I couldn’t view a thread I found on Google without signing in. It wasn’t adult content and didn’t require verifying my age. The reason given was very vague and had something to do with the content not being vetted (despite being old).The Reddit garden wall is already here and is currently being rolled out. For your own good, of course.
I use a browser extension to redirect to old reddit, which doesn’t have all this crap yet
Which extension?
There are some extensions you can try - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=old+reddit+extension+firefox&t=fpas&ia=web
But I’m using LibRedirect - https://libredirect.github.io/
If you’re using Firefox mobile (Android), you could try this https://github.com/octonezd/oldlander
You’re a goddamn life saver
Probably this:
“Unreviewed Content
This community has not been reviewed and might contain content inappropriate for certain viewers. View in the Reddit app to continue.”
Knew I could find it by searching for an in-theaters film followed by “DVD rip reddit”. Behold / old reddit link.
The sub exists to funnel people to a single TinyUrl. Checking the preview instead, I expect it (123movieshd dot club) is a malware distributor.
While reddit’s tactic is coercive, it also functions as a lazy way to fight the reach/effectiveness of spammers.
Replace the beginning of the url with old.reddit.com. this will get you in.
Sure, for now. They won’t keep that up forever.
Agreed, but it’s been working now for longer than I originally expected. I wonder if some part of their choice base totally relies on that being available…
Yeah it’s true. Too bad. Bye reddit.
Use Firefox and there are extensions that block the app request popup. Or you could use tampermonkey or something similar to do it.
I bet that doesn’t work with the login requirements.
The page still loads behind it, usually, there’s just a popup keeping you from accessing it. So I don’t see how they could stop you from just… removing the popup.
Sure, to see a few top-level replies. That’s another part of it, you’ve got to click “see more” several times in order to see every branch of the conversation. None of that is hidden behind the overlay element.
Also, starting in 2018 Google no longer actually searches for the words you entered. Instead, it tries to figure out “what you really mean” and shows results for that. See BERT
“… Google can no longer spider a significant amount…”
What?
“A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing.”
But I think that’s letting Google off the hook because when I search for things I do get hits, it’s just weird and I get terrible hits. Last week I was looking for something specific and I found five pages in the top 10 that were all variations on each other, to the point that I assume some of them were automatically generated but have no idea which is the actual original source, if any.
And then if I’m searching for something like song lyrics, the top five hits are all sites that require JavaScript to be enabled and AdBlock to be disabled. Of course Google could filter its rankings to bring sites like this out of the top 10.
So I agree with you that capitalism is a huge issue but one specific issue here is that the Google developers don’t care about things that we care about. And other companies such as Apple and Facebook are worse of course.
👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆
You can’t just write an essay like that and not tell us what terms you used for your searches
The signal to noise ratio has seemed particularly out of wack with Google lately. The amount of blog spam SEO nonsense that crops up into the top 4 results has been pretty noticeable.
I’m not sure it’s entirely a Google thing. Reddit’s decline has made it harder to find quick answers for, “My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?” Niche hobbies moving from forums to Discord chats means, “How do I safely remove a keycap without damaging the switch?” is becoming a pinned message in a server you have to hear about via word of mouth. Basically any technology troubleshooting topic has moved from a blog post / forum to a YouTube video. And a 10 minute long one at that. Gotta hit those higher ad tiers.
For what it’s worth, I’m starting the new year off giving Kagi a try. It’s a startup trying to make a paid search engine work. You get 100 free searches to give it a try. After that it’s $5/mo for 300 searches, or $10/mo for unlimited. I’m not sure I’ll sign up for it just yet, but it seems pretty nice. No ads, custom components for things like Stack Overflow and Reddit, and some other nice touches for people who care about search. Their image search actually has a “View Image” link in addition to the “View Page” link. It’s hard to quantify how “good” a search result is, but I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far.
The last part of your comment sounds like an ad straight out of those overlong YT videos.
Have Brands™ started astroturfing Lemmy yet?
I’m not completely sold on Kagi yet. I’m still in the trial period right now. But paid services can be a tough sell online. I figured I’d be up front about the costs rather than wait for the inevitable “$10 a month for search!?” comment.
I haven’t seen any obvious astroturfing yet, but your last paragraph really did have the vibe of a smoothly transitioned paid promotion. Not saying it was, but even the comments that you haven’t fully bought into it made it feel even more like one of the more honest paid promotions.
I read this same sentiment two days ago; Google doesn’t work for me.
Not sure what they are on about. I can find things I‘m looking for on Google in under a Minute 9 out of 10 times and I tend to use it quite heavily tbh…
if you’re searching for something general, like, i dunno “dishwasher cleaner” or something, it spits out usable results.
but as soon as a query becomes technical in nature, like troubleshooting IT problems, it’s a straight up nightmare.
the reason it’s so bad at searching for anything very specific is their attempt to “figure out what you really mean”:
and google does that by… ignoring what you typed and changing your search prompt behind the scenes without telling you and without any options to change it.
and putting it in quotes rarely improves searches anymore, only spits out more garbage.
point is: google is basically dead for any specific searches and only really works for searches that amount to “i want to buy thing. show me thing.”
I had this weird hardware issue with my desktop and I could not find results for it on Google about a year ago, and I had searched for it a bunch of times previously as well and couldn’t find anything relevant. My boyfriend searched for it on Google on his computer and found a result with the information we needed and i immediately fixed it.
Guessing my “custom” results were poisoned by something at some time, but it prevented me from finding the answer I needed, and I didn’t think to log out at the time.
Super done with Google tbh
Yes, they have
I signed up for Kagi after the trial. I’m very subscription adverse, but this one was something I don’t mind paying for.
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It’s great that DDG doesn’t track a users searches. It really is.
But at the end of the day, it’s still just another ad platform profiting off of companies trying to sell you things.
And here you are complaining it seems like an ad, when someone’s explaining an alternative ad-free search.
Just think about that for a moment.Also, if we’re being frank, DDG’s results are damn near useless half the time.
It’s like the opposite end of the SEO spectrum. Whereas Google just anchors onto certain keywords to regurgitate the same 4 listacles, DDG just sees your input for “my lawnmower won’t start” and responds with “lawnmower huh? I dunno here’s the history of John Deere or some shit, fuck off”.
I tried using DDG but had even worse results than Google is having right now. I wish it was good, but my multi month trial of it was not impressive.
It was especially bad for programming. At least Google still finds what I need for that
Hard disagree with that, DDG searches are accurate about 90% of the time that I use it (which as a web dev is quite a lot) if they aren’t hitting Google with the same term rarely wields any better results.
I’ve had the same experience as you. The vast majority of the time, I can get the results that I want.
It also doesn’t allow you to actually exclude keywords. Which can be utterly infuriating if you’re looking for a specific entry in a franchise or a lesser used definition of something.
It’s just handing your search off to Bing, and Microsoft just does what it does.
DDG pays Bing to use their API. DDG makes money by placing ads in the results. They do it kind of circularly using Microsoft’s ad system, but they are separate.
Kagi is very good and I’m happy to be paying for it, but you were right in your second paragraph. It’s not all google. Signal to noise in the web has gone way off. We need to throw out this Internet, it’s gone bad
Story time! There is series by Tad Williams called “otherland” - it’s a rift in the standard stuck in vr story.
Anywho. There is a group of hackers, weirdos and nerds who did not like the corporate vr experience and built their own (treehouse). In all honesty it’s an expansion of the tor project.
But it’s what I hope for. A place to end up in the web that’s not saturated to hell and back by corporate interests, and you need to know someone for the ladder to be let down and you to be let in.
For me the fediverse has become that “alternative web” but of course it has its limits… But I’m too young to judge, google has been crap as long as I can remember. Regarding the alternative web, I could imagine a community run search engine operating on an alow list basis inorder to keep any capitalist crap out.
Also I’ll have to read that book (:
Do read it. But also keep in mind the time the books where published.
Honestly I think the fedverse (or it’s successors) will adopt some of the components of tor (or it’s successors) and merge into something new.
google has been crap as long as I can remember.
Eh what’s that sonny? I member when the term “Google” meant sumpin! Stomps off angrily waving his cane
I just started book 2 in the series, and so far I’m loving it, it feels so topical at the moment. Plus I really like Tad’s writing. This series is the first I’ve read of his, but I’m deff gonna grab more of his work.
Fair warning. For me book 3 was a bit of a slog, but seeing everything come together in book 4 was worth it.
I’m about 60% through the first book, I can’t get enough of it!
It’s a machine learning epidemic. Now that blogspam can be automated in a way that Google can’t even look for without penalizing a ton of sites because people write in a similar style to ML tools, search is basically fucked in its current form. Back to human hand curated webrings.
Also Kagi sucks worse than Google and DDG for a lot of things. I still pay for it, hoping it gets better, plus they have a lot of useful tools.
Yandex.com is where you’ll find movies.
Yandex.com is where you’ll find movies.
And porn. Google has recently became completely useless on that.
Rare Google W
Yeah but it’s owned by Russia
And?
I don’t want the KGB knowing what I’m doing any more than Google
Use tor browser then.
They do have a shitty custom CAPTCHA and it makes tor users do it a few times. You can also just use a decent VPN. Mullvad, Perfect Privacy, OVPN, I’m connected to multiple VPNs like 99% of the time I’m on my computer. On my phone I use tor when I need it.
My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?
Oh I got this. You have to put it into diagnostic mode, and then it will flash lights at you, giving you the error codes in binary. I’m not kidding!
For more info you can lift up the top of the machine by unscrewing some screws on the back. There are lots of screws on the back, but only three or four of them attach the top. If you lift the top up you can push the drum back and then slide your hand into the space between the drum and the frame. There’s a ziplock bag in there with the service manual, and it’ll tell you how to spin the knob to enter diagnostic mode. On my Maytag I have to spin the knob R, R, L, R, not to quick, not too slow.
I was blown away when I learned this all. I was having a problem with my clothes not drying, but still the components seemed to be working. I was getting a specific error about one component, but when I tested it it was fine. In my case the problem was where the wires from that component plugged into the control board–it was just slightly loose! So I pushed it in and everything is nominal.
You’re my new favorite person in this comment section.
And this post, being on Lemmy, will be indexable by search engines!
I have a feeling it’s not unrelated to the billions-in-false-charges-for-ads-slash-youtube-ad-debacle.
Tl;dr: google made a billion dollars charging for ads no one saw and then discovered that happened. To avoid being sued they panicked and ensured ads were seen, which had lovely knock-on effects for most of the interwebz.
Remember “anti-trust” laws? Yeah me neither.
Having to join an entire discord server to just find out or download one thing is really, really painful
That’s because everyone thinks they need to post all of their information to discord to get validation instead of maintaining open web accessible blogs that can be archived
I started using Kagi a few months ago and have been really happy with it. It’s completely replaced Google search for me. I think it’s saved me a lot of time and helped me avoid a bunch of advertising I otherwise would have been exposed to. Not being incentivized by advertising money like Google is really makes a difference I think. With Kagi you are the actual customer and search is the actual product, with Google search you are the product and the customer is whoever paid Google to insert advertising into your search results.
It is entirely a google thing. Reddit might’ve helped google hide its limp as it was declining, but it’s google that encouraged websites to write blog spam for SEO, by their very creation of their SEO algorithm. Google has indirectly shaped the internet in this manner.
I remember crunching the numbers with Kagi a couple months ago and most of their plans aren’t worth it, not unless you actually use it at the specified amount. However maybe the packages have changed now, I remember it being something like $5 for 300, $10 for 700 and $27 for unlimited.
It also doesn’t block you when you run out of free searches when you have a package, instead they charge you like 2c per search. So you have to carefully feather your usage to maintain the value - don’t use it enough and the cost per use is high, use it over your limit and the cost per use is high. Frankly, I don’t want all that hassle, particularly with something I’m paying for.
With your new numbers, the $5 package is 1.67c per search, and you’d need to more than 600 searches for the $10 package to beat that rate. However, assuming 2c per search after your 300 in the $5 package, you would hit $10 after 550 searches. So, if the 2c per search is correct, you should upgrade to the $10 unlimited plan only if you’re doing more than 550 searches.
I think they realized their price structure was confusing/annoying towards the end of last year. Now it’s just $5/mo for 300 searches or $10/mo for unlimited. (There’s also still an expensive $25/mo plan for early access to some of their LLM experiments apparently?) You got me curious and I couldn’t find any mention of per-search overage billing. This feature request thread from 2022 just makes it sound like Kagi search gets shut off.
I bouncing hard off of Kagi when they had the original pricing structure you described. Bringing back aughts era SMS overages or just mentally having to count searches doesn’t exactly found like a fun time. I’m going to give the $5 plan a try this month to see how far that gets me. $10/mo is still a tough sell for Internet search. If I really find it substantially better, I might convince my spouse into trying the two seat $14/mo unlimited “Duo” plan for a while.
Maybe paid search engines was the end goal all along…
Someone has to pay for it one way or another. It’s just a matter if you want to pay with money or your personal data being supplied to advertisers.
Yep. If something is “free” for the user, then the user is the product
Well, if it’s from a for profit corporation, anyways, that’s typically the case. Either that or they’re trying to onboard you for an upsell down the line.
are you Kagi seeder ?
So far I am really like kagi. Makes sense to pay for something you use every day, without which the extensive resources on the internet would be basically useless.
A literal ad. Goddamn. I’m blocking your ass.
Could their comment be a highly thoughtful and extrapolation on the current state of affairs regarding search engines and the rise of free to use products where the consumer is the product? Or is the comment just an ad because obviously anything mentioning a brand is immediately an ad with no other thought put into it.
Buddy, companies trying to build up user base aren’t exactly going to push for it in comment sections of a small pocket of the internet. They’ll spend their ad dollars on targeted FB and Reddit ads or buy airtime on new shows to talk about the dangers of data privacy and how Google is selling you out.
Try Brawndo next time you’re looking to water your plants. Brawndo, it’s what plants crave.
This is tough.
1: Kagi is getting some play in Lemmy comments recently.
2: Lemmings are often technology evangelists, making Lemmy a good place to astroturf for very specific products.
3: Companies are better than ever at properly seeding account comment histories to prevent suspicion.
We should all be appropriately skeptical, though somewhat polite can’t hurt either since there’s never proof of anything and I’ve sounded like an ad before.
who honestly pays for a fucking search engine
reads hard like astro turfing
Yeah.
If Google released Google Premium - where teams of offshore workers deranked SEO spam junk - would you give them 99 cents a year to Stop The Madness?
This is that, except it’s a no name, and the cost is far more. But I’d consider the $0.99/yr.*
If that seems more sane… imagine you have plenty of disposable income so whatever the no-name charges is practically free for you. There has to be a market for it. But the resistance will certainly be immense.
*
—
Back to astroturfing…
Anytime Kagi is mentioned I suppose I’ll jump in and say they’re an oft-mentioned brand suspected by at least a handful of users to be astroturfing, although there’s no proof, and SearXNG is a popular non-commercial alternative. I wanted to throw Grasp in to give a commercial competitor a shout but they’ve “paused”.
I do. I use search basically every day and when I’m working I don’t want to waste a bunch of time digging through bullshit if I can help it. Google sucks, $10 a month for a better experience that both saves me time and helps get Google more out of my life is worth it to me.
that reads like an ad so hard lol
I pay for Kagi and it works better than Google. Nobody is astroturfing for them, you’re just paranoid.
Welcome to Costco. I love you
I just ordered a giant thing of cologne from Costco the other day and when it came in I opened the box and said “I love you Costco” as I did it. I looked at my wife and told her Idiocracy was right. I mean, it always has been, but I’m glad Costco loves me too.
For reference, this is not an ad for Costco, or Idiocracy. Although you should totally watch the movie and membership does have its perks. Plus $1.50 hotdogs.
I’m really surprised that you couldn’t find a Hollywood movie in an hour. Can I ask what the movie was? Was there a specific question you couldn’t find the answer for?
I’ve always had the opposite, that a movie having a certain title absolutely destroys that term or phrase’s use unless all you want is that movie.
People trying to look up the Kirby character “Zero Two” to find fan creations based on it…
Only to get barraged with weeb garbage.
Seriously you used to easily find fan content, remixes and music. Now all you get are shitty AMVs of some turbovirgins “Waifu”
In google search for
“kirby” “zero two”
And you only get the kirby results. And if you want to filter out the kirby weeb crossovers you add a
-darling
Didn’t even need the quotations and google knows I’m a weeb, that person is just making a mountain of a mole hill because the newest character with the same name is more popular.
This is because google, surprise surprise, actually knows who you are.
I have very similar results looking for things like Dota 2 hero names. It knows Bane is the nightmare purple monster, not the masked walking meme batman villain, and I don’t have to specify.
What google is TRULY garbage at is answering questions.
Unfortunately negative prompts and quotations don’t work half of the time on Google. As many in this comment section have noted.
You need to click search tools and select “verbatim.”
Google will nag you and not show them, but if you press the “I really mean what I searched for” thing then it usually works for me. I just wish Google would trust that I know what I typed. But yeah I remember it being better.
exact match was phased out years ago sadly
No, it wasn’t. Still works perfectly for me (even to the point that there are zero results if the exact term simply doesn’t exist.)
I just tried the search prompt I wrote and it worked flawlessly. Idk what the issue is.
turbovirgins
I have never heard this term before… Oh that has me laughing, I can never not associate that with weebs and waifu now
Have all three with zero two kirby search.
This is what I hate. Sometimes I like to search up “life on mars” and see the various pictures people have created and the images people claim have life in them.
But I always get results for a television show of the same name that has absolutely nothing to do with the planet…
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I understand OP’s sentiment that google’s getting worse, but this sounds like ragebait. No examples of what they searched for an hour.
People don’t lie on the internet, it doesn’t happen 🫥
I would ask why op didn’t use IMDb.com or trakt which catalogue every Hollywood movie?
People used to be able to do research. Haven’t they ever heard of the Dewey Decimal system?
You can’t ask, because the OP is just part 1 of an ad
I’ve finally switched to DuckDuckGo because of this. Even though only about two months ago I said here somewhere that it’s garbage. Google just managed to convince me that they’re more garbage.
That’s because DDG gets its results from Bing.
But without the chatgpt spam that has overtaken bing the last few months.
I came to the exact same decision a few months ago.
DDG used to be worse; now it’s better.
The only downside of DDG is that it doesn’t have a decade or two of algorithm data to personalise your searches and sort of “learn” what you mean with certain terms.
Not like I miss it too much. It’s just a mild culture shock to suddenly having to be more clear with my searches
That’s a good thing, in my opinion. I miss when Google results were the same for everyone.
You mean the upside is it doesn’t track every behavioral trait? I can live with that
It just occurred to me that this ability to communicate with a search engine, that everyone used to call Google-fu, was exactly this! It didn’t already know (or think it knew) what you were getting at, and it’s took some practice to figure out how to finesse the results.
I’ve been using Bing and choosing Google only as a second resort or for any shopping I do. If Google wants to be an ad filled shopping mall, I’ll treat it as an ad-blocked shopping mall.
In that case you should be using DuckDuckGo; it uses the same database as Bing, without the tracking of Bing, and with the ability to use ! commands to pull in results from other places (!g=Google, !w=Wikipedia, etc.).
When I’m specifically shopping for things I expect to be tracked and advertised to. I’m just selectively deciding who gets to advertise to me.
Over the last year of me using DDG as my primary search engine it has noticeably improved, give it another and we might see a trace of that spark Google had
I find my DDG results are only getting worse with time.
Same problem as with Google, and then some.
Carefully craft search string and submit.
Click through to a result, scroll and try to find the part that addresses my question.
Get frustrated and Ctrl+F for the active part of my search string.
Don’t find it.
Hit back to search results to repeat (but now the results are shuffled for some reason?)
Eventually give up and put the active parts into quotes to force their inclusion.
Same results.Why am I getting these results if they don’t even match my search string?
been using duckduckgo for a while now. it definetely could be better, but google is just hot garbage.
Ddg is my default, but I still find myself having to resort to Google when the query is not dead simple. The engine is good enough for most cases, but overall Google is just better imo.
DDG is way worse than google. I am baffled by this comment.
So you’re using Bing.
It may be bing under the hood, but it gives simple results without having ads and giant boxes everywhere.
What happened is SEO got good and money got made and fortunes got made and greed has taken over.
The internet today is the equivalent of the first and last 10 pages of the old yellowbooks. Why do you think AAA Auto is called what it’s called?
The American Automobile Association was founded in 1902. Well before the yellow pages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Automobile_Association
Don’t forget AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Towing Service
Don’t forget the two biggest gossips: Aaronson and Zakowski.
Oooooh that blew my mind
They needed to go scorched earth on SEO years ago. Try anything even vaguely grey-hat, your domain is permanently blacklisted from all search results. No appeals, no second chances, your content will never see the light of day again.
Because they work on automobiles, duh.
Google was really valuable before web services were so monopolized and consolidated like they are now. It’s almost more useful to use the specific websites search function for many things now. Before this, you could run searches and it would have all these personal and small websites indexed. Oh look, here’s a guy who lives his whole life as Peter Pan and has a website about it, cool… now it’s just a profile on some social media site same as anyone else.
I refuse to believe you haven’t been able to find a Hollywood movie after an hour? That sounds more like an issue with you than Google
I was trying to Google “Best way to shave your head with low or no water pressure” because I was staying somewhere rural for a bit and my razor kept clogging.
All I got were straight razor blog spam and dozens of other completely unrelated shit.
I tried the shake it in a bowl method, 1/10 razor still clogged with hair.
I get specifically pissed at all the AI generated answers.
Funny enough, GPT is where I’m going for searches like this now. Whenever my search query doesn’t pull the answer up with one or two clicks, I head to GPT and it finds the info for me.
*makes up the info for you.
You can ask it for sources etc now, it actually does the searching for you now instead of making shit up
By definition, everything it does is “making shit up”. Sometimes that shit is useful, sometimes not. Citations isn’t going to magically fix that, because it’s baked into how a generative AI based on an LLM works.
I always have it provide sources and I vet them. Same as I do Wikipedia. And it hasn’t been wrong about a movie having a post credit scene or not yet, and now I don’t have to read through all those shitty-ass articles that bury the lead somewhere after providing a shit ‘review’ of the movie.
It’s a very solid tool when used correctly, and GPT4 is head and shoulders above 3.5.
The same tool made up references to seemingly real legal cases that never existed.
K
I hate it when you google how to do basic things and have to scroll through an entire essay on what that thing is and why you might want to do it.
You have a brain right? If you ask it for low water pressure shaving tips I think it would be pretty easy to tell if it’s suggesting nonsense.
The problem is that you’ll start trusting it based on a few examples that it was correct, and you’ll be burned by a seemingly correct answer that is really wrong. I tried testing it with simple science and engineering questions and it was garbage.
Interesting, I’ve had the total opposite experience. GPT-4 is reasonable more often than not. I don’t find the “it’s sometimes wrong” argument very compelling because the same is true for 99% of other information sources. I’ve always had to use critical thinking when look for answers online anyway.
You’d think those rural skinhead training camps would have better-engineered facilities
Wow, really? That’s my go to: shove it in the sink or bath water and aggressively swish the crap out of it. Or, rather, the hair out of it. That must have been frustrating as hell!
While it’s fun to bash on Google, this might have been a more productive discussion if you had provided your search query and perhaps a sample of the results
The biggest issue I have is that half my results come back as videos. Video results should be in the video tab. I don’t want to watch a half hour long video just to find out how to make a healing brew in ark.
One paragraph would convey the information 10x faster than any video couldI just registered an account here specifically because I’ve noticed it a ton recently and I wanted to reply to this since it’s been on my mind. From my experience, google’s quality has been going down in general for a while now, but very recently (the last few months or so?) it hasn’t been just unusable in a figurative sense, it’s been quite completely literally useless to the point of basically being broken.
I really wish I could remember some specific examples of what I was searching for, but I’ve had more than one experience where it felt like if it couldn’t find something on reddit or wikipedia (which I usually have to give it some assistance anyway with the site: filter), it was like that thing just didn’t exist. It was just pages and pages of what looked like fake AI generated articles that were only maybe slightly adjacent to the topic I was searching for. If it happens again or I can remember a specific case I might try to update my response.
Disclaimer: I use bing 50% of the time depending on which browser profile I have open. No real specific reason here, just that I didn’t bother updating the search engine settings on all profiles. Ironically, bing, which I had always regarded as inferior, does manage to give better results in some cases, but even still I feel like the quality has (somehow?) managed to go down as well.
Lately I’ve been trying to use mojeek, which (to my understanding) unlike other sites like DDG actually has its own crawler whereas most alternatives are just frontends for google/bing. The results are kind of wonky a lot of the time, but at least it’s not so much fake unrelated garbage.
I do have an adblocker on all the time. Perhaps that’s related. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that my experience is so shitty given that I’m clearly not their target audience, if we’re just talking about advertising.
Just this morning I noticed that ChatGPT (which I usually hate using) was giving me better results than google. Not just in a little way, the experience was about 100x better. Theory: they’re trashing their search engine product to try to force people onto their “AI” products. Probably not that far-fetched. If they really want to push one product over the other you can either make one product a lot better than the other or make the other product a lot worse.
willing to bet google is garbage now because of all the AI-run “blogs” that post unhelpful idiotic filler “articles” on every topic under the sun
edit: i despise this shit so much that i made this dissection of a bullshit AI article: https://i.imgur.com/Hr1wffj.png
Google search failed to even find a hollywood movie, even after 1 hour of attempts.
That’s just not believable. What was your search criteria?
It got so bad, I mainly use duckduckgo (95%) as of about two months ago
