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.
Not significantly because I’m always stupid specific with my searches, but I do notice that roughly every 5 results they put something in that has nothing to do with what I searched.
I don’t say this to be dismissive, but Google’s search results have been getting worse for the better part of a decade now, and they’re still far above anyone else. While I do think that engines like Bing are closer to Google’s quality than most give them credit for, Google is still the only game in town. There are other search engines that people use, but they are niches in niches, and are probably used for belief reasons over an improvement in quality.
Frankly, I think that for the first time in history, the search market is open for competition. There is an argument to be made whether Google either doesn’t care about their search quality, or that it’s simply a hard problem to solve for anyone. If the former is true, then a competitor could make a very real case for overthrowing Google, given the right backing and hype behind them.
Yeah, it’s not so much that the search results declined, but that the spammy content farms really got the hang of SEO and now all the results are shit and they all have one thing in common in that they’re covered in ads. Google does have an incentive in giving you links filled with their ads, but I’m not convinced that is responsible for the mountains of shit sites. And LLMs are only going to make this worse.
Google got outsmarted. I feel like there’s maybe a few dozen companies where if you blocked all their sites, your search results would improve massively.
What is a good search engine these days? I use DuckDuckGo but I don’t find it’s very sensitive to local content, like if I’m looking up an obituary I end up switching to Google. Any more precise and privacy oriented search engines?
I’m a big fan of Kagi.
I don’t care how good it is, but I’m not paying for a search engine.
Your loss because it’s actually good. There’s also a free version.
I just started using this one today: https://docs.searxng.org/ and it did a great job for what i needed. I never heard of it before, but found the link on an old Lemmy post.
I don’t know how it would work for other people with other needs, but i needed to find graphic designers to help me with a project. DuckDuckGo kept giving me hundreds of results from a handful of big companies, but i wanted small companies and individuals. Found exactly what i needed on the first search using this engine.
The rate at which the results got worse has a notable pattern in line with their drive for ad revenue. Most of the results are garbage because they are driven by money rather than user choice and popularity. The more money you pour into tuning SEO and Google Ads the higher you rank. To hell with relevance or what users actually want.
I ran a web community for writers from 1997 onward, and threw in the towel this year. The site had a core following but we relied on a steady trickle of new users from organic search and word of mouth to stay afloat. And little by little no matter how much time I put into SEO and the site we continued to slide due to a combination of seo rank and google just removing pages without explanation or reason. After spending the last 5 years rebuilding the site for SEO and mobile optimization, I watched google index 99% of the sitemap, our rank come back up slightly, new users starting to come in… And then it just… Stopped. I went to check the indexing, and google had silently moved all the indexed pages back to “crawled but not indexed” for no bloody reason. Zero errors, codes or messages.
I threw in the towel. The site was costing me nearly $500usd a month to operate and I could not throw a dime at ads. I had tried getting ad revenue on the site a few years back even though I did not want ads on the site and it looked promising… I got 90% of the way to covering monthly costs, but before the first cheque was cut google banned me from that service with no explanation. I followed every rule, discouraged regular members from clicking ads unless they really wanted to see the thing the ad was showing. Still got banned. And google just doesn’t even care to explain themselves.
I closed the site in January because I realized the internet I fell in love with, the one I created that community for… Its dead. Killed by capitalism.
Might be for the best. I can throw my coding time at open-source projects now. Just need to find one that entices me.
That’s heartbreaking but not an uncommon story - it does seem like Google has the power of life and death over websites and it seems very fickle and opaque.
Have you thought about restarting it on the Fediverse?
Thats so sad, especially as someone who regularly tries to find small forums like that. But i always have such a hard time finding them unless i already know the site name :(
Its so hard now for a regular person to find content made by other people without it being tarnished by the profit motive. Forums are all pretty much on reddit or dead. Even a good blog that isnt just seo trash is hard to find now days. Social media sites are mostly influencers trying to sell products and attract followers.
I just wanna see the cool stuff other humans are doing and thinking without ads and low effort garbage 🥺
I wont lie, it hurt to shut The Den of Amateur Writing down. That place was a product of the heart. So many good memories.
For literal months now because of ChatGPT and reddit, if you google “countries in Africa that start with the letter K” for the first two results Google will say that none exist.
So yes, I would say Google search results are getting worse.
wowwwww
I think this is because of how transformer style LLMs tokenizers work, the models don’t really understand the spelling of the words when asked like that. Karpathy has a great learning video on the GPT2 tokenizer that just came out.
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Yes, I unironically use bing now because it yields better results
Yes.
I haven’t used Google in years in favor of DDG, which had a degraded search already, but I have noticed the YouTube search is super unreliable now as well, but it seems to be getting better the last few months
Yes. I’m using the same search methods I’ve always used that used to get me relevant results, and I get a bunch of fucking sponsored links instead. I’ve noticed lately that if the result of a search is a YouTube video and I click on it, it doesn’t go to YouTube but opens up as a search result and plays me ads somehow bypassing my adblocker that works just fine in actual YouTube. More than once after the ad was done, the video refused to load, which was utterly infuriating.
Google assistant on my phone has also become garbage. They changed the functionality of the few key things I liked to use, and now it’s totally useless to me. Google is swirling down the shitter faster than yesterdays tacos. Honestly, if it wasn’t for email, photos, and using an Android phone, I’d probably be done with them entirely.
Use Ublock Origin to block all ads. Takes 20 seconds to install, and works on all browsers
Also switch to Firefox, it has built-in protections that Google Chrome (of course) doesn’t have
I am using Ublock Origin in Firefox, it still somehow slipped an ad in there.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-features
Read Dynamic Filtering and Blocking Mode. You still have to manually block the ads, but you can block it across every website.
Well, for now I just right click my YouTube search results and open them up in YouTube instead where Ublock is already working fine.
Technically it takes a while to setup tho
No, it does not. I end up installing Firefox multiple times a week and it takes less than a minute to add uBlock origin ande enable all the extra filters that it offers
When I was new to using uBlock it took me a while to search and read what to do. It definitely took me more than a minute to watch the tutorial video that was linked from the Github. It just sucks when people share these unrealistic expectations with total newbies. I was on the receiving end, too. I just installed it without knowing how to set it up properly, and I kept on hearing “Hard Mode” without knowing that you can actually do it on mobile.
If you say that it takes 20 seconds to install and nothing more, you’re just encouraging someone to just install it and expect it to be the only thing you have to do. You’re not even telling them that you had to configure it to totally block social media trackers and ads on websites!
And ffs, this place is becoming like reddit. I’m being downvoted just because I said something that would’ve been realistic for someone who is new to uBlock, that it has to be set-up and it will take a while.
Bro, it works fine with the defaults, no need to make it hard
There is another comment that said their default settings still let an ad slip in. Same thing happened to me before enabling Dynamic Filtering, then found out some trackers and ad servers are persistent. Plus, hard mode allows you to block trackers more.
Yes
In 5 years and 5 devices, I’ve never changed the defaults
Well you’re missing out. Try reading:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-features
Especially Dynamic Filtering and Blocking Mode.
You can get a degoogled phone but they all seem under par with flagships.
I was looking at the fairphone5 but I’m on the fence. I might just stick with my current phone which is like 4 years old.
You should look into getting an unlocked pixel with graphene on it
Saw that recently. Will check it out
it might be difficult here. I’m in Korea. ie the land of Samsung.
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….
If you want to pay for search (and some other stuff) you might consider Kagi. Check out discussions on Hackernews, the consensus is quite good for Hackernews Standards. I personally use it since it matches my view about privacy and I like to pay for that since that’s seem a logical way to enable me not to be the product. The results are good and you can prioritize sites easily.
I was just looking at it. I’ll have to try it out. Starting out, I feel it’s too expensive but I’ll try it and see if my opinion changes.
That was my initial thought as well. You may or may not find it worth it for you. Time will tell I guess.
Man all this positivity for Kagi feels astroturfed. No offense if you’re actually not a paid shill, but everywhere I go it seems too flowery to believe.
+1 to what others have said … Plus I think lemmy is still way too small for “paid shills” in any case. It’s okay to like a product you’ve spent money on, presumably that’s why you’re spending the money 🤷♂️
Edit: Granted, the original commenter does have a very small lemmy comment history (at least as seen from my instance … maybe larger if you take the time to load their profile on their home instance)
Sorry I lurk mostly
Totally valid, just looks a little sketchy lol
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Well, I just went for the 100 search free trial, liked what I got, and am now a paying customer. I rarely switch back to Google for specific local stuff, but for 99% of my searches, I prefer what I get on Kagi , and even more what they offer me besides that: privacy and no ads.
Believe what you want, but I’d say give it a try and see for yourself.
I’ve heard enough in the replies – I will be giving Kagi an honest shot.
Just try The free version is not enough in the long term but should be fine to evaluate.
What bothers me is that using it in incognito is cumbersome at best and almost impossible sometimes.
In your settings you find a special url that contains your session. If you set that as the search engine, it also works as expected in incognito mode. However, when you log out, the link expires if I’m not mistaken.
Also, i would love to try other payed search as wel. Its just that the Google problem to me seems to comes from the fact that the need to earn money on things I don’t want them to. So out of principle, paying for search (as long as I can afford it) seems to me the right thing.
Als kagi is better then DDG, brave and bing on the axis where Google is stil best so basically almost as good. And on the points of OP it is much better than today’s Google So all in all my experience is that contrary to ddg I never needed to go back to Google since I started using kagi. That’s quite an achievement.
Just try it? You’ll get a free trial, use a fake email, no payment details or use info needed as far as I can remember.
I believe also https://kagi.com/fastgpt is free to use.
It feels like it but it’s really not. We’re actual users who genuinely like the product because it’s catered to nerds like us.
If you too are a nerd, I can highly recommend just giving it a try. If you look for it, you’ll immediately notice many things that Kagi just simply gets so damn right.
I mean they give you 100 searches to try before asking you to pay so the opportunity cost to find out is pretty low.
I’ve also said nice things about it, and it’s just because I’m happy that I can look shit up again. The results are relevant, the blogspam and listicles get stuck in their own sections that I can safely ignore, and I don’t get constantly tracked by Google when I search for random shit. It feels like using Google way back in the day before enshittification.
Some positivity is certainly genuine.
The volume does seem suspect.
Shoutout to them for not censoring it, at least!
alt-text: screenshot of the paid search engine in question, using their free trial to search for brand name mentions + “astroturfing”, filtered by fediverse sites
PS: I’ve spent like an hour digging into comment histories of people who mention paid search. Best believe though companies are gonna be PROS at seeding comment histories by now.
They have a really small userbase, but it lines up well with the demographics here: Early adopter, tech enthusiasts with a distrust in Google and tired of how bad search is now.
Early adopters are generally very excited about whatever they’ve picked up. They feel the same way about a search engine the same way I feel about wearing only the same brand of black socks. Super excited to tell everyone about it whenever I get the chance because of how much it changed my life.
Indeed.
I’ve said in a previous discussion I was sympathetic given “I’ve sounded like an ad before.” We evangelize great stuff.
Now in the history of their business has any employee ever even mentioned the brand name without disclosing their affiliation? My money’s on yes.
But guaranteed nerds who love it chime in too.
Yep, and now you have to scroll through ads and the AI bs. I switched to DDG a few weeks ago. It’s mostly good, my biggest issue is that Firefox on Android always takes several seconds before loading the page. Gotta do what ya gotta do for uBlock Origin though.
It seems gradual to me. It’s a combination of Google’s actions (They make money from ads and storefronts so they promote sites with ads and storefronts) and adversarial attacks on PageRank by spammers. PageRank used to work well until people started designing sites to game the system.
Now that every website has a search function, Google has slowly turned into “I’ll show you to the website and let them take it from there”. It’s absolute dog shit. I think the AI has already taken over, and it’s progressing really slowly so we aren’t aware of the change. It’s already too late to pull the plug, the AI knows we’re all driven by greed for attention and occasionally money, and it turns out those are both easily created and distributed in the modern age of the Internet, and very very unregulated.
Yeah, the first measurements are rolling in and not looking great: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/
Basically, imagine someone built a machine that made it trivial to generate an infinite number of realistic-looking articles (=LLMs). And there’s a monetary incentive to do so (=ad money).
So, I have to imagine, all search engines are absolutely being blasted with spam content, and they have to filter out realistic-looking articles to make their search results worthwhile at all, but as a result, some real search results will also get filtered out or ranked badly.Rip INTERWEBZ 2023 just preserve it how it was before it got sick
Huh. I hate advertising and think it’s brainwashing that harms our minds, increases consumerism and causes massive environmental damage and biases all content and news production.
Affiliate links are just another form of advertising.
So the solution is very easy, outlaw affiliate links. Or advertising in general. Amazon and others should no longer be allowed to offer affiliate systems. Or remove any page with affiliate page or linking to pages with affiliate pages from search results.
You can’t create rules and structures that prioritize profit and expect positive results.
