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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Technology
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It's gotten really worse over the last year or so. They try to be overly "intelligent" by suggesting search phrases you didn't even input, watering down the results.
I'm a web developer and when I google for "string", I don't want to get results for "yarn" to put in a fake extreme example. Rewording my search phrases is one of the worst features they ever introduced. I know what I'm looking for and I don't need assistance with that.
Google even started ignoring operators sometimes. Back in the good old days you were able to put a word into quotations to tell the engine it must be included in the results. Now when I do this it only mostly works but when they run out of results they just go back to the default behaviour of including everything that might loosely fit the search phrase.
It feels like Google is afraid to show you no results, as if that was a crime or something.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but Bing works so much better for me when I look up specific error messages etc.
For my development work, it works fine.. haven't had any issue (but i mainly do a lot of LUA / React). With bing though, a lot of links I got last I tested (a year or so ago) were literally dodgy websites
Bing (and therefore DuckDuckGo, which is what I generally use and is a wrapper around Bing) is definitely worse than Google especially for dev research, but it's not as good as it used to be.
I do use Google for a lot of my dev research, and they seem to be losing the ongoing war against spamers flooding the internet with garbage content.
Websites like reddit (and beehaw) are somewhat of an oasis – actively moderated with absolute garbage content deleted straight away and questionable content at least has replies where people have pointing out if they think it's wrong. If (when?) Reddit goes away, that's a whole bunch of really good content that will suddenly disappear from google results, which will be sad.
PS: If you haven't already, try buying a subscription to ChatGPT+ and use GPT4 as the first place you go for all your LUA/React questions. I find it gives far better answers than Google for most things. You can sort of dip your toes in the AI waters by trying Bing Chat.. but it's nowhere near as good for code as ChatGPT+.
I actually use Copilot mainly these days tbh for a lot of things