At some point in the last two years I completely stopped using Google search in browser and just use Google maps to find businesses or ddg for searches. Actual Google search just has too many sponsored or promotional links
I just searched local restaurants near me and tried to sort by distance and the first option was 800 miles away, the second was 600 miles away. It's not just Google search getting worse.
Pretty soon the internet will be almost completely ruined. Within a few years. AI bots will have spammed everything. Searches and web pages will be entirely faked bs. Reddit and Lemmy will have enough ai Bots commenting and pushing agendas/products that no one will have a clue who's a real person. Information that's true will be almost impossible to verify online.
In short, if you think the web has gotten bad now, you ain't seen nothin yet.
I agree with the sentiment, but lack of AI has not stopped SEO hacking in the past. Sure it will help them go farther, but there are already tons of garbage websites hacking the top 1-5 results of any search
"Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers' measures."
Click bait headline. I see they're good at SEO themselves.
Yeah, DDG skips all the sponsored links but I generally find what I'm looking for faster on Google if I just skip half the page rather than trying to find the right incantation to bring up what I'm looking for on DDG.
I've tried, many times over the years, to use DDG and you are 100% spot-on. I find it damn-near impossible to find what I need without some deep voodoo magic to somehow craft the perfect query. It's been a decade+ since I've gone to page 2 of a Google search. Using DDG I can be 3 or 4 pages deep before maybe finding the answer. There is SOOO much irrelevant stuff to filter through.
It sucks, I don't want to use Google, but there doesn't seem to be a great alternative.
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I swear I’m going to capture screenshots of 2-3 dozen searches across DDG & Google, as well as hopefully Bing, Startpage… SearXNG…
b/c DDG is doodoo while corporate overlord Google is great with Ublock Origin.
Faithfully perform every search on DDG first in the hopes I can keep the data out of Google’s hands! But !g out half the time.
—
Anybody know of a site, app, or TamperMonkey script that’ll search multiple search engines side-by-side?
In the meantime, one example w/a direct quote from deep inside a Harry Potter book:
This is what happens when everyone does 'SEO,'
It really seems like nowadays that internet search is just people trying to game the system for clicks. But it has made everything superficial and fake. Not to mention, utterly useless.
I don't know what the solution is really. It's easy to say 'dont do SEO' but people will just find some way to game that system too. It was great when Reddit wasn't complete shit, because the subreddits dedicated to a particular topic had great insights into whatever topic you wanted to know about. But now that it's a cesspool, and Lemmy is tiny in comparison, id say get used to the Internet being like this for a while.
IMO It's not just optimization or monetization. It's the abandonment of the open internet (blogs, forums, etc) in favor of walled garden apps that are closed off and operate like a black box. SEO itself is just metadata and helps find things during search nothing malicious about it, but the problem is due to web abandonment, the things there are to find are so low effort you stick to big tent apps like reddit instead of sifting through blog spam
Especially if you somehow tryout some popular program, for example wordpress. The most search results are just different best of xy plugins lists. Even if you search for issues. Its like you are suddenly in a whole different bubble of the internet and everything is broken.
What I find is that Google is now still better for what I usually search (a mix of programming, gaming and random factoids) compared to Bing or DDG, but no longer by such a wide margin as it used to.
Best as I can tell, it's because in the past Google constantly tweaked the parameters of their scrapers and models, in turn leading to SEO constantly having to re- and re-optimize, and making it difficult to artificially push your spam and crap content high. They must have stopped doing this, leading to this steady rise of generated spammy content, and now Google feels a lot like other search engines in that i have to very actively discard 80%+ of the results including the whole first page.
(edit)
I recommend reading the actual paper. Interesting though Google has gotten worse, it's results are still massively superior to the competition. 9% spam compared to 31% for DDG and 23% for Bing. Damn. That's still a huge difference, shit as nearly-10%-spam is. I would however say its increased percentage of social media results (11% vs 6% respectively 5%) is bad, but eh, I guess there are users to genuinely want to see those results. 🤷
Amazon's no longer any good at shipping, and Google's no longer any good at searching. What a terrible year to be a tech nerd.
Amazon's not good at shipping?
I don't like a lot of their business practices, but holy shit do they get stuff to my house fast and reliably. Most of the time, same or next day.
Yeah same, they're absolutely unmatched, and by a huge margin. Faster, cheaper, and more consistently arriving both on time and undamaged.
I hate them. They do however easily outperform the competition, that's sadly also something I have to acknowledge.
don't forget about every single device collecting as much information as possible.
It’s kind of shocking how bad it has gotten. I never thought SEO would win in the end, but they did and now Google is fairly useless. Like if AI doesn’t work out long-term what are they left with? A bunch of inferior products people don’t trust anymore or have better/comparable alternatives. GCP sucks compared to AWS and Azure, Android has more freedom than iOS but feels developmentally behind on most fronts in terms of end user experience. Google Search is now about even with Bing and otherwise privacy focused Search Engines have improved to the point of being viable for most cases. Gmail has let in more spam than ever and there’s a lot of alternatives now as well with bo meaningful improvements coming to it. Maps is still probably the market leader there, but more competition in this space too. Google harvests your data to an extreme amount and consumers are privacy aware than previous generations which adds to the distrust of a target demographic. Lastly Youtube is making the user experience worse with every update. While there is no real alternative right now given the overhead required, there is at least a desire for a good alternative should one ever come about.
Feels like Google is losing on every front and bet the farm that AI will save them. We’ll see I guess.
I agree with most, but android has better UI than IOS by a mile. And I don't really see a maps competitor coming close, maybe Apple maps.
Android has more freedom than iOS but feels developmentally behind on most fronts in terms of end user experience
That's the one point I strongly disagree with you: Android, for all it's flaws, has free and open source spin-offs (LineageOS, for one), that are the ONLY chance you have as an end user to own your phone / privacy (barring hardware backdoors or installing stupid apps)
Anecdotally, I recently had an issue with my printer and used Google to search for the exact error message (something like ' "error 4308e ink absorber pad is full" Brother JW539DW ') and the first three pages of results were random garbage about other things. If other search engines are worse, we are doomed.
Just tried looking up if it’s safe to light a fireplace fire after having had a sinus surgery. (It’s very cold here in Seattle tonight and I had septoplasty/FESS/turbinate reduction yesterday afternoon.)
All my results were about smoking cigarettes and a result for whether it’s okay to box after surgery. Not a single source to suggest a fire being safe or not.
This is why I use Bing Chat for specific questions.
"Hello, this is Bing. I’m sorry to hear that you had sinus surgery and that you’re feeling cold. 😟
According to some sources, it’s best to avoid exposure to smoke, dust, and other irritants after sinus surgery, as they can interfere with the healing process and cause inflammation. Therefore, lighting a fireplace fire may not be a good idea for your recovery."
Bing Chat provides sources to the claims so you can verify:
https://www.realself.com/question/cambridge-ks-pain-sinuses-weeks-after-fess-surgery https://www.healthline.com/health/phantosmia
Your story is obviously anecdotal but I think it pretty much aligns with what what we've all experienced. You search for something and get results for something else. You change your search to try to get results you asked for and get........ literally the exact same results. It's infuriating.
RE: potential astroturfing (my comment last time); from my comment downthread that one:
Anytime [paid search engines] are mentioned I suppose I’ll jump in and say…SearXNG is a popular non-commercial alternative. I wanted to throw Grasp in to give a commercial competitor a shout but they’ve “paused”.
Update on Grasp:
We will be back soon and will open-source our code.
Neat, wonder if SearXNG x Grasp would be synergistic.
We need a google that uses AI/ML to hunt and de-rank the 1800 word essay web pages that answer the question, "how long should you microwave a baked potato for?"
"In 1863, county cork in Ireland, Shamus O'Toole created the world first commercial potato farm. He'd go on to...."
These scammy useless sites are numbing - they pad a thousand plus empty, filler words on either side of the buried wrong, weak answer you would have just glanced by in the past. They are so formulaic and obvious, that an AI could probably identify them as such 10 times out of 10 without an effort.
Google chooses not to fix things like this. Because fuck you.
We need a google that uses AI/ML to hunt and de-rank the 1800 word essay web pages that answer the question, “how long should you microwave a baked potato for?”
“In 1863, county cork in Ireland, Shamus O’Toole created the world first commercial potato farm. He’d go on to…”
Exactly what it feels like if I'm asked to "write an 700-word article" somehow. Most of it is just filler material, really.
One thing I have noticed is any search is more likely to pop up a news article with that word vs a good article on it. Look up say a band and I will get a lot of articles about some recent things they did vs the website for the band or an indepth look at the band. I really don't need twenty versions of the same article from news networks all copying each other. It feels like it is favoring new stuff first and can't see that it is repeating itself.
Duck duck go still works better.
Looks like those theories about algorithms becoming recursive and ineffective will be proven sooner than we expected. I wonder if the emergence of crap AI sped the process up.
The AI questions and answers that almost never seem to be answering the question in my search.
Q: Best tool for removing a nail
A: The most common tool used to take out nails is a hammer!
No, Google. I fucking know what hammers are. I'm asking you for NAIL PULLERS. JESUS CHRIST.
Despite how bad Google Search had become, DuckDuckGo and Bing are somehow still worse. While Google displays the result in the first few, DDG and Bing have no idea what I'm looking for.
Gotta try Kagi sometime.
I hear this a lot, but I changed from google to DDG about a year ago and haven't even considered looking back. I can find everything I need quite easily and can only think of maybe a handful of times that I have had to resort to using a bang to try and find something using another search engine. I'm very curious what the difference is between my experience and that of others who have problems DDG.
Anecdotal evidence, but I swapped out Google for DDG about 5-6 years back and haven't missed it. I do use Google sometimes but it's once in 4-5 months when DDG fails me, which is acceptable to me.
Personally I'm noticing the opposite.
I tend to do a lot of technical-related searches. I'm finding I'm getting consistently better results from DuckDuckGo / Bing -- what I'm looking for is usually available on the first page without having to faff around.
With Google however, it was drawing parallels to what I'm looking for but not what I explicitly queried. I had to either enable verbose search, or manipulate the search to look for specific words. Even then what I was looking for was in the 3-4 page.
I switched to DDG and then to Kagi based on all the praise it gets here. So much better than Google!
Google has literally killed itself. Maps, Google.com, YouTube.... It's all garbage now.
It really is terrible. I was a DDG early adopter and then Kagi. It’s been a while since Google has been my daily driver, but I do sometimes use it and the results are just bad. There’s so much spam and the results page is a mess. To my eyes, Google is worse than either Kagi or DDG in just about every way except speed. The only other thing I can really think of where Google is much better is in local search. They are damn good at that.
LMGTFYWNMGSN
Let Me Google That For You, Wait, Never Mind, Google Sucks Now
My wife and I were looking up a specific calendar. The search query wasn't particularly complicated and very clear. In Google, the first result was a 2023 version of the calendar, and the rest of the results were completely useless. In Duck Duck Go, the calendar we wanted was the top result. I can't imagine what it's like to use Google for a search that's actually complicated.
It seems there is an arms race between search engines and content creators. The latter come up with those pages that will tell you the life history of the writer and their dogs, and 20 ads, five popups, subscription offers, allow the site to access your location and send updates questions and 'read more's later you might find out the thing you need. All this to have more ads and rank higher in various searches. 10 minutes ago I wanted to find out what the hell a float needle is. I couldn't. ChatGPT gave me the answer I needed in two questions.
It seems there is an arms race between search engines and content creators
No. It's an arms race between content creators and spam.
Anyone who creates genuine good content has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google.
10 minutes ago I wanted to find out what the hell a float needle is. I couldn’t.
Huh? The top result for "float needle" in Google seems like a great description to me.
It would be helpful if google actually responded and actioned on reports. i see malicious websites on search every day that I have reported numerous times.
Is it just me, or has autocorrect on phones also gotten way, way worse? When would I ever want to type 'thbnks'?
Is this entirety Google's fault, or is it due to the different people who send me ten emails a week saying "Good day to you dear sir. I have been checking your website and I see that you have a good ranking but I am an SEO specialist and I can make your website rank higher "
Bitch please I'm a lazy cunt, I don't want the work 😂
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