That’s not only a search engine problem in itself - websites also got worse in general to appeal to googles algorithm. Which means that other search engines would show similar crap, unfortunately.
Yep the whole Internet feels like a dying mall. There are still some places I go for specific needs, but I’d say my casual browsing of any kind just keeps getting smaller.
I legitimately switched back to local teletext as my main news source. No SEO bullshit, no ads, the articles are succinct and written by humans (for now).
I remember in the early days of the internet Alta Vista search worked quite well. It was easy to find what you wanted, and find new things relevant to your interests - and so it became very popular. Unfortunately, Alta Vista only worked well if people made their websites in good faith. It was searching meta-tags and text on the page; and so when greedy people wanted to get more traffic on their website, they found it easy to exploit Alta Vista’s search. As more and more people started exploiting the system, the search got worse and worse.
I remember the day I switched to using Google. I was searching for some C programming stuff on Alta Vista with technical words - and the results had more porn sites than programming sites. Like, wtf. Obviously that search doesn’t work anymore. It stopped working because arseholes were exploiting it.
And now, pretty much the same thing is happening to Google. Their algorithm worked better for longer than what Alta Vista was doing, but it seems that self-interested people have kind of cracked the system, and now the results are mostly just junk instead of useful stuff. (Note, I stopped using Google several years ago. I’ve been using Duck Duck Go. But you’re right that the problem is more widespread than just Google.)
I’ve been pretty happy with DuckDuckGo. Some people have made the switch to using a search engine aggregate thing like SearXNG. And then there’s the one $12/month search engine I’ve heard people talk fondly of that I can’t remember the name of.
Not since they got their own crawler which manages to be worse than Google’s one.
At least I assume that’s what happened. Their results are noticeably worse than they used to be and noticeably worse than a Google search, although that might be because I’m signed in
I often search for things with plenty of results on any other search engine and get one or (more commonly) zero results from Startpage. I remember they used to be a proxy for Google. I’m no longer convinced they are.
Search engines funded by ads have this perverse incentive to not give you the best possible results (or at least stop trying so hard to improve their results) so you search more (and thus served more ads). This may not be true for the underdogs (because they’re trying to gain marketshare) but seems to be especially true for Google.
The true test is searching anything related to android and not get flooded by hundreds of links to auto generates blog content and useless bot created pages.
Salem wasn’t ergot, it was a genocide. Historians only used that as an excuse to justify the atrocities that went down but anyone whose done even a little bit of looking at the situation will know that all the witchcraft stuff was a cover for the red scare purges they were doing.
Of course the american education system isn’t going to teach you that because they ultimately side with the Christian fascists.
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