No, I’m working on it since a week from scratch. Had a #showerThought idea and since also had some time I immediately started to realise it and here I am now :D Waiting for 300K pages to be crawled so I can add more sources there :D
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.)
Word. It’s ridiculous how hard it is to get good hits these days. And while GPT makes shit up sometimes it’s at least related to what I’m actually asking about. Google desperately wants to show the SEO optimized pages about something tangentially related instead of the page which actually has relevant information.
Getting a solid old forum hit for an obscure DNS issue takes a lot more work these days.
It’s Googles fault, but it’s not the algorithm getting worse, everyone is just too good at gaming it which fucks it up for everyone (the humanity special).
Any discussion on search on Lemmy will bring up Kagi as it has been here already. I will just mention that. A. You can cheat and just keep using a bunch of email accounts to get free trials from them B. If you do that long enough you’ll realize their 300 search plan is pretty fair and having saved preferences is worth a membership and they have an option where you can use crypto to pay your fees and remain anonymous (this is very important to me as the only thing more evil than Google would be to have all your search data, your full name and your credit card info - I strongly recommend the crypto pay option and create a dedicated email address. For Kagi membership).
Fantastic. I left some other comments on here but I switched within days of doing the trial and I haven’t gone back at all. I think the total number of times I’ve used Google search since then is 3. Yes 3 total searches on Google in the past six months. None of those searches gave me what I wanted, but those were the times i couldn’t find what I needed with kagi. So 3 kagi failures in 6 months and Google wasn’t helpful either.
I’ve been using Kagi for a few months and it has been exponentially better than Google. I wouldn’t have known about it if it weren’t for people talking about it on Lemmy, actually.
My main problem with DDG is that it doesn’t show the dates of results. A lot of the time, I need to know that to get the information I need. I used it for a couple of years, but I was constantly forced to go back to Google or Bing to get the information I needed.
I found Kagi earlier this year and tried it out, and it’s as close to perfect as you can get, IMO. I really can’t recommend it enough. It’s like being back to “the before times” when Google was king, with the addition of many other features. It’s a paid service, and I’m more than happy to do so for something like this. No tracking, a ton of features, very well designed, and results that never fail. I’ve shared my account with family and friends, and everyone has mentioned how good it is after trying it.
Sorry if it feels like I’m a shill for it, I’m just super happy with it and really feel like everyone deserves to know about it.
Of course it has, and this effect was completely foreseeable, and indeed, was foreseen, from the very moment they decided to whore themselves out with that IPO. They took their role as custodian of the baby internet and became a pimp.
Stop calling it anything else. As a musician, I promise you, trying to promote yourself online feels like prostitution. If you’ve ever tried, then you know too. The only difference is if I were a prostitute I might actually make some money back.
People aren’t comparing it to alternatives, they’re comparing it to Google 5-10 years ago.
Google used to be astoundingly good at figuring out what it was you wanted, and finding out for you. Now there’s a lot more SEO garbage and meaningless fluff clogging every results page, and if your search could even remotely be related to buying something, it’s only products and ads.
Dude, I switched from Google for the first time in my life a couple months ago because I couldn’t take it anymore.
Ads, ads, ads, ads, ads, ads, ads
Ai articles, Ai articles, Ai articles, Ai articles, Ai articles
The fact that google has a built-in graphing calculator just isn’t worth it.
I won’t forget this, actually: I was looking up what to do next in a game I was playing—very deliberately, I care a lot about spoilers—and the “people also ask” section implied, for no reason, this had nothing to do with what I wanted to know, that a character who died really early on apparently has things to say in chapter 9.
Honestly people keep saying this but I just don’t find it to be true. Google is a vital daily resource for me, and usually the best way for me to find most things.
Is this because I don’t use social networks? Are people somehow using Instagram or TikTok as search engines to find what they’re looking for? It feels like people just use social networks these days and nothing else, so maybe that’s it?
I’ve been doing a lot of searches lately about running, picking shoes, overpronation, training schedules, etc.
Straight google searches (ones that would have returned worthwhile results even ten years ago) are all trying to sell me something, or are AI generated content filler garbage.
I have to add “reddit” to every search in order to get real information from normal people.
i use google to search reddit and youtube. reddit’s search still sucks and youtube brings up the same results as google generally and it’s in my address bar aleady.
YouTube is fantastic but it’s a video platform, all you’re going to find there are videos.
If I need to find a business or product page, I’m not going to look on YouTube. Same if I need to find a driver download, or a PDF manual, or the local weather, or information on a historical event, or…we’ll, you get the idea. They just do videos.
Similarly Reddit has a lot but it’s mainly centered around discussions of things. I use it as a very valuable resource, but similar to the above, it’s not where I go when I’m not looking for the one thing they do very well - discussion.
It sounds as if the main thrust of this idea isn’t that Google (or a search engine in general) is any less vital in daily web life, but rather that for some things you can go straight to the more centralised source and search there. E.g. if I want a video I’ll search on YouTube, rather than searching Google for aggregated results from many video hosts.
In that sense Google is slightly less relevant sure I agree, but only a little bit, and only for very specific things.
Oh goodie. If I want made up answers based on the middle of the road guess work of an auto complete that sounds like a fun idea but I’d really just like to find out if anyone is selling the used record I’m looking for.
Let’s say I want to find an aftermarket built-in air jack kit for a car. Nevermind why, but let’s say it’s what I want to find.
So I look up car air lift jack. Google spits back a grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, a stack of videos of floor air bag jacks by people trying to sell them, Another grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, then finally a couple of the kind that go on a car, and godammnit another grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, finally sponsored posts for floor jacks or the wrong kind, Amazon ads for the same thing, ads for brands of the floor jacks, and more, more, more, makers of the wrong thing, lowes, home depot, walmart…it’s all wrong.
So the very next words out of your mouth are “Well, you used the wrong search term!” No, not really, but let’s try getting rid of “bag”, because that seems to be a big incorrect return on the search. So in goes “-bag” to the search term. What does that get us?
The exact same fucking thing. “-” is meaningless anymore.
So that’s google now.
Want help with a tech problem?
Wade through a stack of a dozen shitty youtube videos 10 minutes long each (because google pays more for ad space, longer videos have more space, so those get pushed to the top, and a problem that would take a paragraph of text to solve now becomes a shitty video with blather, subscribe, previous videos, like, other videos, and 2 minutes of actual help), a bunch of sponsored links to tech makers that have shit to do with your problem, and SEO sites like solveyourtechproblem.com or wefixitgood.com or whatever BS name for sites that consist of boilerplate help like “did you turn it off and on again?” Maybe after all that you’ll get an out of date reddit or github list of posts that don’t have anything to do with your exact issue. So you put it in quotes, that should work, right?
“It looks like there aren’t many great matches for your search” says google.
Why? I dunno. Not enough returns on the search to cram ads, sponsored links, shit for sale in?
Google is shit. I’ve switched to DDG. It has it’s own frustrations, but at least I don’t have to put up with Google cramming every ad and sponsored link in front of me along with garbage SEO sites. Google’s heyday has ended.
The troubleshooting you list here second is my primary use for a Google search and it is completely garbage. Just like you say, it’s a bunch of trash SEO sites that don’t really address the problem so most of the time I add reddit to the search to get legit answers. Because reddit has a garbage search engine, of course.
Though I have to admit I have given up on that and just use DDG to search for Reddit results. It used to be that I’d start on DDG and if it didn’t have what I need I’d go to Google, but Google search has gotten so bad that I almost never bother anymore.
I think people’s ability to effectively Google varies though. There are people who will write full questions in, or fail to iteratively improve their search terms based on the results, and ignoring the fact that bard is actually pretty good if they start using that, googling is much more effective if you stick to relevant keywords and search using operators.
I like DDG, but I believe it uses the Bing API to get the search results. So even though it’s a privacy focused site, you’re still getting results from a giant corporation.
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