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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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
DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google.
A typical example is more popular searches crowding out actual answers to your question.
I have had this a lot of times with IT problems, I am a sys admin and google a ton of things related to my job. But 5 out of 10 times some keyword will relate to a simple problem many people have with their pc and all relative answers to my exact question get drowned out.
Google anything related to ‘laptop monitor turn off’ and you will only find results telling you how to turn of sleep when you close the lid. No matter how much syntaxing or formatting you do with your search
You’re a Systems Administrator, but Google Tier 2 issues, do you provide break fix support? I thought as a SA you would be working behind the scenes on systems (apps), servers, etc.
Can’t speak for the person you’re replying to, but I’m a security engineer and stuff still makes its way to me that you would think would get filtered out by others (and isn’t my job to fix). It just takes the right person thinking “this is obviously a problem with $system, let’s just send it straight over to them so they can fix it quickly!” And then we get the fun job of proving it’s not us and has no relation to us.
We got a ticket today for packet loss between two systems, neither of which have any of our tools on them…
I think this is a training issue that needs to be resolved at the Helpdesk level. I understand that nobody is perfect but if you keep seeing tickets like that - Helpdesk managers need to update their training modules and start tweaking the Helpdesk system to have service requests go to the proper groups. Incident tickets are another story but that’s where the training comes in.
I’m not even a sysadmin, just a power user and this infuriates me to no end. I gave up on a search just a couple days ago because I kept getting bottom tier answers. Like thanks but I already know how to use my computer, now tell me how to fix this problem.
C’mon now. “Laptop monitor turn off” has never generated a good result, even in the before time. I share the question: what are these people searching for that Google is generally yielding worse results than other engines? For anything sysadmin, IT-related, or any sort of troubleshooting, I’ve always needed to be creative to get to the good stuff.
C’mon now. “Laptop monitor turn off” has never generated a good result
That’s not what they’re saying. They mean that if your search contains that or is somewhat adjacent (despite being more specific), your results will be drowned in it. For example, if you had something like “laptop monitor turn off when bla bla bla”, 90% of the results will completely ignore what you’ve added.
I’ve got to deal with the same shit whenever I have to deal with complicated programming questions. Half the results will be related to some really basic mistake on the user’s side that I haven’t done, and I’ll need to spend a lot of time trying to find the magical word combination that doesn’t trigger those non-related issues and actually show me what I need.
Google straight up lies to me about movies an actor has been in, almost every time. “Wow, I had no idea Robert Downey Jr was in Mean Girls! Who did he play?” checks imdb “no he fuckin wasn’t wtf google” (this is an arbitrary example I just made up because I don’t feel like finding a real one right now)
Right. I just think it was overly ambitious. It’s right just enough to earn trust and wrong just enough to burn you. I had a really, really dumb argument once because of that feature
Is he not slated for season two? I thought that robot he voiced was going to be in it, I remember reading some article months ago though I admit I only have a passing interest in the show.
I see speculation but nothing solid. I think google is pulling from the rumors, which it really shouldn’t. If he is slated then that’s fine, let me know if you find anything
Me not caring enough to confirm if Alan Tudyk is going to be in the second season of a show I haven't even watched is not a good excuse for you to just make up shit to try to make a point.
you are spreading made up shit as we speak to prove your own point, and you’re very rude. you have reached a conclusion and think anyone who disagrees with you is either a liar or stupid. bye
I don't ever remember calling you a liar or stupid, but okay. Also not sure what made up thing I said, or what point I'm trying to prove. I kinda think we are having two completely different conversations.
Open Watcom is a compiler for DOS. Every search engine will try ten ways to politely tell you that you obviously meant Wacom tablets, you illiterate goblin, and then shrug and direct you to the project’s own single-page FAQ.
Asking questions about DOS itself is even worse. Say you want the scan codes for arrow keys. Then say it a hundred more times, with increasing specificity and occasional vulgarity, because you are getting nothing but “how to use a terminal window in Windows.” Or at best, Ralph Brown’s big fat interrupt list, rearranged into the most Geocities-ass jumble of pages, where you can easily look up what any specific hex code does, once you already know which code to look for.
Yet if I enter something like ‘resolv’ in Google I need to add ‘-resolve’ to not get hundreds of unrelated results… Same goes for any not-too-popular software that is named a slight misspelling of their purpose… I even find it ridiculous how often first results litterally say underneath they did not contain your query…
But with terabox and “content plaza” it gives 2 results?
Startpage I have no idea, but I’m guessing they, like many, use the Google API for webcrawler results… 1 result? Those are pretty common words,…
Kagi.com is one of the best services I pay for. I know paying for Internet search seems outrageous because we’ve been accustom to our data being the payment, but I think it’s worth it. The search feature and added stuff really make it very functional plus the no adds or SEO type sites is bonus.
I do. Did you find better results on Google? I’ve used DDG, yandex, qwant, and brave search engine but I really like the add free results and I understand something has to pay for the servers.
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