I haven’t used Google for awhile now. It just became an ad-ridden hellhole.
Do people not have ad blockers anymore?
That’s not what we’re talking about. Ad blockers don’t do anything to fix Google’s search algorithm
I understand the post OP but I’m replying to a comment. Specifically this part…
It just became an ad-ridden hellhole.
The ads you see injected in your search result as “sponsored” are not the only way Googles Ad interests affect your search results. They are actively manipulating your search queries to make them point more towards their paying customers wanted result without you noticing.
Yeah. That’s why i use an ad blocker
that’s not something your adblocker can suppress
It absolutely is.
I love science, like experimentally observed science or at least practical theoretical science, but Youtube tries to shove every crackpot nonsense they can at me. I watch one political thing and now they try and shove every conservative propaganda they can at me. It feels like when I was young, the internet was too much for conservitives to understand and control…not anymore. What’s the one true power conservatives have? Money. Now they’re ether buying up social companies or their CEOs left right and center - or at least bringing tech leadership into the ultra-rich fold. Where they are winning without exception, is in isolating the majority of their voters. Now, there’s no longer a shared reality and the divide seems to wide to close. Conservatives wanted brainwashed cult followers and did everything they could to make it happen. Now Idiocy seems far more real on the right with each passing year.
There’s some theory on this and it goes beyond conservatives.
Once, the internet was small enough that whatever happened on it could be seen by most users. Now, things can go viral in one ‘part’ of the internet and people in other ‘parts’ would have no idea what was going on.
The solution to this is to recognize that the internet should be treated as more of a local place, where we interact with the communities and people we want while ignoring the ones we don’t.
We can’t expect “the internet” to share any overarching views because there are too many people from too many places online now.
The issue I have is that so many users are uneducated and read some disinformation, take it as truth and then vote accordingly. I don’t want to see certain things but I go out of my way to use multiple sources that are as unbiased as possible. But so many consume extremely biased propaganda and live according to that constructed view that they think is reality. I know there’s no easy answer, but the problem is clear and so long as the rich can easily take advantage of the useful idiots, it’s a struggle for progress in society…
Search engine are pretty much over. They ate themselves
SEO destroyed the search providers, and now that search is useless, seo has become useless.
Here’s my theory… Google wants to artificially fuck up it’s search functionality. It wants to offer good performance for a fee. And it’s going to be doing that by giving it’s own AI the correct filters while at the same time tripping every other AI capable of searching the net such that the other AI results become garbage and only the Google one works correctly. Anyway that’s my conspiracy theory, fuck Google with a bunch of sharp forks.
It’s much simpler than that. Google is an ad company, not a search company. SEO spam gives them ad clicks just the same as quality content, if not more so. As long as they don’t became bad enough that everybody switches to the competition, they simply don’t have to care.
SEO spam gives them ad clicks
It does? I thought the point of SEO was to show up in search results without having to pay for keyword placement.
It’s not about the ads on Google.com, but the ads on the SEO sites themselves, those are also served by Google. Ever heard of DoubleClick? That’s also Google. If Google Search would give you good clean non-commercial sites without ads, they would lose money.
Exactly. Google has an incentive to send you to the most ad infested seo garbage, that just barely answers your search.
Or they just cannot complete with literal millions of people attempting to optimize their webpages for discovery using Google.
If other services like kagi can offer better results they should be able as well, right?
I think it’s simply a question of what are Google’s interests. Users doesn’t pay anything to Google for the service, so that’s not where Google’s interests are. Advertisers pay Google, so that’s where Google’s interests are. Google has no interests to make the search better for users, they want to make it better for advertisers.
They still need to make the system appealing to users.
If users had higher standards, then Google would have to meet those standards or lose out on business.
To do that, you simply have to inform users about other available search engines and remind them again that those exist when one of their searches fails.
And AI is just making it worse. Entire websites of SEO-optimized content can be generated in seconds now. No one will be able to keep up with all that!
I’m finding that LLMs are doing a better job for searching for new things. If I have a question, instead of going to google or bing I’ll goto chatGPT and ask some of that nature with some sources for further reading.
Never would I think that I would need to use AI to answer simple search and yet here we are because the sole purpose of a search engine doesn’t really exist anymore.
The problem is, you can’t trust ChatGPT to not lie to you.
And since generative AI is now being used all over the place, you just can’t trust anything unless you know damn well that a human entered the info, and then that’s a coin flip.
plus search engines don’t lecture me as much for typing naughty sex words
Get on the unfiltered LLM train, they’ll do anything GPT does and won’t filter anything. Bonus if you run it locally and share with the community.
However, I find it much easier to check if the given answer is correct, instead of having to find the answer myself.
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How much do you think should it cost to use?
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Oddly I prefer Bing because it’ll cite the source!
Perplexity is great for this. It gives like 5 links in addition to the text answer so it is imo the best of both worlds.
I’m surprised in most posts I’ve read about this there wasn’t a mention of Yacy which is a P2P distributed indexer / search engine. It heavily focuses on privacy. I’ve used it in the past and it worked great for my use cases to bypass censorship. It’s still actively developed after all the years. Would definitely recommend it or try it out as an replacement. The installation and usage is fairy simply.
What is everyone else using instead?
I use DuckDuckGo, you can configure it as your default search engine in Firefox.
I find myself hitting the same issues with ddg as with Google. The 1st page trys to sell me the thing I want info on
I find google better than ddg the vast majority of the time… and google sucks
You can turn sponsor off in setting or use start.duckduckgo.com
I find their ad is much more clearly marked than google.
I use DDG when coding and generally find it to be a bit nicer, but from the article it sounds like they’re prone to the same issues. Anecdotally, I have noticed non-code queries do seem to be similarly crap
ETA: You can set it as default in Chrome too, under Settings -> Search Engine
I’ve turned to devdocs.io for my API documentation needs, which saves me the step of searching at all.
Searx. That it doesn’t ignore operators legitimately arouses me slightly.
If I ever can’t find something I’m looking for using a Searx instance, I switch to something like StartPage temporarily.
As great as Searx is, on very rare occasion I find myself having to switch to a different engine.
That’s funny, I’m the reverse- Searx is my final solution. I don’t like costing the lovely people hosting it any more than I have to so I start with the duck. If ddg offers nothing, searx always has it.
As an aside, are you aware that startpage was purchased some time ago? It’s owned by an ad company now.
Had absolutely no idea startpage was bought because I never keep up on this kinda stuff. Thanks for the heads-up.
I use DDG like others have mentioned, but I also like Perplexity, because it’s not a chat like ChatGPT, it just answers queries without trying too hard to chat to you.
I use DuckDuckGo Lite in Librewolf with Ublock and NoScript (amongst other addons). That combination used with ddg’s !bangs got me covered. No ads, not even image search (just go to ddg directly for that), just content.
I’ve used searx through a docker container, and it’s a strong 2nd choice, but ddg lite is just easier to set up and gives better results imho.
All said, an LLM like a local Llama and ChatGPT, can fill the gaps for very specific searches. Sadly, the modern internet takes a lot of savvy to navigate quickly and effectively.
There’s a very good reason so many are typing in “reddit” at the ends of their searches, and that’s if their not using Chat GPT to just get them to the answer faster, and using much more computational resources to do so…it’s a big cluster fuck.
I really like Ecosia. Someone told me it’s just bing, but I still like it.
Bing has done well for me
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Ask Jeeves
Startpage.
FCC should impose regulations on search providers to make searching with Google’s competition more cumbersome and less useful. You know, ‘level the playing field’
I think it would be enough if other search providers would be required to give a portion of their profit from each search to Google.
sometimes i think I’m smarter than i am… you’re a goddamn genius
I thought it was normal for Google search results to suck.
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