What’s your opinion? Does google really “not work” anymore? Are there any better search engines? Why did the quality of search results go down? I honestly stumbled onto this question through this music video, what is ironic in it’s own way i feel…
You must log in or register to comment.
Google is definitely iffy for me, which is why I’ve been bouncing between alternates. A lot of people like to complain about how google is filled with ads and spam results like Pinterest, but even then it just doesn’t really seem to give accurate results anymore, and even when results are accurate it’s very surface level. From what I found, it loves to push listicle articles and such when googling a new topic, as opposed to say, Wikipedia or an encyclopedia article. Like if I search about Barbie, I’ll probably get a bunch of ScreenRant-esque articles before I get the IMDB page. There have been dozens of instances of me searching for controls for video games and getting clickbait-y articles, some of which barely even make an attempt to answer the question, before getting an IGN or GameFaqs article that’s to-the-point and answers my fucking question.
There are definitely better search engines out there, but they all have their own flaws. DuckDuckGo is pretty bare bones and can also give poor results if your search is too vague. You have to adapt to that one. Others like Brave have AI to help out with summaries and stuff, but Brave’s management is “problematic” and so some people might not want to support them.
TL;DR: on google, not only is there ads and spam, but it’s just hard to find answers anymore. Everything is clickbait. And with other options, they are good but they also have their own major flaws that some might find unappealing.
Exactly, I’ve noticed this over the past few months, actual relevant results are being pushed much further down the stack.
If you want to explore alternatives, I’ve been using SearXNG, a so-called “metasearch engine”, where you can get a combination of various search engine results, based on your preferences. It’s pretty good, when it works (it tends to get rate-limited fairly often… or at least some of its results / search engines do, which can get annoying).
Just to help me understand: Why is it that when I try the same search on different instances of this, I get very different search results?
This would depend on the search engines enabled and/or the default language/country set (if any) for that particular instance, you can find those in the settings of the instance itself (and enable/disable whichever you’re most interested in, as well as a few other relevant settings).
Woah thank you for this!!
I have notice that in the past you altered your terms a bit amd got different results, now the search gives me junk so I alter the phrase and same junk shows up. So it is not as effective at doing a deep search these days that actually matches the search terms.
Have you tried searching incognito? I find the junk is generally tied to profiles Google has on me; they decide based on the data they’ve built up what I should really be looking for.
Searching incognito tends to return results closer to what I got 5 years ago.
I run tracker control, and only essentail scripts can run, all ad stuff is totally blocked.
SEO and AI-generated clickbait have basically ruined most search engines. I’ve yet to find one that can really tackle this properly. I believe Kagi offers higher quality results but I can’t really verify that myself as I don’t have an account with them.
Google is absolutely useless now, nothing but SOE farmed rubbish.
It’s become completely unusable.
I’ve moved over to Kagi 100%
It’s well worth the money for the amount of control I have over my experience. Being able to black list, downplay or uplift specific sources is awesome
I like the idea of Kagi a lot, but the pricing structure is not yet the right one for me. I fully support the idea of paying for search - I paid for Neeva and now that this has shut down I pay for Brave Search Premium. But I despise having limits, that’s a mental burden I don’t want. And with Kagi that would mean I have to pay $25 a month, and that’s not worth it for me.
Being able to black list, downplay or uplift specific sources is awesome
I’ve never heard of Kagi, but yeah, those features sound like a godsend. I’d love it if you could have that on a search engine that isn’t pay to use.
It hasn’t worked for a while. Even a year ago it was considerably better.
I can’t believe it, but Bing is now the better search engine. What is happening to the world?!
MBAs and VCs
Google is one of the worst offenders, with constant effort to force you to login, sponsored links etc but it isn’t unique to them.
AI (or human) generated rubbish, optimised for SEO is making it harder and harder to find what you actually want. This isn’t entirely new, there has always been a battle but it does seem like now with the AI push they are winning and we (the users/consumers) are losing.
I think google made the web worse with SEO. Sites have to be designed in ways that users and creators do not really care about so that they may show up in search results.
If I have a site about star trek and it has all the relevant information that the user is looking for, then do not derank my site because the text is not a specific length or whatever other unrelated stuff is there.
I think there are some things that are worth while, like I think https sites are preferred over http sites. I think that this is a good thing to promote.
Google is almost impossible to use when I search for solutions to maths problems. The first few pages are dominated by those sites gaming Google’s algorithm and their articles usually don’t help.
Have you tried WolframAlpha? It can break down math problems and is a wealth of information for just about everything
My Google results change like the weather. Sometimes I can’t take it anymore and use Bing but quickly switch back as it’s worse. There’s no replacement yet, but you need more google Fu than ever before.
tl;dw: song about google being broken
“I have to add to word reddit to every goddamn search to read content made by humans”
Oh the ironing. That line won’t age well now will it :)
What’s your opinion? Does google really “not work” anymore?
Depends what you’re searching for. For some searches I’ve given up on using it. For example I just purchased a new TV and one of the features wasn’t working. It took me several hours of Googling to figure out how to fix it — almost every result offered by Google didn’t contain an answer to my question.
Are there any better search engines?
ChatGPT works well for some searches. Especially if you pay for GPT-4.
It’s pretty impressive how ChatGPT is better than Google despite never being designed as a replacement for Google. I think when someone applies the same technology to a proper search product, the result will be really awesome. Time will tell who manages to pull that off - it might even be Google.
Why did the quality of search results go down?
The main issue, I think, is all the websites these days that exist exclusively to show banner ads. Many of them are packed with information that Google’s algorithm determines might be relevant to the user, but the algorithm is wrong.
The websites want you to click on an Ad, and you’re a lot more likely to click an Ad if you give up, don’t find what you’re looking for, and decide to buy a new weight loss gadget instead.
I’m sure part of the problem is Google itself is an ad company. A lot of the things they could do to fix this issue would harm their own revenue.
It works but it’s way shittier. I ended up paying for Kagi.
is this an ad?
Nope. I gave it a shot for a little bit and the results were way better than DDG so I decided to pay for it after the trial was up.
Nothing to add to this discussion except that savannahxyz is a treasure
Google is broken because AI is making it obsolete. I bet in 10 years google will be a historical footnote.
AI is driving me mad. Pages and pages of generative text filled articles with nothing to say drive all the humans away.
Ironically, because Lemmy is so hard to index for search engines, it keeps the AI content spammers away. Mostly. So far.
Seems to mostly work fine for me. However Google as a company is a fucking mess so doesn’t surprise me people have problems. I have had more problems with my Pixel 7 and Google Maps seems to be getting worse and worse.
Mojeek has been an interesting alternative. I do find myself using google as a backup when I’m not getting what I need, but Mojeek does tend to present very different results.
I don’t think any other search engine, including DuckDuckGo, has its own web crawler like mojeek does. DuckDuckGo is security based, but still google in the end (similar to how most browsers are actually chromium). It apparently also uses a different term algorithm so you have to readjust how you search because it doesn’t do anything predictive or “smart” in its searching for results.
map of search engines since i found this website a few minutes ago i consider using mojeek too… and i was surprised how few actual search engine crawlers exist…
Yeah I think I was simultaneously surprised about that, and how long Mojeek had been in the game.
