At some point in the last two years I completely stopped using Google search in browser and just use Google maps to find businesses or ddg for searches. Actual Google search just has too many sponsored or promotional links
I just searched local restaurants near me and tried to sort by distance and the first option was 800 miles away, the second was 600 miles away. It’s not just Google search getting worse.
Google has really been dropping the ball a lot more publicly lately
Was over for me when I opt out out of some of their data tracking shit and they started captcha’ing me everytime I browsed there. Like wtf Google what are you anymore? Sounds dumb but them changing the banner every week was the start of the end.
Changing the banner for like holidays and anniversaries of things isn’t an issue for me IMO
But yeah all their tracking shit that you can’t opt out of is a big problem and a big part of why I’m pulling away from Google as much as I can
Not saying it was an issue just was a significant change in how they did things.
Here’s the thing, Google has changed. Over time, they’ve restructured themselves, initially purposefully, but now they’re facing the consequences of that.
Google genuinely does still have amazing programmers and engineers.
The trouble is that their expertise is in crafting systems that harvest personal information; expertise in other areas has been left to rot because there’s no point in improving them.
Gmail is already entrenched, as is search, YouTube, maps, android, etc.
They aren’t going to attract a significant amount more customers, so their main avenue for continued growth has been to become better at harvesting and processing data.
For a while that was fine, but now that this expertise has been lost, Google can’t make good products. They don’t have the ability to do so, it’s not that they don’t want people to use their software and think “wow this is actually pretty great”, it’s that they genuinely can’t do it anymore. Not unless the product you want is a telemetry system, in which case I doubt you’ll find anybody that can do such a stellar job.
It’s a part of why Google starts then kills so many projects. They want to expand to collect more data, but they don’t have the ability to create good services anymore, so it just ends up being an advanced data collector with a sub-par app/website on top of it. The company just isn’t structured to make things in any other way.
Pretty soon the internet will be almost completely ruined. Within a few years. AI bots will have spammed everything. Searches and web pages will be entirely faked bs. Reddit and Lemmy will have enough ai Bots commenting and pushing agendas/products that no one will have a clue who’s a real person. Information that’s true will be almost impossible to verify online.
In short, if you think the web has gotten bad now, you ain’t seen nothin yet.
I agree with the sentiment, but lack of AI has not stopped SEO hacking in the past. Sure it will help them go farther, but there are already tons of garbage websites hacking the top 1-5 results of any search
In the past I remember it made using search engines less rewarding than using web directories, web rings, asking people on forums etc. That was slower, but gave you results (and acquaintances). While using search meant looking through dozens of pages of search results, mainly SEO.
The top results pages, sure. I belive it’s going to take over the top 500. Along with flooding places like lemmy and reddit.
I am more optimistic on that one. AI provides a pretty clear way out of this, since it allows you to automatically detect the bullshit. Meaning either the bullshit has to raise so much in quality that it is indistinguishable from good content, in which case it would not be bullshit anymore, or it will get filtered. AI can also transform bad websites into good ones, like a super-powered ReaderMode, AdBlock and more all rolled into one, so a lot of the “lets plaster everything with ads” will lose effectiveness.
The problem over the last decade was that Google completely lost interest in being a search engine, they are just an ad company and as long as search leads you to more ads, they are quite happy. So the user experience went down the toilet.
The real problem with AI is that it will remove the incentive for the authors. Content producers want to get paid, with AI you can just extract the information from an article without ever viewing the article or the ads around it.
They have already been trying to use ai to combat and identify ai in college and highschool papers. So far it’s been severely ineffective. AI has gotten pretty good at writing out a sentence or two that looks like it’s real. If ai improves enough I doubt they’ll be much of a way to identify it all.
It’s not about identifying AI or even spam, but about extracting useful information. Are the claims made in a source backed by other sources? Do they violate information from trusted sources? That’s all stuff that an AI can reason about and then discard the source as junk or condense it down to the useful information in it.
Basically you completely skip browsing the Web yourself and just use the AI to find you what you want. Think of it like some IMDB or Wikipedia, but covering everything and written and curated by AI. When the AI doesn’t already know some fact, it goes crawling the Web and finding it out for you, expanding its knowledge base in the process.
Or see the ship computer from StarTrek, you don’t see the people there browsing the Web, you see them getting data in exactly the format they need and they can reformat and filter it as needed.
At the moment there are still some technical hurdles, the AI systems we have are all still a little to stupid for this. But that seems to be the direction we are heading, things like summarizer bots already do a pretty good job and ChatGPT is reasonably good at answering basic questions and reformatting it the way you need it. Only a matter of time until it gets good enough that you couldn’t do a better job yourself.
You’re looking at it in a flawed manner. AI has already been making up sources and names to state things as facts. If there’s a hundred websites for claiming the earth is flat and you ask an ai if the earth is flat, it may tell you it is flat and source those websites. It’s already been happening. Then imagine more opinionated things than hard observable scientific facts. Imagine a government using AI to shape opinion and claim there was no form of insurrection on Jan 6th. Thousands of websites and comments could quickly be fabricated to confirm that it was all made up. Burying the truth into obscurity.
You have plenty of literature that can act as ground truth. This is not a terribly hard problem to solve, it just requires actually focusing on it. Which so far simply hasn’t been done. ChatGPT is just the first “look, this can generate text”. It was never meant to do anything useful by itself or stick to the truth. That all still has to be developed. ChatGPT simply demonstrates that LLM can process natural language really well. It’s the first step in this, not the last.
Sounds like you’re arguing against yourself, now.
I think it’s just a new world for spam.
At some point, probably soon, AI content will generate so much data it becomes untenable to store all the scraped data.
We’ll also reach a point where it becomes much more costly to parse the data for AI spam+trustworthiness+topics. If you need LLMs just to filter spam, that is a large step up in costs and infrastructure vs current methods.
When that happens what happens to search? The quality will have to degrade or the margins will drop off sharply.
I think this is part of why Google holds on to youtube despite it not making them money. Without that Google would just be the map and email company. They would completely lose the appearance of “owning” any part of the internet.
“Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers’ measures.”
Click bait headline. I see they’re good at SEO themselves.
Yeah, DDG skips all the sponsored links but I generally find what I’m looking for faster on Google if I just skip half the page rather than trying to find the right incantation to bring up what I’m looking for on DDG.
I’ve tried, many times over the years, to use DDG and you are 100% spot-on. I find it damn-near impossible to find what I need without some deep voodoo magic to somehow craft the perfect query. It’s been a decade+ since I’ve gone to page 2 of a Google search. Using DDG I can be 3 or 4 pages deep before maybe finding the answer. There is SOOO much irrelevant stuff to filter through.
It sucks, I don’t want to use Google, but there doesn’t seem to be a great alternative.
Care to share what kind of stuff you look for? Usually, when I look for niche media or code stuff, either I find it effectively enough on DuckDuckGo, or it’s not on Google at all, full stop.
I swear I’m going to capture screenshots of 2-3 dozen searches across DDG & Google, as well as hopefully Bing, Startpage… SearXNG…
b/c DDG is doodoo while corporate overlord Google is great with Ublock Origin.
Faithfully perform every search on DDG first in the hopes I can keep the data out of Google’s hands! But
!gout half the time.—
Anybody know of a site, app, or TamperMonkey script that’ll search multiple search engines side-by-side?
In the meantime, one example w/a direct quote from deep inside a Harry Potter book:
Genuinely, thank you for going through the trouble. I know it’s a huge ask, especially because it’s not easy to retroactively remember a specific type of search you were struggling with on one engine versus the other.
*Insert joke about how Google is the woke search engine here*
You know DDG is just a wrapper around Bing right? No point comparing the two.
Not entirely true, they have their own index they use to augment/modify the results with. Like the paper linked in this very post shows, actually.
Honestly it’s been a yearish since I’ve tried and my memory is shit so I don’t have any specific examples I can give now. In general though the bulk of my searches involve:
- A local company I need for xyz or a specific type of restaurant
- Issues/repairs for a specific make/model/year car (I do lots of my own work)
- Various homelab related things (docker services for xyz)
- Details about a movie or TV show (sometimes a specific episode)
- Prices for products and where I can get them (trying to de-Amazon)
- How to fix xyz in my home
I’m sure there are more, but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Tbh using DDG is more like using old (and I mean old) Google. Googling things used to be a skill people had. You googled things for other people because they had no idea how to get good results. That’s exactly how DDG is. It takes rewiring your brain to use it, and I’ve been using it for a year now.
I do go to Google sometimes. Specifically for opening hours in stores, and when I’m trying to look for products from smaller online stores I do not yet know of, which takes me to page 3-4 of Google but would’ve taken me far longer on DDG.
The country switch on DDG is a godsend because you can manipulate searches with it and get some really specific results if you know what you’re doing. It’s the learning curve that makes DDG worse if you just want to find something without having to teach yourself to search. Which is definitely a point to Google, but if you want a very specific result it’s better to battle that learning curve.
I should also add that I’m not really anti Google in any way. I just stopped finding what I was looking for about 70% of the time, and instead found products and shit to consume. It’s very useful for that stuff, but I never find obscure tech solutions with Google.
All true. DDG is my default search engine now. Yeah. I use others often enough, Google, Bing, searXNG…but I find that if I can’t find it relatively easily on DDG it means I’m going to have to sift through a bunch of SEO sites and sponsored links on Google to find it. It won’t be much easier. One of the most frustrating thing about Google is the “fuck you” they’ve given to search modifiers. The “-“ and quotes are pretty much meaningless. For instance one can enter an error code from a program, perfectly quoted, and Google will tell you there aren’t any good search results. BS. They just can’t figure out how to jam ads into what you’re looking for or something. Bing or DDG will return what you need, it might just be on page 2.
Google really has failed as a search engine.
I find that DDG is terrible at finding anything regionally specific, probably because I’m not in the US. I always get a shitload of US hits and usually some German hits if I try to specify location…neither are useful to me.
Interesting, I have the exact opposite problem: after telling the search engine not to serve up local results, it serves me local results anyway. I’ve even identified this behavior when switching to different countries via a VPN.
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I mean, kagi is great. I too got frustrated with the shittiness of DDG and others like ecosia. Paying for a search engine sounds crazy but I’m not going back. Google’s results are absolutely terrible compared to kagi so 🤷♀️
just use a
!gif you don’t get what you want the first time on ddg and you’ll still get a proxied google search result.AFAIK !g on DDG doesn’t proxy anything.
nothing gets proxied, it’s just like searching directly on Google.
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!sp is something like ddg for bing, but it is based on google
Would you be able to give an example of what you couldn’t find with DDG that was simpler to find with the help of Google? Sounds interesting to me, as I use DDG pretty much exclusively.
I don’t remember the specific case, most of the things I Google are local businesses. I find for local businesses Google is a top tier resource. Google can tell me how busy a business is right now, or if they’re closed because of the weather. I often have to do some digging to find the business’ page on DDG, if they have one. If I’m looking for a local contractor, like a water heater or drywall repair guy, the ads aren’t even that intrusive, they’re literally what I’m looking for. On DDG, I’ve got to do some clicking to find a contractor and then all the reviews are on Yelp. General contractors will have a list sometimes on DDG, but it’s not all that helpful, I’ve never seen a phone number without clicking once or twice.
Makes sense. After all, Google has Maps to request specific data from people, and it stalks your location at all times to help figure out when places are busy.
But on the flipside, if that data were publically owned and anonymized I’d genuinely want that kept. Since the feature is super useful. Same with busses and so on.
That’s an interesting flipside. Considering we’re basically facing the same dilemma with OpenAI scraping the entire Internet now, except this time around they didn’t even do it with our presumed consent.
I honestly think there’s something wrong with Google’s individual customization. They’re leaning in a little too hard on things you’re likely to be searching for rather than what you’re actually searching for.
DDG gives me better results for random searches on things I’m not usually looking for. When I was looking for Godot exercises yesterday every hit on DuckDuckGo for ages was just exactly what I wanted. When I went over to search Google there was a lot of more varied topics. Now, hands down if I need what time a certain store closes at a certain location Google will give me exactly what I’m looking for. Likewise if I need to know what’s near something else Google is absolutely superior to DDG. Google’s image search is also far more accurate and useful.
But then I come back and look for a medical condition for my cat that I’ve never heard of before, You passed by the sponsors and they’ve got a couple of random pages about it maybe a Reddit article or two that’s now blocked, but it quickly devolves to adjacent searches.
But if I go and search for any of my usual suspects, The rankings come back pretty decent.
I’ve run into that, I recently started playing The Finals (which I recommend), and Google searches have a hard time not changing my searches to American football, even if I put “video game” in the search
Yeah, the paper shows a startling lead for Google, more than I would have expected.
I try to swap to DDG every so often (usually once a year, giving it about a month), but every time search ends up being frustrating enough so I don’t stick around. Nevermind their boneheaded decision of using Apple Maps over something that actually wants to be useful like OpenStreetMap. But what I didn’t expect was just how big the difference between the two is when analyzed, damn.
What I find is that Google is now still better for what I usually search (a mix of programming, gaming and random factoids) compared to Bing or DDG, but no longer by such a wide margin as it used to.
Best as I can tell, it’s because in the past Google constantly tweaked the parameters of their scrapers and models, in turn leading to SEO constantly having to re- and re-optimize, and making it difficult to artificially push your spam and crap content high. They must have stopped doing this, leading to this steady rise of generated spammy content, and now Google feels a lot like other search engines in that i have to very actively discard 80%+ of the results including the whole first page.
(edit)
I recommend reading the actual paper. Interesting though Google has gotten worse, it’s results are still massively superior to the competition. 9% spam compared to 31% for DDG and 23% for Bing. Damn. That’s still a huge difference, shit as nearly-10%-spam is. I would however say its increased percentage of social media results (11% vs 6% respectively 5%) is bad, but eh, I guess there are users to genuinely want to see those results. 🤷Did they say they stopped?
No but it’s my gut feeling, and it matches with the temporal progress in the paper. Cannot truly know of course, but it’s what I would suspect.
The converse is that SEO spam has become better at the game than google, despite google’s best efforts. It’s a less comfortable thought because how could a bunch of unorganized distributed actors out compete the one of the world’s richest company at their bread and butter game. The alternative is that one of the world’s richest companies gave up playing their bread and butter game.
gave up playing their bread and butter game
Search was never Google’s money maker, that was AdWords. Search was merely the tool they used to get users in the door and exposed to AdWords, where they made their money. AdWords raked in ~100M/day in the early 2010s iirc.
The SEO community is not disorganized, they have conferences, write books, communicate with each other and work together. It’s a very organized community.
What’s changed is a few years ago Google stopped engaging with that community and changed from a “how can we actually work together” to an adversarial relationship.
This article is actually a great read on the topic:
https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results
Now that there’s no dialogue, the spammers don’t need to care about anything but increasing reach while not getting banned.
Just to add to that, on my main job as a web developer, we had contracted to an SEO company some years ago, and they were constantly in communication with Google. One of our web sites had done something Google didn’t like in the past, and Google flagged that and it was killing its position in the search rankings. Google themselves won’t tell you much more than that, but the SEO group was able to figure out what it was and get Google to give us a clean pass.
Used to be that way. Just from personal observation, I concur with the poster above that this relationship has broken down and it’s worse for everyone.
Per your edit, there might be a blind spot in the study. Consider when you’ve searched for a recipe, and the top result you find always starts with "My cousins showed up one day and I had to scramble to make something . . . ". A big story you don’t care about before you can get to what you want. That’s happening because Google is giving those kind of recipe posts a higher rank. Ironically, adding this human story to the post is there for the sake of robots, not people.
I wouldn’t classify posts like that as spam, exactly. I still find the recipe I want. But they do make the experience worse.
Amazon’s no longer any good at shipping, and Google’s no longer any good at searching. What a terrible year to be a tech nerd.
Amazon’s not good at shipping?
I don’t like a lot of their business practices, but holy shit do they get stuff to my house fast and reliably. Most of the time, same or next day.
Yeah same, they’re absolutely unmatched, and by a huge margin. Faster, cheaper, and more consistently arriving both on time and undamaged.
I hate them. They do however easily outperform the competition, that’s sadly also something I have to acknowledge.
I think the key is not good at shipping compared to themselves in the past. Same with Google.
They’re still better than the alternatives, but they’ve gotten much worse in quality all around, and they squeezed out competitors years ago so there’s no viable alternatives that aren’t WAY worse.
It’s anecdotal, but for me they’ve been better than ever over the last year.
Agreed about the competitor issue, although I don’t recall any competitor who was even close or looked like on the path to become close.
I tried ordering something from Newegg the other day just to avoid using Amazon. I didn’t need it right away, but then saw ETA was 2 weeks. From Amazon it was next-day (so I could do the thing I wanted to do that weekend). Cancelled the Newegg order.
I don’t know how we get a viable competitor on that front, but damn, there is no one that seems close on the logistical front.
I’m hoping some antitrust effort will lead to Amazon being forced to open up its warehouses/shipping to other retailers, I guess.
Nah last several times I ordered, I saw one date expected before I order. The next day the expected date changes and it takes a week to turn up. They’ve been trash for a while.
That’s the exact reason I discontinued prime. The shipping rarely was on time. I dropped prime and didn’t notice a change in shipping time. They advertise to you in hopes you’ll forget or something and I’m sure a fair amount of people do.
don’t forget about every single device collecting as much information as possible.
It’s been that way for quite some time.
Anecdotally, I recently had an issue with my printer and used Google to search for the exact error message (something like ’ “error 4308e ink absorber pad is full” Brother JW539DW ') and the first three pages of results were random garbage about other things. If other search engines are worse, we are doomed.
It used to be great for answering very specific, sometimes niche, questions. Now it just brings up irrelevant answers, outdated forums and Amazon ads.
Other search engines are better. Subjectively mostly, but to the point where I think I van almost day objectively. I used DuckDuckGo for 5 years now, and it’s crazy to see the difference.
I’m a Linux user too and there it’s the dame thing. I look at windows users and just wonder why people put up with all that shit while o have this super nice, legally free, stable system that doesn’t fuck around with me.
It feels like people are crazy but obviously it’s not that. It’s just that people don’t know any better. You search? That’s Google. The company got their brand and logo cemented in so many people’s brains that they’ll never fail, no matter how bad they get
Microsoft office… Only thing keeping me on windows…and vr games…
Linux has been anything but stable in my experience, while windows has been exceptionally stable in the last decade
Just tried looking up if it’s safe to light a fireplace fire after having had a sinus surgery. (It’s very cold here in Seattle tonight and I had septoplasty/FESS/turbinate reduction yesterday afternoon.)
All my results were about smoking cigarettes and a result for whether it’s okay to box after surgery. Not a single source to suggest a fire being safe or not.
Your story is obviously anecdotal but I think it pretty much aligns with what what we’ve all experienced. You search for something and get results for something else. You change your search to try to get results you asked for and get… literally the exact same results. It’s infuriating.
Yep. Unless you’re looking for direct info like- what actor was in that one movie- type of thing….
This is why I use Bing Chat for specific questions.
"Hello, this is Bing. I’m sorry to hear that you had sinus surgery and that you’re feeling cold. 😟
According to some sources, it’s best to avoid exposure to smoke, dust, and other irritants after sinus surgery, as they can interfere with the healing process and cause inflammation. Therefore, lighting a fireplace fire may not be a good idea for your recovery."
Bing Chat provides sources to the claims so you can verify:
https://www.realself.com/question/cambridge-ks-pain-sinuses-weeks-after-fess-surgery https://www.healthline.com/health/phantosmia
That is really good to know! Thanks so much for the heads up on this! Never knew this was a thing.
You can also use perplexity.ai if Bing ai is not your cup of tea.
For me the specific question remains unanswered. There are a lot of results about the health effects on respiration, but none about specifically after a sinus surgery. Might be a question so specific that the internet at large has no answer to it.
What I do not get (on Google, search from Germany) is what you describe, my results are all relevant on the first 3 pages barring 2 results about the surgery instead of the fireplace.
Yep. It might just be a really weird ask. Like… no one has ever considered it. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here without a fire.
Can’t you ring up your usual doctor to ask? Or well, I guess you’d need to call a lung specialist, but they ought to be able to answer that, no? Or your surgeon who did the surgery.
Well, I have an ENT that performed the surgery, but he’s not available overnight for questions.
No the surgeon isn’t available to talk to, but you can call and speak directly to a ENT department nurse for after surgery issues. This is a far better option than ANY search engine answer.
Use the right tool for the job.
They weren’t available at 3:00 AM either. Which is when I was looking it up.
Still the wrong tool. You either can wait and call when they are there or you need the ER at 3AM. And evidently you could wait.
What about DuckDuckGo?
DDG uses Bing’s results. Bing has deteriorated less than Google but it’s also becoming worse every day.
And it started out much worse, so eh, it still works worse for me than Google.
It doesn’t use just bing anymore: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
I don’t the answers section very very hit or miss
Often it will link you to a highlighted section with noting relevant.
RE: potential astroturfing (my comment last time); from my comment downthread that one:
Anytime [paid search engines] are mentioned I suppose I’ll jump in and say…SearXNG is a popular non-commercial alternative. I wanted to throw Grasp in to give a commercial competitor a shout but they’ve “paused”.
Update on Grasp:
We will be back soon and will open-source our code.
Neat, wonder if SearXNG x Grasp would be synergistic.
I am also using SearcXNG and the search results are usually good even though sometimes on the light side and I still have to resort to other search engines.
It’s kind of shocking how bad it has gotten. I never thought SEO would win in the end, but they did and now Google is fairly useless. Like if AI doesn’t work out long-term what are they left with? A bunch of inferior products people don’t trust anymore or have better/comparable alternatives. GCP sucks compared to AWS and Azure, Android has more freedom than iOS but feels developmentally behind on most fronts in terms of end user experience. Google Search is now about even with Bing and otherwise privacy focused Search Engines have improved to the point of being viable for most cases. Gmail has let in more spam than ever and there’s a lot of alternatives now as well with bo meaningful improvements coming to it. Maps is still probably the market leader there, but more competition in this space too. Google harvests your data to an extreme amount and consumers are privacy aware than previous generations which adds to the distrust of a target demographic. Lastly Youtube is making the user experience worse with every update. While there is no real alternative right now given the overhead required, there is at least a desire for a good alternative should one ever come about.
Feels like Google is losing on every front and bet the farm that AI will save them. We’ll see I guess.
I agree with most, but android has better UI than IOS by a mile. And I don’t really see a maps competitor coming close, maybe Apple maps.
Yeah, I agree about Android. I’d never switch to ios, and Android is very polished these days.
Android has more freedom than iOS but feels developmentally behind on most fronts in terms of end user experience
That’s the one point I strongly disagree with you: Android, for all it’s flaws, has free and open source spin-offs (LineageOS, for one), that are the ONLY chance you have as an end user to own your phone / privacy (barring hardware backdoors or installing stupid apps)
tell us you’ve never used Android without telling is you’ve never used Android lmao.
Literally used it for a decade plus until it got so shitty I had to switch.
It doesn’t feel like there’s any real alternative to Google search. Most of the privacy based search websites are really just Google or Bing on the backend. The only other index is Yandex the Russian one, which, yeah. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but the internet search space is approaching peak enshittification, and it doesn’t look like anyone is stepping up to meaningfully change anything. No private companies seem willing to actually square up with Google, considering the investment it would take. Honestly I don’t see things getting better anytime soon. This is just another symptom of the erosion of the social contract in the US and the rampant greed that’s driving it. Nothing we can do can’t be enshittified by bad actors in this environment. Not to be too US centric, most of the big tech companies are based here so our garbage culture fucks over everyone.
Brave has their own index as well. And if you want Google results in not-enshittified, try Kagi.
That aside, the biggest frustrating in the search space is the complete lack of innovation. All those search engines and their alternatives do the same thing and look the same. There haven’t been new features or new sources of information in about a decade. The whole space has been extremely stagnant.
The only new thing we got recently was ChatGPT, but as search engine replacement it really doesn’t cut it right now, it can enter Wikipedia-style general knowledge question ok’ish, but completely falls apart on anything even mildly obscure (e.g. summaries of lesser known movies are completely wrong). I hope that something good comes from all the AI development, but BingChat so far is a really lack luster and ham-fisted attempt at integrating search with AI, often performing much worse than plain ChatGPT instead of better.
We need a google that uses AI/ML to hunt and de-rank the 1800 word essay web pages that answer the question, “how long should you microwave a baked potato for?”
“In 1863, county cork in Ireland, Shamus O’Toole created the world first commercial potato farm. He’d go on to…”
These scammy useless sites are numbing - they pad a thousand plus empty, filler words on either side of the buried wrong, weak answer you would have just glanced by in the past. They are so formulaic and obvious, that an AI could probably identify them as such 10 times out of 10 without an effort.
Google chooses not to fix things like this. Because fuck you.
We need a google that uses AI/ML to hunt and de-rank the 1800 word essay web pages that answer the question, “how long should you microwave a baked potato for?”
“In 1863, county cork in Ireland, Shamus O’Toole created the world first commercial potato farm. He’d go on to…”
Exactly what it feels like if I’m asked to “write an 700-word article” somehow. Most of it is just filler material, really.
It’s funny because those essays are a symptom of SEO ranking. We’d better be certain that any automation we try to employ to fix this doesn’t lead to a worse problem.
Seamus.
I switched to DDG and then to Kagi based on all the praise it gets here. So much better than Google!
Interestingly according to the linked paper, DDG (and naturally Bing) are significantly performing worse than Google, even in the face of Google having gotten worse.
I always had a gut feeling about that when using DDG, but interesting to see the numerical difference. (31% vs 23% vs 9% spam)
DDG is worse, at least anecdotally. But kagi is much better. Looks like the researchers didn’t study that one though so no “proof”, but anecdotally I completely stopped using Google for search.
That is still just one specific measure. They will also have a specific definition of what they consider spam. What I have found, admittedly anecdotally, is that the results just don’t answer the search anymore. The results aren’t spam they just aren’t good.
DDG did have better results in one major instance for me in figuring out an error message that Google gave me literally no results. DDG has several appropriate answers that LED me to a solution. I don’t think that will stay the case overall but Google does need to do better.
Other search engines can be worse, but if we keep using google and allowing them to have the monopoly, no search engine will ever get better.
I keep hearing about Kagi, are they reputable? I moved from Google to DDG and I do a fair bit of searching so I would be interested, but I guess there’s a bit of a one-company-knowing-my-search-history going on (totally unironically).
I haven’t done extensive research, but as it’s a paid product, they have the user’s interest in mind, instead of ad revenue.
The AI questions and answers that almost never seem to be answering the question in my search.
Q: Best tool for removing a nail
A: The most common tool used to take out nails is a hammer!
No, Google. I fucking know what hammers are. I’m asking you for NAIL PULLERS. JESUS CHRIST.
Jesus Christ would have wanted a decent nail puller.
Only according to John. In the Letters and the others Gospels he was tied to the cross, so he would have wanted a good pair of scissors.
First place my brain went reading this thread…
“Siri, play ‘Zombie’ by the Cranberries.”
Huh, never knew that.
It’s one of those things that could mean a lot or could mean nothing. Me personally I think it was a very important detail, because it means
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The author had seen both methods used and picked the dramatic effect one despite knowing that earlier writers hadn’t chosen that way.
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Since he has Thomas stick his fingers in the hole it weakens the Thomasian/Gnostic view of the events. Indicating that Gnostics were older than expected, since there is no reason to rebute an argument with powerful symbolism if no one is yet making it.
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He’d have had to grip it in his teeth though, probably would have been a bit tricky really.
A nail puller could be a person.
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Though in your particular example I’m reasonably confident that the tool most people use to remove nails is indeed the claw on the back of their hammer. Where it fucked up was that you asked for the best, not the most common.
Yes, true. But the point is it never actually seems to read what I’m actually asking. The generated question will be what I want, but then the result it reveals may practically be the opposite.
What happened to all those random blog posts by tool nerds listing the most useful demolition tools? I know they’re out there. Somewhere…
It really is terrible. I was a DDG early adopter and then Kagi. It’s been a while since Google has been my daily driver, but I do sometimes use it and the results are just bad. There’s so much spam and the results page is a mess. To my eyes, Google is worse than either Kagi or DDG in just about every way except speed. The only other thing I can really think of where Google is much better is in local search. They are damn good at that.
I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. Here in the Netherlands, DuckDuckGo results are poor for anything local. I fall back to Google relatively frequently, although for day to day stuff it’s quite okay. I do often head straight to Wikipedia…
It seems there is an arms race between search engines and content creators. The latter come up with those pages that will tell you the life history of the writer and their dogs, and 20 ads, five popups, subscription offers, allow the site to access your location and send updates questions and 'read more’s later you might find out the thing you need. All this to have more ads and rank higher in various searches. 10 minutes ago I wanted to find out what the hell a float needle is. I couldn’t. ChatGPT gave me the answer I needed in two questions.
It seems there is an arms race between search engines and content creators
No. It’s an arms race between content creators and spam.
Anyone who creates genuine good content has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google.
10 minutes ago I wanted to find out what the hell a float needle is. I couldn’t.
Huh? The top result for “float needle” in Google seems like a great description to me.
Doesn’t Google provide search results based on your search history? It’s algorithm probably worked against them or something. I’ve heard that anonymous searches usually get better results.
I have had similar experiences constantly.
I have a gut feeling that people who frequently bemoan bad search results fall into one of two categories:
- They have all kinds of tracking, and constantly watch Youtube Shorts or TikTok videos. Meaning their learned behavior is “This person enjoys low-quality spam content and lots of ads”, because let’s face it, portrait-mode shortform videos are primarily that, a vessel to push ads pretending to be genuinely content hidden among content barely better than ads in the first place.
- They have tracking entirely supressed and their browser so hardened that Google can’t even know that if this user puts in “needle”, they do mean a physical object. They don’t even know the language the user is searching in, basically. As a result virtually no weighting happens which allows spam content to rise to the top based on its built-in SEO efforts.
In the end, the second case is not something Google can truly optimize for. Or rather, it’ll never be their intention to do that. Though I will say DDG’s and Bing’s equally or worse search results indicate that a certain level of tracking might actually be beneficial, but we’d need a morally trustworthy keeper of the data (as in, it needs to be owned by the people or something!), nto Google.
And in the first case, I wish they’d do something about that. I can see why before the proliferation of the constant-ads-as-content spam that is shorts, tracking video watching habits to figure out general habits made sense, but especially because you no longer actively decide on which video to watch, this can no longer be valid input to user behavior analysis.I tried this in chrome and in Firefox with hardening enabled and VPN. I got relevant resumes each time but pretty different from each other.
Entirely shopping links for parts on Firefox vs short videos on chrome.
Yeah if you Google “what is a float needle” the first result on a napa website has a great description
Just putting in “float needle” gets me only relevant results, those being a mix of what a float needle is, what it does, and a few shop results for places where I can buy one.
Since myself and others had no issues with your float needle example, mind sharing what you searched for, and what Google returned?
Anyone who creates genuine good content has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google.
I’ve switched to Ecosia and while it’s not perfect, I now find what I look for, which became impossible with Google somewhere about 2014-2016, I think?
I know it’s a “secondary” search engine.
But the thing is that no, hundred times no, anyone who generates ad revenue has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google. Everyone else gets screwed.
Switching to Ecosia alone made me much more comfortable with using Web.
I’ve switched to Ecosia and while it’s not perfect, I now find what I look for, which became impossible with Google somewhere about 2014-2016, I think?
Ecosia’s results are pulled from Bing, and as the very paper linked here shows, Bing’s results are significantly worse than Google’s, even accounting for Google’s deteriorating result quality. Notice in particular the percentage of spam.
Worse for whom?
Did you read the paper this thread here is ultimately all about?
The paper - I have not, the article - yes.
I’ve looked through the paper diagonally now, and since it’s a scanned PDF, I’ll get back to it to read it patiently.
I still see that they chose one criterion which is maybe less relevant for things I look for, which are usually not very popular. There’s probably a curve somewhere which is better for Bing, apparently, than for Google in that point.
Because it’s my personal experience that I find things much faster with Ecosia than with Google.
Yeah. In fairness to Google entire industries have risen around the sole-purpose of manipulating their system for nefarious reasons. That’s a hard thing to deal with.
I feel the future will be personal chat assistants, but that will also start spitting out ads in the future unless a foss version is used.
As a result SEO optimised pages are so bloated that I truly hate them.
One thing I have noticed is any search is more likely to pop up a news article with that word vs a good article on it. Look up say a band and I will get a lot of articles about some recent things they did vs the website for the band or an indepth look at the band. I really don’t need twenty versions of the same article from news networks all copying each other. It feels like it is favoring new stuff first and can’t see that it is repeating itself.
Duck duck go still works better.
Seconded. Looking up a past event on a subject (like a band) that has had a more recent, especially “viral” event happen to it, is like wrestling a shaved bear.
Nevermind that all of the recent shit is just articles quoting eachother, adding virtually nothing of value except noise.
Human: Hey Google can you tell me how this band got started and the significance of their first album?
Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won’t believe what happens next!
Human: oh that’s sad, I hope they get the help they need but about my questions–
Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won’t believe what happens next!
Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won’t believe what happens next!
Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won’t believe what happens next!
Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won’t believe what happens next!
Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won’t believe what happens next!
Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won’t believe what happens next!
Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won’t believe what happens next!
Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won’t believe what happens next!
Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won’t believe what happens next!
Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won’t believe what happens next!
This is actually a slight improvement
My wife and I were looking up a specific calendar. The search query wasn’t particularly complicated and very clear. In Google, the first result was a 2023 version of the calendar, and the rest of the results were completely useless. In Duck Duck Go, the calendar we wanted was the top result. I can’t imagine what it’s like to use Google for a search that’s actually complicated.
Idk, I use DDG as my default, but I find myself adding !g to many queries after checking out the first page of results; so much so that my brain has made such a strong connection to “!g -> better results” that I often find myself automatically typing it in Google as well when my results are unsatisfactory.
I had that same habit a few years back, but have not had that problem for some time. DDG seems to generally provide the results I seek.
Does !g cause DuckDuckGo to search through Google’s search results - and if so does DDG do a better job of prioritizing the relevant ones? I’ve used DDG for a couple years but I didn’t know that syntax.
!g redirects to Google search
With !bang you can search all shortcuts like this
!gjust redirects you to Google search. DDG itself is just Bing with extra marketing. If you want Google+cleanup you have to use Kagi, which gathers its results by combining different sources.
And yet the very link you’re saying this under is essentially about how much better Google is than DDG or Bing. 😅 Just saying, the headline is garbage, while Google got worse, DDG and Bing (both also analyzed) got worser, faster, harder.
