m0darn ,

I don't think Google can be blamed too much for presenting an article from a relevant, generally trustworthy site, that has the search query as the article title.

figaro ,

For the record though, I used bing for the duration of 2023, sort of as an experiment to use the ai assistant.

Bing search is worse that Google by a long shot. I almost always gave up and used Google.

Goodie ,

Honestly, I think almost everything else is worse than Google.

I set my default to duck duck go, and it's getting better, but I still fall back on google with some regularity

mPony ,

well, that was last year, right?
I wouldn't bet on Bing search results having gotten better since then, but I would bet on Google search results having gotten worse since then.

figaro ,

The results of my experiment still seem to be true

bad_news ,

In my experience that's only been true if you're letting Google track you post-2020-ish. If you Google via tor or a VPN with no history so Google has no data about you, the results are trash, where Bing/DuckDuckGo (which is just Bing sans non-MS trackers) results are slightly better (although still much worse than Google before it sucked).

sigmaklimgrindset OP ,
@sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz avatar

I see a lot of my friends actually use Bing through ChatGPT, and they seem to get better results than Google. That might be what Microsoft is actually optimizing Bing for

seaQueue ,
@seaQueue@lemmy.world avatar

Bing is even more heavily monetized and encrusted with garbage than Google is.

elias_griffin ,
@elias_griffin@lemmy.world avatar

Best breadcrumb from article:

I wanted to understand: what kind of human spends their days exploiting our dumbest impulses for traffic and profit? Who the hell are these [SEO/Google] people making money off of everyone else’s misery?

Karyoplasma ,

I don't get ads in general. They don't work. I never bought something that got presented to me from an ad because I know ads are deliberately lying to me, so the product they show is the first product I don't consider purchasing.

AnagrammadiCodeina ,

Time to time i watch twitch from an iPad that I use only for that and an ad banner appeared of a weird but useful adapter for USBC. I clicked on it on purpose (first ad I clicked in a decade probably) the link wasn't working, dead link.
I was speechless.

MyRobotShitsBolts ,

The demise of google search is by design.
https://www.techspot.com/news/102765-who-prabhakar-raghavan-why-accused-killing-google-search.html
TL;DR. Management noted that search revenue was not growing, so the head of google search Prabhakar Raghavan made it worse so you have to click more to get what you want. More clicks = more money = growth = happy investors = enshitification. Fuck you Prabhakar Raghavan.

LainTrain ,

Zitron, though, describes him as "a computer scientist class traitor who sided with the management consultancy sect."

Based

nossaquesapao ,

And by making the search engine worse and worse, they open the opportunity to bring AI chat as a "savior", and people will think it revolutionized internet search.

scarabic ,

Sigh. So many things in the world are like this. It’s not a bad idea, in theory, to favor more recent pages in search results. Finding 4 year old information is often not what you want. But in practice, when everyone knows this bias exists, they just fiddle with their pages daily to try to fool the algorithm. It must be aggravating to be Google, because as smart as they are, the entire world is engaged in an unending and ruthless quest to game their results for personal gain.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yup, and that's why we shouldn't have one dominant search engine, but a few that all do things differently. That way gaming the system is a lot more difficult. But I guess that's not the world we live in, because everyone wants to use "the best," which means "the best" will eventually degrade due to everyone gaming it.

vsis ,
@vsis@feddit.cl avatar

you are a printer we are all printers

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In ,

Technically we are highly complex, self replicating 3D printers.

Rozz ,

I'm not, but my wife is

Im_old ,

oh man, you made me think so many bad jokes about this... 😅

Reddfugee42 ,

Its printers all the way down...

seaQueue ,
@seaQueue@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, well PC LOAD LETTER

yamanii , (edited )
@yamanii@lemmy.world avatar

It worked, SEO really sucks.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b7ac6c83-a018-4583-986b-6d81bfe38859.png

samus12345 ,
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

Heck, I didn't even need "2024", just "best printer" worked.

cybersandwich ,

Kagi

Paying for search aligns incentives better than free search.

It's also the best results from a search engine I've had in a decade.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Theoretically, sure, but I'm not paying what they're asking. $10/month for unlimited searches is ridiculous, and $5 is still unpalatable even if it was unlimited (which it's not).

I'd pay if it was something like $1-2/month for 500+ searches.

nutsack ,

The next good search engine will unironically be a Microsoft chatbot of some kind

normanwall , (edited )

Takes all of the AI processing power in the world to make Bing a good search engine

ILikeBoobies ,

You mean current Bing co-pilot?

Bing has gotten so much worse in the last 5 years, it’s not even better than google anymore

Search results aside, why can I no longer copy the result from Bing’s calculator anymore

AFC1886VCC ,

I only ever knew Bing as being good for porn. Maybe a porn aficionado can confirm if it still is

ILikeBoobies , (edited )

Their video pages gives way fewer results than before

Just did a test searching “porn” and scrolled for 3 seconds before reaching the end of the results

If I do a search though I can get the same 3 results for 20 pages before finding a new one

Draegur ,

Yeah Bing used to be lagging behind Google on censorship so you could find shit that Google wanted to hide once. Now, it all sucks.

Ibuthyr ,

Lol, Copilot is easily the dumbest AI assistant. It's completely useless, it just spews bullshit.

ILikeBoobies ,

It just parses the first few results

It’s the same as the search engine

starman2112 ,
@starman2112@sh.itjust.works avatar

Omg I can't believe they used AI to write this article 😡

starman2112 ,
@starman2112@sh.itjust.works avatar

my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.

Y'all mfs didn't read the article lmao

Scrollone ,

People downvoting you without having read the article 😭

umbraroze ,

I really need to go through my old files and find The Screenshot from around 1999-2000. Basically, I searched for something in AltaVista and got back a page that was super chock full of ads and "portal crud". ...and a tiny little text that you really had to squint for, somewhere in the middle, that said there were no search results, actually. I got the strong impression that this search engine was fucked.

Sometimes Google's results are kind of starting to look like the same, except the crud is in the actual results. Which is something Google could do something about. I mean, they used to care about SEO spam.

Maggoty , (edited )

There was an article about that recently. Apparently Marketing won the battle for control over Google Search. So it's no longer focused on quality of product.

NutWrench ,
@NutWrench@lemmy.world avatar

Google has also gotten lazy. Their first dozen or so searches are either YouTube or Reddit results. (And that's only when they want to pretend they're a search engine).

dutchkimble ,

I think you'll enjoy watching the movie called Idiocracy. It is your AltaVista search result extrapolated to full life.

AWittyUsername ,

Is that the one where the guy is frozen for 500 years? I watched that today.

dutchkimble ,

Encino man?

weew ,

Strange how Google became the default search engine back in the day because they were so good at filtering out the dumb websites that just spam search terms all over the page.

They've regressed and become Yahoo

Pxtl ,
@Pxtl@lemmy.ca avatar

Except there isn't much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn't better. DDG isn't better.

Cris_Color ,
@Cris_Color@lemmy.world avatar

I think it takes a while for that kind of competitor to emerge and gain enough traction to become a genuine alternative option. The primary option everyone long since adopted kinda has to suck for a while :/

aesthelete ,

It also is going to take another leap in algorithm.

It was a hard problem to solve when Google's founders cracked it, but it's an even harder problem to solve now that you have state of the art spam bots filling the Internet full of shit that looks like it was composed by humans.

If someone cracks how to figure out whether something is ai or not (for real, not the fake solutions we have now) and adds that to a good search algorithm and filters the fake shit by default, they will have a hell of a product on their hands.

Hypx ,
@Hypx@fedia.io avatar

I'm of the opinion that it will require human interaction to fix this. It can't be purely solved via algorithms.

What people don't realize is that the original Google search algorithm, PageRank, effectively looks at how real humans interacted with the websites they were indexing. Only websites referenced by other websites were being considered by Google's search engine. And at the time, that meant real human beings were making those links. This gave them a real advantage over other, purely algorithmic search engines.

Something like this will have to be recreated. We will have to figure out a way of prioritizing search results that real human beings have found to be useful.

roguetrick ,

Tough to do when those services tend to get infiltrated by bots as well.

magic_lobster_party ,

DDG has been around for quite a while. Now it was a few years ago I used it last time, but the reason I switched back to Google was because I was clearly less productive with DDG.

Cris_Color ,
@Cris_Color@lemmy.world avatar

I don't think something like duckduckgo is gonna be the eventual contender to take on google. I think it'll have to be an engine with its own index or some kind of lateral solution.

Something like brave, kagi, qwant, or stract could maybe turn into something exciting with more momentum, but honestly I have a hard time seeing them be the kind of scrappy competitor with a new approach that unseats the old king who has lost their way in pursuit of more profit at the expense of product quality. None of them seem like they truly have a new approach, but only time will tell how that story plays out this time.

Krauerking ,

I honestly think it will have to be semi curated and look a lot like a more complex digital version of an encyclopedia.

I mean I think the stupid LLM craze is from trying to make something like that in the vain of the "Hitchhikers Guide" but without having to do the actual work and using autogenerated articles except that makes them prone to being false. The Hitchhikers Guide still had writers and people entering and double checking information.

It can then further link you to related stuff from the web but the wide spread of information is somewhat dead since it's now the product to be sold and free and easy sharing of it would ruin profit margins.

Kyouki ,

Personally really like ddg over it though. Only gotta be more precise with keywording for finding what you need.

JackFrostNCola ,

I use DDG but i do wonder what i dont see sometimes.
I often google a specific brand of components at work and even with the exact brand and/or part number in the search it sometimes doesnt turn up any results (say 5-7 random unrelated webpages) and thats it. Then i put the same search in google and bam, top result.

Kyouki ,

That's what I said - the right key wording. It's pretty strict, whereas Google's results sometimes are a tiny bit more loose understanding of what you roughly mean. Though not always, and on Google I found myself often just adding "Reddit" for specifics. Though really really depends on what you search.

For me DDG offers a lot more than just search results, the bangs and features like I added a script to directly port my questions to some AI is really useful.

skulblaka ,
@skulblaka@startrek.website avatar

I don't know what "right" key wording you want if not the exact model and part number.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Quotes help. So "model" "part number" since those force them to be in the results. DDG likes to ignore parts of your query to get more results.

winkerjadams ,

"DDG likes to ignore parts of your query to get more results."

Wow sounds extremely useful and like a feature I want. I love searching for something specific and they are like "did you mean totally unrelated thing?"

freebee ,

chatGPT and in apps integrated AI search is stealing it.

starman2112 ,
@starman2112@sh.itjust.works avatar

Reddit used to be better, but now any time you search for advice on good _____ to buy, the only answers you can find are "use the search function, this question has been answered already"

duffman ,

That was my issue with old school SymForums. I don't see that so much on reddit.

ShepherdPie ,

I've noticed half the subs are now marked as "NSFW" when searching for something like a plumbing issue for example, which won't allow you to see the posts without using the reddit app.

starman2112 ,
@starman2112@sh.itjust.works avatar

Use old.reddit as long as you're able to. Don't even need to log in (at least where I live), you just hit the "I'm 18" button

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yup, I rarely use Reddit these days, and when I do, I use old reddit. Oh, and I never log in, no need for that nonsense.

ShepherdPie ,

I do (and did when I was still there) use it on a desktop but on a phone it directs you to the terrible mobile site where the HVAC and plumbing subreddits are somehow NSFW and restricted. Maybe next time I'll try to manually redirect to old.reddit and see if it works.

AngryCommieKender ,

Are they actually recommending the Reddit search function? We shit on their internal search function for over a decade, and told people to just use Google and site:Reddit in the search.

arken ,

I'm starting to feel like a shill because I say this so often, but Kagi is the only one I've found that actually does the job anymore. To me a search engine that works is worth the small cost each month, but unfortunately I don't see paying for search becoming mainstream anytime soon.

GbyBE ,

I was sceptical at first too, but a not-paid-for search engine will either have ads, paid results or try to monetize the search data in some way.
I feel it helps me find what I need, better than the alternatives I tried, and I like the features and configuration options it has.

erwan ,

To be fair when Google solved SEO spam in 1999, thanks to pagerank, it was no small feat. The others were bad not because they abused ads but because they didn't know how to deal with cheating webmasters.

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In ,

Why can't someone replicate old Google pagerank?

erwan ,

Pagerank worked first, but SEO adapted since with link farming.

acockworkorange ,

DDG is better, but only in the sense that Google got so bad that now it’s worse than it.

sanguinet ,

I've found DDG to be adequate for the majority of things I search, but when I need something specific or with some nuance, it fails miserably. For that reason I still use Google when I do stuff for work, or when I do troubleshooting. For my daily usage DDG is just fine, though.

nitefox ,
@nitefox@sh.itjust.works avatar

Kagi is better

laughterlaughter ,

I'm almost convinced that Kagi comments on Lemmy are spam. Please prove me wrong:

Has anyone here tried Kagi because of a recommendation from here and, well, actually found it better than the rest?

Mkengine ,

I use it, but to be honest I did not do a comprehensive comparison. I like it mostly for the fine grained website control. For work and some personal stuff I often look for code and can push websites like GitHub to appear more often. Or I can block Pinterest in my search results. I tried to do this in SearXNG, but this was too much of a hassle so in a way I pay kagi for convenience. I recently got a new job and will evaluate in the coming months if it is still worth the money, but right now I am satisfied. Nobody else I know would pay for a search engine, so I can understand the stance, but I am really fed up with all the advertising and enshitification so I thought why not give it a try. And yes, because it was recommended here.

laughterlaughter ,

Thank you for your insight. Much better than the usual, "oh yeah, Kagi is good. All praise Kagi!"

Your account makes it sound very appealing, so I'll check Kagi out more closely.

jmanes ,
@jmanes@lemmy.world avatar

I didn't get recommended it here, but elsewhere. I ended up paying for a years worth last year and yeah I like it better than pretty much everything else. There is still a rare occasion that I need to use Google, but that is maybe once a week whereas with DuckDuckGo it was multiple times per-day.

nitefox , (edited )
@nitefox@sh.itjust.works avatar

I did lol, why the hell would I recommend it otherwise?

It’s a search engine, so to be better than the others it’s obvious it would have to return better results than the usual ad-based crap — and it does. There is a free trial and you can check out if it’s worth it for you btw

It has quite a lot of QoL features for searches, but their main one — searching — is worth the cost; if you do a search once in a blue moon or append “Reddit” at the end of a query, it’s not imo since any search engine is “good enough” for that. If you instead actually do a search without having a specific website in mind, it’s good. You can also filter out the quora and other shitty websites results, which is nice

laughterlaughter ,

I did lol, why the hell would I recommend it otherwise?

Not directly saying that you're doing this, but c'mon, you know the answer. Why would anyone recommend a paid product?

There is a free trial and you can check out if it’s worth it for you btw

Nice! I didn't know there was a trial. Good to know.

You can also filter out the quora and other shitty websites results, which is nice

Oh, now we're talking!! That's very cool.

nitefox ,
@nitefox@sh.itjust.works avatar

Cause the free alternatives are trash, so… it’s not like “free is better” is always true

Hadriscus ,

Not sure if you read the recent article or not, but the guy responsible for this enshittification came from Yahoo, where he applied the same policies. So you're more literally correct than you may think

arken ,

And here is the link for anyone who didn't read it.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Destroying search engines as a career...

nucleative ,

Missing the days of Consumer Reports. I think the velocity of new products is too high for them to be relevant for more than a few months once they release a report anymore.

CaptSneeze ,

I still sign up with them when I’m researching bigger, or long-lasting, purchases. Cars, washing machine, and that sort of thing. I’m always a little annoyed at the price, but the content is SO MUCH better than any other online review source that I’m always happy with my decision in the end. Reddit comments are probably second, but I’ve found those to be littered with what seem to me to be suspiciously positive reviews for items that are not significantly better than their competition. I feel like I need to dial up my critical nature to 10 to fight against the echo chamber and/or the covert advertising.

clay_pidgin ,

I get Consumer Reports free through my library. You may too!

overload ,

Reddit posts could always be company astroturfing as well.

nucleative ,

I saw a website that was selling Reddit bot services to companies that want to review their products. They would just send a swarm of bad accounts in there and make nice comments. Even replying to their own comments.

After that I stopped trusting almost every Reddit review (⁠╯⁠°⁠□⁠°⁠）⁠╯⁠︵⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

*Edit: meant to say bot accounts but leaving it

bradorsomething ,

I was shopping printers earlier, and reddit-based results had clear paid comments.

fossilesque ,
@fossilesque@mander.xyz avatar

I saw it too and did the same thing.

dirthawker0 ,

And Wirecutter used to be good but they will occasionally point out how highly rated something is, and cross checking against falespot et al indicates a lot of fake reviews.

psycho_driver ,

Give SearxNG a try. There are browser plugins available for it. I was using Librey but I'm finding SearxNG to be better.

KairuByte ,
@KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Why?

psycho_driver ,

Because google is a turd sandwich? When alternatives are out there, people need to use them. Everybody was using yahoo or infoseek, or in case of somewhat intelligent people, altavista back in 1999. Every now and then you'd hear someone say something about google, and lo and behold, it was way better than those search engines. Now google sucks. A replacement will eventually arise.

KairuByte ,
@KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

You’re giving no information other than “switch”, I’m trying to prompt you to give an actual critique, and what you like about it that would get people to switch.

psycho_driver , (edited )

Aha. Well, so far I'm finding that it gives better results than I've been getting from google in years. I mostly search programming or linux related questions. It's another metasearch engine which goes through multiple search engines and presents you with the results it thinks are relevant. It will show you which search engine(s) it pulled each result from as well. Seems to almost completely get rid of blogspam and advertisements and just return real information.

Edit: Also, it brings back the cached feature

Much Later Edit: It is, in fact, very good at hiding advertising/shopping sites. I had to switch to google for a search the other day when I was looking to order something online because searxng had filtered out all of the etail sites in its results.

SendMePhotos ,

and Google is a turd sandwich.

freebee ,

google controls the portals through which many people search. Defaults will always be google when people are using android and or chrome. Yahoo, infoseek or altavista never had anywhere near a grip on people like google does today. It takes effort to change now, while in the olden days you just had to change your 1 start page on the browser, things are a lot more embedded and thus customers locked in. Thinking it will switch over to a better alternative like it did back then, purely because it is a lot better, is a bit naive I think, unfortunately.

Allero ,

SearxNG, much like original SearX, pulls data from a variety of search engines, reducing their bias, and also has great filtering options, including filters for academic/IT/social/etc.

Aside from that, it is decentralized and private. Everyone can kickstart their own SearX server, though it might need some minimal juice to work quickly.

And yes, it can be integrated to search from URL bar much like any other search engine. Some instances offer addons that set their one to default, tho you don't have to install anything, just add your preferred instance to the list of search engines, Firefox will prompt you on that, for example.

merthyr1831 ,

Google used to list sites with backlinks highly, it was their first ever search algorithm iirc. Once people learned you could game that by planting useless backlinks, Google realised it was a bad idea.

Somehow, they've reinvented this all over again with parasite SEO that fundamentally works the same way. All they did was add some "domain ranking". Now, unreliable-but-popular sites coughredditcough will always score highly regardless of quality, because Google deemed them superior.

psycho_driver ,

reddit is a very good search resource though because it has 15 years of real people giving real information. I imagine reddit from here on out will be going hard on the enshitification train so it's value as a search resource will rapidly decline.

turmacar ,

Anything post-2022, and probably post-2020, is suspect on Reddit because it became abundantly clear how steerable it was and how easy to generate sales as long as you didn't do anything too "suspicious". Current 'ad guides' tell advertisers not to link things because just saying the name reads as more authentic.

Before that it was legitimately people discussing, e.g., the best flashlight for x-y-z purposes. But a decent amount of old stuff has been gutted by people deleting their posts/accounts.

time_lord ,

You weren't around for the 2016 presidential elections.

TheBlackLounge ,

Politics on Reddit has always been shit. Product reviews and recommendations were good. How-to's and troubleshootings that don't fit on stackoverflow are still good.

dezmd ,
@dezmd@lemmy.world avatar

After January 2015 it was a downhill slalom.

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