- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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…
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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
I agree! I find myself amazed that I’m binging now when for so long that was a joke.
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.
I agree,
human.Meow
Hard agree with you on that. AI generated articles are a disaster for the internet. There’s just no quality control any more, especially when actual authoritative sites are no longer in the top search results. Now we’ve got tons more crap-tier content on the internet and no way to differentiate it from the useful content.
You’re talking about the AI that provides accurate-sounding results but can’t fact-check and is also used to generate the kind of spam that’s constantly being pushed by search engines, right?
Well. Some time ago one had similar arguments about manually categorized web site catalogs and algorithm driven search engines.
Today’s ai are not areplacment, but in ten years … rather likely.
Not exactly. Stupid people with advanced tools make stupid outputs. Venture capital is pushing the propaganda sauce hard and a lot of stupid people are jumping on AI as a corporate trend. These are the idiots.
The tools are next level. We are on the edge of this tech becoming a really big deal. There are several research papers making breakthroughs regularly and making double digit percentile improvements on efficiency and accuracy. The reason it is a big deal is because you can have around 1/4 of the knowledge of the entire internet running on hardware as powerful as a current flagship phone. Sure it lies around 1/2 the time, but these are problems that are being solved. Like, the latest and greatest models are ancient history in a matter of 2-3 weeks. To be honest, have a casual conversation with an offline and uncensored LLM. You may know it is lying from time to time, but if you’re being objective, so are most humans you encounter under casual circumstances. The sociological function and potential value of this tech is pretty powerful medicine. Like if you need someone to talk to, or to talk out an issue in private, this is a way to make that happen.
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 :)
2min 30sec is too long? Tell me it was the YT ads not 2m30s.
But I did appreciate the reddit irony.
I have been having better luck with goddamn BING, ffs. Do you realize how embarrassing that is, Google?
Bing is a good search engine, don’t know why people shit on it.
Cause it’s Microsoft. It’s amazing for porn.
Not like Google is a better company.
The core limitation is that the problem is dramatically more complex than it was when Google started. The number of sites were smaller, there was much less dynamic content, and there wasn’t a sizable portion of the internet committed to an adversarial relationship with search engines forcing everyone else to go to the same extremes just to play catchup.
What this means is that you’re looking for answers in a much larger search space, and the indicators you used to use are much less reliable. You have more resources to try to balance that out, but there’s so much straight trash to weed through that it’s pretty difficult to do.
You know, I didn’t expect dead internet to hit search engines first. In hindsight it makes sense, what with the amount of computing they can budget for each result, but it seemed like such a successful, established thing. Man, normalcy bias is a bitch these days.
I hate where the internet is right now.
Anyone trying to get information written by a human or decent benchmarks of CPUs is in for a real crap time.
Just tested i5 12400 vs i3 12100f and was met with results in this order:
- Userbenchmark
- Userbenchmark
- CPU-Monkey
- 3 shitty YouTube videos of obviously fake gameplay benchmarks (that’s a whole other thing on YouTube)
- Technical city
- cpubenchmark.net - the first kind of decent result as it’s from the people at passmark.
- versus (dot com)
- gadget versus
- pc Praha (dot cz)
- cpu-compare
- cpu-panda
The crap just goes on. SEO optimised lists of (at best) affiliate link laden spec sheets with no real information form an actual human.
At this point I get most of my CPU/GPU info from GN, HWUB, and derbauer.
It’s so annoying to look for it elsewhere.
I had the same experience when choosing between the Intel or AMD versions of a prebuilt. Went with Intel due to having comparatably better specs at the price. Theading is better on AMD (as a rule?) but I can only have so much fun running multiple VMs.
It sucks. I hope you got the best part.
Nah google definitely still works, it just doesn’t work well or as consistently anymore.
All these companies paying for SEO bumps to remove or highlight their content fuck with results, just like the Reddit protests did. It’s a real mess because google is more of an ad company than an SE company
For me depending on what I’m searching for, I’ll use chat gpt or similar AI with internet access/training or may use google or other SE and use site modifiers to keep results to a somewhat related domain.
I’m really interested to see what people like when it comes to search engines. Duck duck go, Brave, yandex, bing, google, they’re all different states of shit tbh
Even if they give good results they’re scraping your data to sell or use chromium and is therefore antiAdblock anti user, etc.
After some browsing I found another option - whoogle which seems to be a self-hosted search engine? I didn’t look into it too much but this also seems very interesting
You can also check out https://github.com/hnhx/librex I’ve used one of the listed sites several times and it’s been acceptable.
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.
Yup. DDG is my go to. Every once in a while I have to use Google, but it’s rare.
Also, buy the Wolfram Alpha app if you want math problems solved easily.
Does anybody else find when using DDG for research that it’s waaay too aggressive about “correcting” your query to something more mundane?
This is why I switched to startpage
Doesn’t it just query Google behind the scenes, though?
Yeah, but DDG uses Bing. I want to switch to Kagi or start a SearXNG server though once I get around to it.
I have been using Kagi for a month. Really liking it so far! I just subscribed to their basic plan. Much better results than DDG.
Huh. TIL!
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.
I’ve honestly been on DDG for years; I very rarely hit Google anymore, unless I need to map something because DDG maps suck.
I need an engine where if I put something in quotes it appears on the site, visible to the human eye. sure sure it can ignore case, but otherwise the damn word or phrase should be there.
I need an engine where if I put something in quotes it appears on the site, visible to the human eye
I can confirm this works on Kagi:
I’ve just recently started using Kagi. It’s great, it’s fast, I love that I can raise, lower, or block certain sites in the results.
However, $5 a month for up to 300 queries is pretty steep for the average user. Well, not for the average user (apparently the average google user only searches 100 times a month) but I used up the 100 demo searches over about 48 hours, mostly just researching for responses to lemmy comments.
I subscribed anyway. And I understand search engines are not cheap to run. But time will tell how much this will end up costing in the long run, and if it’s worth it over a free one with an ad blocker.
I became a paying subscriber for kagi today. The way I justify the cost is it’s saved me time digging up technical information at work and that increase in efficiency is worth money to me. Also, I hate ads and SEO crap, and $5 isn’t really that much these days. I’m trying to reduce my reliance on Google so it’s nice having an actual superior search experience, even if I have to spend a little money for it.
Yeah, I tend to try to support new projects doing things different just because I want them to grow. At the moment it costs them approx 1.25 cents per search, which is what pricing is based on (they also need to offset the searches for free trials so the price is a little higher) but presumably there are fixed costs that will mean this cost can come down as the userbase grows. $5 is also not much to me, but it can mean a lot to the service which is young and founder-funded.
Yep, if I put a word in quotes with a minus in front of it, it used to mean that search results with that word would not show, but now it does not matter because “AI haz learn”
Actually i still use this feature but without the quotes (eg -keyword1 -keyword2 …), few weeks ago it still worked
I might try it again then… that is if I have to search for something on Google again
yes. I will check given the one guys reply but I know in the past I have minused something then ctrl-f and the damn thing is there.
This is such a simple ask and yet it seems almost impossible with modern search engines. They all seem to insist on second-guessing you. It’s a lack of respect for the user: “We know you are dumb but don’t worry, we will figure out what you really mean. Oh and don’t forget to watch your ads.”
My other pet-peeve is that they will almost never admit that maybe they just don’t have any good hits for the query. They insist on pushing some irrelevant crap in your face instead. I guess it comes down to needing to show the user something so that they can mix in those ads.
My experience with Google search had degraded dramatically in the last 6mo. Just isn’t pulling up relevant results. Sometimes not even close.
I find google works fine if I’m just looking for general information on a simple topic, because it will dependably return a link to the wikipedia entry and a few of the most popular sites.
And I find that it’s pretty much useless for specific information about narrow topics, because it’s still just going to return the same general shit.
I’m not sure exactly how the change worked, but some time back (it’s been a year or two now, and maybe more - it’s just something that I sort of slowly realized had happened), they shifted to a system that made Google Fu essentially useless.
It used to be the case that you could define the importance of search terms by the order in which you listed them and make some effectively required by putting quotation marks around them.
But starting a couple of years back, it’s been generally ignoring search term order and quotation marks, and instead giving priority to specific common (and certainly not coincidentally common marketing) terms.
To anthropomorphize, it’s as if it’s developed a cripplingly narrow focus. So if, for instance, you’re looking for the title of some specific movie, it doesn’t matter how many other search terms you include or what order you list the terms in - if you include the term “movie,” that’s what it’s going to focus on. So if you’re lucky, you might get the actual movie you’re looking for, but it’s absolutely guaranteed that you’re going to get streaming services and “18 movies with real blood” style clickbait.
I’ve noticed this even when trying to find the name of a song. I used to be able to search:
lyrics “a specific part of the song I remember” whatever random words I can remember out of order
and it would very reliably find songs, even obscure ones. Now the only way it works is if I happen to remember part of the name of the song, usually it’s full of entries for the same popular song that has one word in the title that I included that is definitely not what I’m looking for.
It sounds stupid, but I really miss that working.
It’s complete shit right now. 5 or more years ago I could quickly find an answer to a very technical question with no problem. Now it is useless for anything. Just today I was looking for a shop near me that can perform a front end alignment on my RV, I searched for “Tractor Trailer front end alignment near me”. The entire first page is either tire shops that do not offer front end alignments, car tire shops that don’t even sell the correct size tires I would need for a tractor trailer, or shops 2000 miles away in various directions. It’s horrible and I think it would be faster to look in the yellow pages for what I need in this case. I never found a shop using google.
Also today I was searching for the tires I need in the shopping tab there were ads for tires that google had labeled as wal-mart but when I would click the link it would take me to a Chinese scam site.
And God forbid you look for anything involving troubleshooting your home network. Good luck sorting through pages and pages of the same copy and pasted article telling you how to restart your router.
“Have you tried port forwarding? Here’s some vague results and a screenshot of a netgear gateway page from 2006.”
