- 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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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.
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.
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.
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).
You can also selfhost SearxNG with modest hardware and side step the rate limits. I love it. Happy to answer any questions
Just set this up on my Unraid server and it’s amazing. Great suggestion and thank you.
How does it compare to Kagi?
I can’t self host it, what’s the problem with using an existing instance?
I haven’t used Kagi much, but my understanding is that Kagi has their own indexing and you can customize your search by ranking your results.
SearxNG runs searches against many other search engines and then uses an algorithm to rank the results sanely. So less customizable but also the net you’re casting is much wider.
You could easily self host on a free-tier instance in Oracle cloud or AWS for a year, or even just run it on a laptop. But if you really can’t see a way to do that you can of course use one of the listed instances, you’ll just be more likely to bump up against rate limits since you’re sharing limits with many other people.
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).
These days I often just skip the first 2 pages and go straight to page 3 for my search results to be able to find anything slightly resembling what I searched for.
Bookmarking this for later. Thanks for this.
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.
kagi seems very enticing to me, but man thats expensive… anyone here use it?
I’m still on my trial period but I think I’m going to pay when it runs out, I’ve been really happy with it so far. I think it’s saved me a good chunk of time at work I would have wasted digging through Google SEO crap so it feels like it’s worth spending a few bucks on.
I got work to pay for it. It is pretty good, and I like the lenses function (focus on just forums or other ways to sort). I can’t say that it’s necessarily better in general than startpage.com, which is anonomized google (gets you out of the filter bubble though). I feel like Kagi is very slightly better, maybe 10 percent at most.
I also don’t love the hard ID they have on you for payment. They claim not to track you but they certainly can, and I’d argue better than Google can if you use startpage.com or whatever anonomized version.
Worth every dollar. The quality is so good that you will switch and forget Google exists. I haven’t used Google search in 6 months even once.
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 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
Never heard of Kagi but it does sound I intriguing.
You will love it. I switched about 6 months ago and it’s wonderful. When I was using duckduckgo I had to use the !g keyword to search Google sometimes. With Kagi, it’s basically switch and you forget Google exists.
Set it as default and you will see what I mean.
I’ve tried Kagi several times and the results for me are not good. I’ve pretty much gone back to Google unfortunately.
Can I ask what kind of searches you’re doing? I don’t find google all that great, so I’m curious what you’re searching for where google gives you good results.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
SEO isn’t something google invented, it was just a result of their actions.
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.
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.
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.
I agree,
human.Meow
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?
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
