Technology

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

"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.

This is what happens when everyone does 'SEO,'

It really seems like nowadays that internet search is just people trying to game the system for clicks. But it has made everything superficial and fake. Not to mention, utterly useless.

I don't know what the solution is really. It's easy to say 'dont do SEO' but people will just find some way to game that system too. It was great when Reddit wasn't complete shit, because the subreddits dedicated to a particular topic had great insights into whatever topic you wanted to know about. But now that it's a cesspool, and Lemmy is tiny in comparison, id say get used to the Internet being like this for a while.

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. 🤷

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Despite how bad Google Search had become, DuckDuckGo and Bing are somehow still worse. While Google displays the result in the first few, DDG and Bing have no idea what I'm looking for.

Gotta try Kagi sometime.

Looks like those theories about algorithms becoming recursive and ineffective will be proven sooner than we expected. I wonder if the emergence of crap AI sped the process up.

I switched to DDG and then to Kagi based on all the praise it gets here. So much better than Google!

Google has literally killed itself. Maps, Google.com, YouTube.... It's all garbage now.

LMGTFYWNMGSN

Let Me Google That For You, Wait, Never Mind, Google Sucks Now

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.

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.

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 would be helpful if google actually responded and actioned on reports. i see malicious websites on search every day that I have reported numerous times.

Google Maps as well. Very inaccurate at times.

Is it just me, or has autocorrect on phones also gotten way, way worse? When would I ever want to type 'thbnks'?

Is this entirety Google's fault, or is it due to the different people who send me ten emails a week saying "Good day to you dear sir. I have been checking your website and I see that you have a good ranking but I am an SEO specialist and I can make your website rank higher "

Bitch please I'm a lazy cunt, I don't want the work 😂

Kagi is paid service, but the results are so good!

edit: fix typo