Technology

I have been having better luck with goddamn BING, ffs. Do you realize how embarrassing that is, Google?

I've honestly been on DDG for years; I very rarely hit Google anymore, unless I need to map something because DDG maps suck.

Mojeek has been an interesting alternative. I do find myself using google as a backup when I’m not getting what I need, but Mojeek does tend to present very different results.

I don’t think any other search engine, including DuckDuckGo, has its own web crawler like mojeek does. DuckDuckGo is security based, but still google in the end (similar to how most browsers are actually chromium). It apparently also uses a different term algorithm so you have to readjust how you search because it doesn’t do anything predictive or “smart” in its searching for results.

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.

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.

From googles perspective, you, the user cost them money. Their revenue comes from ads. The brands don't was to be associated with anything controversial so the results are tailored to be as PG and clean as possible.

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.

My experience with Google search had degraded dramatically in the last 6mo. Just isn’t pulling up relevant results. Sometimes not even close.

Google works and it doesn't. I use Duckduckgo, and in general it works decent. Both suck and so does brave search so I don't really have many options that I know of. I always end up searching with reddit to get any real result, as its always the same clickbaity shifty sites.

The sad part is, Google ends up being the best of all the shittyness, because whenever I search some local none of the other engines know what to do. The number of times I have to switch to Google for a address is sad.