I mostly get sponsored sites or content farms that repeat the same text about things as other context farms, but no answers to what I'm actually looking for. Or I want to know about something that happened a while ago, but it only gives me results for the most recent version of the thing despite including details that should limit it to the prior one.

My search criteria is the same as I used 10 years ago when I actually got helpful results.

Search engine optimization has ruined search engines.

It's been years since I felt any satisfaction using a search engine, personally. Between the ocean of sponsored results and the ever-growing mountain of AI-generated Search Engine Optimisation-filled garbage it's so much harder to find stuff than a decade ago.

My problem is that when I search for something, I often want to find precisely the text that I'm searching for. Not just some of the words, not synonyms, and not random stuff with no apparent connection to it. Putting the search query in quotes doesn't always help.

Most people don't know advanced googling anymore, even though it largely still works.

As far as people not using bookmarks, they just refuse to close tabs until they're sure they'll never return to a given site. People even obsess over tree style tabs and other tab organizing add-ons or features rather than, y'know, using bookmarks with folders which can already handle all of that.

AI happened. Beyond the immediate issue of decabytes of garbage articles that now show up any time you search something, information on the internet has now crossed the line to "inherently untrustworthy" because anything could be AI generated. If you're not able to confirm that a real human being wrote the information you're looking at, you just have to assume it's wrong.

The internet was definitely a sketchy place in the past, but there were at least a few places you could go to get reliable information. Those places either don't exist anymore, have become buried in the avalanche of AI garbage, or have become AI garbage themselves. Bookmarking a place when you do find it, like OP is suggesting, doesn't sound like such a bad idea now.

"ne" presses enter for netflix.com

"l" presses enter for lemmy.world

Auto completing urls are so fast.

Trust me, most people don't even know what that star in the URL bar is for

And visitor counters

Geocities!

https://www.anarchymeanything.com/

The old internet done for a laugh

DDG is complete dogshit. It's my primary search engine and it drives me mad with how useless it is. It was pretty bad but it's gotten way way worse over the past couple of months I feel.

And yeah until a couple of days ago I hadn't bookmarked anything for 13 years. I just keep tabs open, remember names of sites or search the web. But I think I'll start bookmarking again in some cases, but bookmarks suck ever since Delicious disappeared.

From my personal experience it became worse in the past few years. Sometimes I couldn't find something only to find it with one search request in google or yandex /:

I didn't know something like that existed, I usually use a service as cloudhiker to explore interesting web pages, but I don't like the ads and the redirecting, so I am currently I am searching for alternatives.