Yes it has. And it’s talked about all over Lemmy. Is there a circle jerk community on Lemmy?
… A metaphoric one, you mean? Because … um … nevermind.
Bump me if anyone finds one. That shit was hilarious back in the day.
https://lemmy.world/c/searchengines
Of course dead, even not showing up on my instance
It is getting tiresome. It seems the main lemmy communities are worse hiveminded than reddit.
It takes less effort to poison a smaller well.
Yes, google has been badly managed for years and the business model doesn’t make sense for users. I’ve moved to Kagi and am paying for my search (yes, I’ve tried searx and others).
Google has been useless for me for years now. I switched to DuckDuckGo like 5 years ago and every now and then if I accidentally even stray onto Google, I’m just scared by the results
You’re saying Bing has better results than Google?
DuckDuckGo is not Bing, though they get most of their results from Bing so they end up pretty similar.
And yes, I would say it’s better. Not that Bing is particularly good and their search results have also taken a nosedive. But they are still way better than the garbage results I get out of Google.
Not who you replied to, but I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years knowing it’s limitations and would occasionally use Google if I needed more specific search results, however, these days Google Search is about the same as DDG and (even as a fan) I have to admit DDG was never and is not a spectacular search engine. Honestly, the thing that surprises me most is that when I get inadequate results from DDG and try Google, the results are basically the same. Not a great look for Google.
Are you me?
Same thought. Try kagi search. Search is better, I believe they use their own indexing, and you’re their customer, not the product, so there’s incentive to providing good service to customer instead of being treated like cattle and it shows!
I came here to say this. Partly due to behavioral changes on my part, DDG’s results have been closer to what I’m looking for. At school, they block DDG on the WiFi, so I use Google there and I have to flick past many ads and results that look good from the summary, but have nothing to do with what I’m looking for when load the page.
Very yes
I went digging and found one called Qwant which seems pretty good too.
the only cenario i actually use google search for but only in very rare occasions is when i am curious why i don’t find more results in another search engine, i then sometimes want to validate “missing” results are also missing in other/minor search engines that could theoretically have hits instead of misses, but usually i don’t find in google what i was already missing elsewhere, so mostly no gain, only sort of validation.
It feels more like Bing every day. I end up using quotations until there are only 20 results left and none of them are the thing I’m looking for.
Yeah, they’ve been getting progressively less useful. UBlock Origin helps but I feel like Google Search was much better in the past.
I saw an article on a technology Lemmy the other day that showed how Google was pretty much helping to make sure you get shitty results. I’ll have to see if I can find it and link it.
Yes, I unironically use bing now because it yields better results
I haven’t used Google in years in favor of DDG, which had a degraded search already, but I have noticed the YouTube search is super unreliable now as well, but it seems to be getting better the last few months
Big time.
YES
I don’t say this to be dismissive, but Google’s search results have been getting worse for the better part of a decade now, and they’re still far above anyone else. While I do think that engines like Bing are closer to Google’s quality than most give them credit for, Google is still the only game in town. There are other search engines that people use, but they are niches in niches, and are probably used for belief reasons over an improvement in quality.
Frankly, I think that for the first time in history, the search market is open for competition. There is an argument to be made whether Google either doesn’t care about their search quality, or that it’s simply a hard problem to solve for anyone. If the former is true, then a competitor could make a very real case for overthrowing Google, given the right backing and hype behind them.
What is a good search engine these days? I use DuckDuckGo but I don’t find it’s very sensitive to local content, like if I’m looking up an obituary I end up switching to Google. Any more precise and privacy oriented search engines?
I just started using this one today: https://docs.searxng.org/ and it did a great job for what i needed. I never heard of it before, but found the link on an old Lemmy post.
I don’t know how it would work for other people with other needs, but i needed to find graphic designers to help me with a project. DuckDuckGo kept giving me hundreds of results from a handful of big companies, but i wanted small companies and individuals. Found exactly what i needed on the first search using this engine.
I’m a big fan of Kagi.
I don’t care how good it is, but I’m not paying for a search engine.
Your loss because it’s actually good. There’s also a free version.
Yeah, it’s not so much that the search results declined, but that the spammy content farms really got the hang of SEO and now all the results are shit and they all have one thing in common in that they’re covered in ads. Google does have an incentive in giving you links filled with their ads, but I’m not convinced that is responsible for the mountains of shit sites. And LLMs are only going to make this worse.
Google got outsmarted. I feel like there’s maybe a few dozen companies where if you blocked all their sites, your search results would improve massively.
The rate at which the results got worse has a notable pattern in line with their drive for ad revenue. Most of the results are garbage because they are driven by money rather than user choice and popularity. The more money you pour into tuning SEO and Google Ads the higher you rank. To hell with relevance or what users actually want.
I ran a web community for writers from 1997 onward, and threw in the towel this year. The site had a core following but we relied on a steady trickle of new users from organic search and word of mouth to stay afloat. And little by little no matter how much time I put into SEO and the site we continued to slide due to a combination of seo rank and google just removing pages without explanation or reason. After spending the last 5 years rebuilding the site for SEO and mobile optimization, I watched google index 99% of the sitemap, our rank come back up slightly, new users starting to come in… And then it just… Stopped. I went to check the indexing, and google had silently moved all the indexed pages back to “crawled but not indexed” for no bloody reason. Zero errors, codes or messages.
I threw in the towel. The site was costing me nearly $500usd a month to operate and I could not throw a dime at ads. I had tried getting ad revenue on the site a few years back even though I did not want ads on the site and it looked promising… I got 90% of the way to covering monthly costs, but before the first cheque was cut google banned me from that service with no explanation. I followed every rule, discouraged regular members from clicking ads unless they really wanted to see the thing the ad was showing. Still got banned. And google just doesn’t even care to explain themselves.
I closed the site in January because I realized the internet I fell in love with, the one I created that community for… Its dead. Killed by capitalism.
Might be for the best. I can throw my coding time at open-source projects now. Just need to find one that entices me.
That’s heartbreaking but not an uncommon story - it does seem like Google has the power of life and death over websites and it seems very fickle and opaque.
Have you thought about restarting it on the Fediverse?
Thats so sad, especially as someone who regularly tries to find small forums like that. But i always have such a hard time finding them unless i already know the site name :(
Its so hard now for a regular person to find content made by other people without it being tarnished by the profit motive. Forums are all pretty much on reddit or dead. Even a good blog that isnt just seo trash is hard to find now days. Social media sites are mostly influencers trying to sell products and attract followers.
I just wanna see the cool stuff other humans are doing and thinking without ads and low effort garbage 🥺
I wont lie, it hurt to shut The Den of Amateur Writing down. That place was a product of the heart. So many good memories.
Yes. I’m using the same search methods I’ve always used that used to get me relevant results, and I get a bunch of fucking sponsored links instead. I’ve noticed lately that if the result of a search is a YouTube video and I click on it, it doesn’t go to YouTube but opens up as a search result and plays me ads somehow bypassing my adblocker that works just fine in actual YouTube. More than once after the ad was done, the video refused to load, which was utterly infuriating.
Google assistant on my phone has also become garbage. They changed the functionality of the few key things I liked to use, and now it’s totally useless to me. Google is swirling down the shitter faster than yesterdays tacos. Honestly, if it wasn’t for email, photos, and using an Android phone, I’d probably be done with them entirely.
Use Ublock Origin to block all ads. Takes 20 seconds to install, and works on all browsers
Also switch to Firefox, it has built-in protections that Google Chrome (of course) doesn’t have
I am using Ublock Origin in Firefox, it still somehow slipped an ad in there.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-features
Read Dynamic Filtering and Blocking Mode. You still have to manually block the ads, but you can block it across every website.
Technically it takes a while to setup tho
No, it does not. I end up installing Firefox multiple times a week and it takes less than a minute to add uBlock origin ande enable all the extra filters that it offers
When I was new to using uBlock it took me a while to search and read what to do. It definitely took me more than a minute to watch the tutorial video that was linked from the Github. It just sucks when people share these unrealistic expectations with total newbies. I was on the receiving end, too. I just installed it without knowing how to set it up properly, and I kept on hearing “Hard Mode” without knowing that you can actually do it on mobile.
If you say that it takes 20 seconds to install and nothing more, you’re just encouraging someone to just install it and expect it to be the only thing you have to do. You’re not even telling them that you had to configure it to totally block social media trackers and ads on websites!
And ffs, this place is becoming like reddit. I’m being downvoted just because I said something that would’ve been realistic for someone who is new to uBlock, that it has to be set-up and it will take a while.
Bro, it works fine with the defaults, no need to make it hard
There is another comment that said their default settings still let an ad slip in. Same thing happened to me before enabling Dynamic Filtering, then found out some trackers and ad servers are persistent. Plus, hard mode allows you to block trackers more.
In 5 years and 5 devices, I’ve never changed the defaults
Well you’re missing out. Try reading:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-features
Especially Dynamic Filtering and Blocking Mode.
You can get a degoogled phone but they all seem under par with flagships.
I was looking at the fairphone5 but I’m on the fence. I might just stick with my current phone which is like 4 years old.
You should look into getting an unlocked pixel with graphene on it
it might be difficult here. I’m in Korea. ie the land of Samsung.
