Google search failed to even find a hollywood movie, even after 1 hour of attempts. I don’t really care about the movie, but I am terrified by the prospect that google now ceased to function on this basic level. Why is this happening?
I understand the explanations of seo and other stuff like spam content. But why are there NO relevant results at all.
I wouldn’t mind having to start wading through results at page 2 or even 10 but now it utterly fails to find even the most basic things.
Things you found on the first attempt even just a year ago. Now they are effectively hidden.
To me functionally the entire internet has now vanished. I cannot access anything that I am searching for. Might as well not exist at all.
Has anybody found a way around this?
Is this on purpose? Is this an attack on the free internet, herding people to just the top 5 sites like facebook, youtube, tiktok, and so forth?
Are there search engines that still work?
Everybody is blaming SEO, which is true - but Google is also hamstrung by walled gardens.
Before Facebook, most content posted to the web was open. It could be viewed by anyone without logging in. Reddit even uses this paradigm.
But then Facebook started putting everything behind their account login and suddenly, Google can no longer spider a significant amount of the conversation going on on the Internet - and it can’t link you to it either, because the link would be dead if you weren’t a logged-in Facebook user. And of course it’s not just Facebook.
This is why appending site:reddit.com has come into fashion in the past couple years. Reddit, being open, viewable without a login, is a fantastic source for finding people who are talking about exactly what you’re searching for.
And it’s another reason why Meta is cancer: all the conversations going on about whatever problem you are experiencing that made you do a search in the first place, if they exist in private groups on something like Facebook - they are useless to you and useless to anyone but the members of that private group. We are losing our giant public knowledge base because capitalism.
You really need to add Discord to this list as it is soaking up gigantic amounts of information about video games as a forum replacement. One could argue for actual community games like MMO’s it is perhaps slightly different, but for the majority it is a huge problem.
In 10 years, when we move off discord for “the next big thing” all that info will be gone yet again. It happened to slack and it will most likely happen to discord. None of it will be indexed too. Fun times.
Where are the data hoarders when you need them?
Tools for backing up servers already exist: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter But unfortunately discord can’t be easily scraped in one coordinated attempt unlike reddit due to the massive number of private servers and existing verification/anti-bot mechanisms. As a result, only the communities that have data hoarders will be actually archived.
Good link, though not the one I used. I’ve already begun taking measures archiving various chats. Even if Discord lives, my account might not.
But u can login to discord and if the room is public you can see the content. Even if ur logged into FB if ur not in the private group u can’t see the content.
Even if ur logged into FB if ur not in the private group u can’t see the content.
Well yes, that’s entirely the point of the comment above: unlike old school forums, discord is just as useless as Facebook in helping search engines deliver useful content.
I think the point is you can’t put a search term into a search engine and get results from some random Discord. No body is going to go trawling through Discords to then use the search function to potentially find information from it. Now, if chats were somehow archived and could then be searchable, different story, but I don’t think that’s what people using Discord want from Discord.
yeah, this is a problem. But in practice i found that if your searching for one niche problem and your only lead is discord, the people there are going to be kind and help.
I know the pain on having to join something’s discord to get info, but it’s usually fast after I join.
But the bigger issue appears when you don’t have a clear place to go. It’s like we’ve gone back to before written records were common. Once that server goes and the people scatter, that information might as well never have existed. 5 years after Discord disappears, the only knowledge people will be able to find of it will be a handful of old messages complaining about
some dude who scammed a bunch of people with low quality ironDoge coin.I get it, it is a problem. But I just wanted to up the mood by saying that “you can get the info”. ig I just made ppl mad :/
I can’t see downvotes, but I imagine that people just took it as you disagreeing and saying that it’s not a problem.
I was thinking of stuff that’s super niche anyways, like if you’re trying to keep a program running that your company’s database relies on that hasn’t been supported since Windows 95 or something absurd like that. For most stuff, it’s still possible to find at least somebody with an answer, even if you have to go to a Discord server for it. But when nobody has documented stuff that’s super obscure? Good luck!
You can see the content, but it isn’t categorized, tagged or organized in any way. If you’re looking for some specific information but you don’t know which server/channel it was discussed on, you’ll never find it.
Yeah I can’t stand discord. Impossible to find anything, constantly feel like I’ve joined a conversation they had been in progress for months so have to scroll up ages to get any sort of context.
Aren’t you comparing apples and oranges:
If the server is private, then you can’t search it. If the group is private, then you can’t search it.
If it is public you can on either platform but must participate on the platform. That’s what made Reddit unique: lurking was real easy and didn’t require an account.
Reddit keeps asking me to use their app and they are very clearly making the mobile browser version worse and worse.
Just last week I couldn’t view a thread I found on Google without signing in. It wasn’t adult content and didn’t require verifying my age. The reason given was very vague and had something to do with the content not being vetted (despite being old).The Reddit garden wall is already here and is currently being rolled out. For your own good, of course.
I use a browser extension to redirect to old reddit, which doesn’t have all this crap yet
Which extension?
There are some extensions you can try - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=old+reddit+extension+firefox&t=fpas&ia=web
But I’m using LibRedirect - https://libredirect.github.io/
If you’re using Firefox mobile (Android), you could try this https://github.com/octonezd/oldlander
You’re a goddamn life saver
Probably this:
“Unreviewed Content
This community has not been reviewed and might contain content inappropriate for certain viewers. View in the Reddit app to continue.”
Knew I could find it by searching for an in-theaters film followed by “DVD rip reddit”. Behold / old reddit link.
The sub exists to funnel people to a single TinyUrl. Checking the preview instead, I expect it (123movieshd dot club) is a malware distributor.
While reddit’s tactic is coercive, it also functions as a lazy way to fight the reach/effectiveness of spammers.
Use Firefox and there are extensions that block the app request popup. Or you could use tampermonkey or something similar to do it.
Also, starting in 2018 Google no longer actually searches for the words you entered. Instead, it tries to figure out “what you really mean” and shows results for that. See BERT
But I think that’s letting Google off the hook because when I search for things I do get hits, it’s just weird and I get terrible hits. Last week I was looking for something specific and I found five pages in the top 10 that were all variations on each other, to the point that I assume some of them were automatically generated but have no idea which is the actual original source, if any.
And then if I’m searching for something like song lyrics, the top five hits are all sites that require JavaScript to be enabled and AdBlock to be disabled. Of course Google could filter its rankings to bring sites like this out of the top 10.
So I agree with you that capitalism is a huge issue but one specific issue here is that the Google developers don’t care about things that we care about. And other companies such as Apple and Facebook are worse of course.
“… Google can no longer spider a significant amount…”
What?
“A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing.”
👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆
The signal to noise ratio has seemed particularly out of wack with Google lately. The amount of blog spam SEO nonsense that crops up into the top 4 results has been pretty noticeable.
I’m not sure it’s entirely a Google thing. Reddit’s decline has made it harder to find quick answers for, “My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?” Niche hobbies moving from forums to Discord chats means, “How do I safely remove a keycap without damaging the switch?” is becoming a pinned message in a server you have to hear about via word of mouth. Basically any technology troubleshooting topic has moved from a blog post / forum to a YouTube video. And a 10 minute long one at that. Gotta hit those higher ad tiers.
For what it’s worth, I’m starting the new year off giving Kagi a try. It’s a startup trying to make a paid search engine work. You get 100 free searches to give it a try. After that it’s $5/mo for 300 searches, or $10/mo for unlimited. I’m not sure I’ll sign up for it just yet, but it seems pretty nice. No ads, custom components for things like Stack Overflow and Reddit, and some other nice touches for people who care about search. Their image search actually has a “View Image” link in addition to the “View Page” link. It’s hard to quantify how “good” a search result is, but I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far.
The last part of your comment sounds like an ad straight out of those overlong YT videos.
Have Brands™ started astroturfing Lemmy yet?
I’m not completely sold on Kagi yet. I’m still in the trial period right now. But paid services can be a tough sell online. I figured I’d be up front about the costs rather than wait for the inevitable “$10 a month for search!?” comment.
I haven’t seen any obvious astroturfing yet, but your last paragraph really did have the vibe of a smoothly transitioned paid promotion. Not saying it was, but even the comments that you haven’t fully bought into it made it feel even more like one of the more honest paid promotions.
I read this same sentiment two days ago; Google doesn’t work for me.
Not sure what they are on about. I can find things I‘m looking for on Google in under a Minute 9 out of 10 times and I tend to use it quite heavily tbh…
Yes, they have
I signed up for Kagi after the trial. I’m very subscription adverse, but this one was something I don’t mind paying for.
deleted by creator
It’s great that DDG doesn’t track a users searches. It really is.
But at the end of the day, it’s still just another ad platform profiting off of companies trying to sell you things.
And here you are complaining it seems like an ad, when someone’s explaining an alternative ad-free search.
Just think about that for a moment.Also, if we’re being frank, DDG’s results are damn near useless half the time.
It’s like the opposite end of the SEO spectrum. Whereas Google just anchors onto certain keywords to regurgitate the same 4 listacles, DDG just sees your input for “my lawnmower won’t start” and responds with “lawnmower huh? I dunno here’s the history of John Deere or some shit, fuck off”.
I tried using DDG but had even worse results than Google is having right now. I wish it was good, but my multi month trial of it was not impressive.
It was especially bad for programming. At least Google still finds what I need for that
It also doesn’t allow you to actually exclude keywords. Which can be utterly infuriating if you’re looking for a specific entry in a franchise or a lesser used definition of something.
It’s just handing your search off to Bing, and Microsoft just does what it does.
DDG pays Bing to use their API. DDG makes money by placing ads in the results. They do it kind of circularly using Microsoft’s ad system, but they are separate.
Kagi is very good and I’m happy to be paying for it, but you were right in your second paragraph. It’s not all google. Signal to noise in the web has gone way off. We need to throw out this Internet, it’s gone bad
Story time! There is series by Tad Williams called “otherland” - it’s a rift in the standard stuck in vr story.
Anywho. There is a group of hackers, weirdos and nerds who did not like the corporate vr experience and built their own (treehouse). In all honesty it’s an expansion of the tor project.
But it’s what I hope for. A place to end up in the web that’s not saturated to hell and back by corporate interests, and you need to know someone for the ladder to be let down and you to be let in.
For me the fediverse has become that “alternative web” but of course it has its limits… But I’m too young to judge, google has been crap as long as I can remember. Regarding the alternative web, I could imagine a community run search engine operating on an alow list basis inorder to keep any capitalist crap out.
Also I’ll have to read that book (:
I just started book 2 in the series, and so far I’m loving it, it feels so topical at the moment. Plus I really like Tad’s writing. This series is the first I’ve read of his, but I’m deff gonna grab more of his work.
It’s a machine learning epidemic. Now that blogspam can be automated in a way that Google can’t even look for without penalizing a ton of sites because people write in a similar style to ML tools, search is basically fucked in its current form. Back to human hand curated webrings.
Also Kagi sucks worse than Google and DDG for a lot of things. I still pay for it, hoping it gets better, plus they have a lot of useful tools.
Yandex.com is where you’ll find movies.
Yandex.com is where you’ll find movies.
And porn. Google has recently became completely useless on that.
Rare Google W
It is entirely a google thing. Reddit might’ve helped google hide its limp as it was declining, but it’s google that encouraged websites to write blog spam for SEO, by their very creation of their SEO algorithm. Google has indirectly shaped the internet in this manner.
I remember crunching the numbers with Kagi a couple months ago and most of their plans aren’t worth it, not unless you actually use it at the specified amount. However maybe the packages have changed now, I remember it being something like $5 for 300, $10 for 700 and $27 for unlimited.
It also doesn’t block you when you run out of free searches when you have a package, instead they charge you like 2c per search. So you have to carefully feather your usage to maintain the value - don’t use it enough and the cost per use is high, use it over your limit and the cost per use is high. Frankly, I don’t want all that hassle, particularly with something I’m paying for.
With your new numbers, the $5 package is 1.67c per search, and you’d need to more than 600 searches for the $10 package to beat that rate. However, assuming 2c per search after your 300 in the $5 package, you would hit $10 after 550 searches. So, if the 2c per search is correct, you should upgrade to the $10 unlimited plan only if you’re doing more than 550 searches.
I think they realized their price structure was confusing/annoying towards the end of last year. Now it’s just $5/mo for 300 searches or $10/mo for unlimited. (There’s also still an expensive $25/mo plan for early access to some of their LLM experiments apparently?) You got me curious and I couldn’t find any mention of per-search overage billing. This feature request thread from 2022 just makes it sound like Kagi search gets shut off.
I bouncing hard off of Kagi when they had the original pricing structure you described. Bringing back aughts era SMS overages or just mentally having to count searches doesn’t exactly found like a fun time. I’m going to give the $5 plan a try this month to see how far that gets me. $10/mo is still a tough sell for Internet search. If I really find it substantially better, I might convince my spouse into trying the two seat $14/mo unlimited “Duo” plan for a while.
Maybe paid search engines was the end goal all along…
Someone has to pay for it one way or another. It’s just a matter if you want to pay with money or your personal data being supplied to advertisers.
Yep. If something is “free” for the user, then the user is the product
Well, if it’s from a for profit corporation, anyways, that’s typically the case. Either that or they’re trying to onboard you for an upsell down the line.
Having to join an entire discord server to just find out or download one thing is really, really painful
So far I am really like kagi. Makes sense to pay for something you use every day, without which the extensive resources on the internet would be basically useless.
are you Kagi seeder ?
A literal ad. Goddamn. I’m blocking your ass.
Could their comment be a highly thoughtful and extrapolation on the current state of affairs regarding search engines and the rise of free to use products where the consumer is the product? Or is the comment just an ad because obviously anything mentioning a brand is immediately an ad with no other thought put into it.
Buddy, companies trying to build up user base aren’t exactly going to push for it in comment sections of a small pocket of the internet. They’ll spend their ad dollars on targeted FB and Reddit ads or buy airtime on new shows to talk about the dangers of data privacy and how Google is selling you out.
Try Brawndo next time you’re looking to water your plants. Brawndo, it’s what plants crave.
This is tough.
1: Kagi is getting some play in Lemmy comments recently.
2: Lemmings are often technology evangelists, making Lemmy a good place to astroturf for very specific products.
3: Companies are better than ever at properly seeding account comment histories to prevent suspicion.
We should all be appropriately skeptical, though somewhat polite can’t hurt either since there’s never proof of anything and I’ve sounded like an ad before.
Welcome to Costco. I love you
I’m really surprised that you couldn’t find a Hollywood movie in an hour. Can I ask what the movie was? Was there a specific question you couldn’t find the answer for?
I’ve always had the opposite, that a movie having a certain title absolutely destroys that term or phrase’s use unless all you want is that movie.
People trying to look up the Kirby character “Zero Two” to find fan creations based on it…
Only to get barraged with weeb garbage.
Seriously you used to easily find fan content, remixes and music. Now all you get are shitty AMVs of some turbovirgins “Waifu”
In google search for
“kirby” “zero two”
And you only get the kirby results. And if you want to filter out the kirby weeb crossovers you add a
-darling
Didn’t even need the quotations and google knows I’m a weeb, that person is just making a mountain of a mole hill because the newest character with the same name is more popular.
Unfortunately negative prompts and quotations don’t work half of the time on Google. As many in this comment section have noted.
Google will nag you and not show them, but if you press the “I really mean what I searched for” thing then it usually works for me. I just wish Google would trust that I know what I typed. But yeah I remember it being better.
You need to click search tools and select “verbatim.”
exact match was phased out years ago sadly
I just tried the search prompt I wrote and it worked flawlessly. Idk what the issue is.
deleted by creator
turbovirgins
I have never heard this term before… Oh that has me laughing, I can never not associate that with weebs and waifu now
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I understand OP’s sentiment that google’s getting worse, but this sounds like ragebait. No examples of what they searched for an hour.
I would ask why op didn’t use IMDb.com or trakt which catalogue every Hollywood movie?
I’ve finally switched to DuckDuckGo because of this. Even though only about two months ago I said here somewhere that it’s garbage. Google just managed to convince me that they’re more garbage.
That’s because DDG gets its results from Bing.
But without the chatgpt spam that has overtaken bing the last few months.
I came to the exact same decision a few months ago.
DDG used to be worse; now it’s better.
The only downside of DDG is that it doesn’t have a decade or two of algorithm data to personalise your searches and sort of “learn” what you mean with certain terms.
Not like I miss it too much. It’s just a mild culture shock to suddenly having to be more clear with my searches
That’s a good thing, in my opinion. I miss when Google results were the same for everyone.
You mean the upside is it doesn’t track every behavioral trait? I can live with that
I’ve been using Bing and choosing Google only as a second resort or for any shopping I do. If Google wants to be an ad filled shopping mall, I’ll treat it as an ad-blocked shopping mall.
In that case you should be using DuckDuckGo; it uses the same database as Bing, without the tracking of Bing, and with the ability to use ! commands to pull in results from other places (!g=Google, !w=Wikipedia, etc.).
Over the last year of me using DDG as my primary search engine it has noticeably improved, give it another and we might see a trace of that spark Google had
I find my DDG results are only getting worse with time.
Same problem as with Google, and then some.
Carefully craft search string and submit.
Click through to a result, scroll and try to find the part that addresses my question.
Get frustrated and Ctrl+F for the active part of my search string.
Don’t find it.
Hit back to search results to repeat (but now the results are shuffled for some reason?)
Eventually give up and put the active parts into quotes to force their inclusion.
Same results.Why am I getting these results if they don’t even match my search string?
been using duckduckgo for a while now. it definetely could be better, but google is just hot garbage.
Ddg is my default, but I still find myself having to resort to Google when the query is not dead simple. The engine is good enough for most cases, but overall Google is just better imo.
DDG is way worse than google. I am baffled by this comment.
So you’re using Bing.
It may be bing under the hood, but it gives simple results without having ads and giant boxes everywhere.
The biggest issue I have is that half my results come back as videos. Video results should be in the video tab. I don’t want to watch a half hour long video just to find out how to make a healing brew in ark.
One paragraph would convey the information 10x faster than any video couldI fucking despise video results.
But most of them are from YouTube, which surprise surprise, is owned by Google! So they don’t give a damn, it’s promoting their products in spite of the wishes of their consumers.
It’s wild that in the few instances where the generative AI feature would actually work quite well (summarizing lists of distinct instructions), it often pushes long-form video instead.
But then how would they RETAIN YOUR ATTENTION?
Don’t forget to COMMIT WAR CRIMES AGAINST the bell and IRREPARABLY VIOLATE that like button!
This is such a great sentence I hereby like and subscribe to your comments.
So much this
Exactly the same for shopping results. There’s a designated tab for that as well but often half of the first page tends to be a link to Amazon, ebay or promote a product
What happened is SEO got good and money got made and fortunes got made and greed has taken over.
The internet today is the equivalent of the first and last 10 pages of the old yellowbooks. Why do you think AAA Auto is called what it’s called?
Don’t forget AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Towing Service
Don’t forget the two biggest gossips: Aaronson and Zakowski.
Oooooh that blew my mind
They needed to go scorched earth on SEO years ago. Try anything unethical, your domain is permanently blacklisted from all search results. No appeals, no second chances, your content will never see the light of day again.
Because they work on automobiles, duh.
I was trying to Google “Best way to shave your head with low or no water pressure” because I was staying somewhere rural for a bit and my razor kept clogging.
All I got were straight razor blog spam and dozens of other completely unrelated shit.
I tried the shake it in a bowl method, 1/10 razor still clogged with hair.
I get specifically pissed at all the AI generated answers.
Funny enough, GPT is where I’m going for searches like this now. Whenever my search query doesn’t pull the answer up with one or two clicks, I head to GPT and it finds the info for me.
*makes up the info for you.
You can ask it for sources etc now, it actually does the searching for you now instead of making shit up
By definition, everything it does is “making shit up”. Sometimes that shit is useful, sometimes not. Citations isn’t going to magically fix that, because it’s baked into how a generative AI based on an LLM works.
You’d think those rural skinhead training camps would have better-engineered facilities
Wow, really? That’s my go to: shove it in the sink or bath water and aggressively swish the crap out of it. Or, rather, the hair out of it. That must have been frustrating as hell!
Google was really valuable before web services were so monopolized and consolidated like they are now. It’s almost more useful to use the specific websites search function for many things now. Before this, you could run searches and it would have all these personal and small websites indexed. Oh look, here’s a guy who lives his whole life as Peter Pan and has a website about it, cool… now it’s just a profile on some social media site same as anyone else.
It’s almost more useful to use the specific websites search function for many things now
Except Amazon’s search of their own store has been so enshittified that it’s normally better to search for a product on Amazon using Google.
I do the same except once I find it I go to that specific manufacturer and I buy it directly from their website more often than not
So AliExpress? I swear 95% of the stuff sold on Amazon is just crap people are reselling from AliExpress.
That’s a good way to do it, whenever possible. Unfortunately most of the results on Amazon these days are from companies with word salad names, like ENGRTSIAL or LOFRABTAN.
Do not use Amazon unless you know exactly what you want. The reviews are almost all fake. What’s annoying is that if you search for review sites on a type of product you do not know much about, they funnel you back to Amazon’s “highly rated” ones and get a kickback of you but the no name garbage. Also annoying is that those words salad companies are all the same manufacturer for the most part. They set up a ton of different names to flood the search results and then throw up a bunch of fake reviews. Some of that shit can be dangerous. Louis Rossman just did a video testung out some highly rated fuses and one of them by Nilight did not blow until 5x its amperage rating. That can easily lead to a fire. He also did one on crimping cables a bit ago that absolutely failed to crimp. Amazon removed his negative review.
Oh look, here’s a guy who lives his whole life as Peter Pan and has a website about it
Holy shit, I haven’t thought about that guy in something like 20 years! I wonder what he’s up to these days. I like to imagine he and the berries and cream guy are pals.
This is what capitalism does. A constant battle of finding the lowest quality to price ratio. Everything will naturally gravitate to the shitiest cheapest version of itself.
“We need better training data for our AIs. Let’s introduce some random scramble into search results, and when users have to hunt through the list and pick what they actually wanted instead of the top result, we can use those data to train the AI how to respond to those words when they come up in AI prompts.”
– a Google exec, probably?
They measure how long time you stay on a webpage. More is better.
Guess why all top sites have 10 pages of garbage explaining the history of windows and linux and what an OS is when you just want to know how to use grep…
Manpages are a thing? And you can search for man grep.
It’s the best mansplaining around….
A list of what the command line switches do is completely different from how to use them to solve a problem.
There are entire books written about regex.
You made a different point just then too… man grep won’t tell you when you should be using sed or egrep… although the manpage does reference them at the end.
But even at its best, Google would just link to reddit and stack overflow, where you’d learn all the wrong ways to abuse grep.
Lol what Internet are you using? Literally never have seen that
I have the French Internet, le Internet.
They measure how long time you stay on a webpage. More is better.
Guess why all top sites have 10 pages of garbage explaining the history of windows and linux and what an OS is when you just want to know how to use grep…
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years now and it works surprisingly well for me. 9 times out of 10 I find exactly what I’m looking for in the first couple of results. Brave Search is another independent alternative you might look into.
AI generated garbage seems to be cluttering up places like Google.
Brave search is great, I changed over and haven’t needed anything else since. There’s no dedicated product search, which is a shame, but it does call out prices on the main search so it’s still useful even for pretty niche products.
Even searching for obscure items returns 10,000 hits, but only the same 5 sites repeated 2,000 times.
Compounded by sites like RSSing that frame or scrape other websites. Another hit, but literally the same thing verbatim as another.
Duckduckgo has gotten good enough that they’re being more brave with ads: the first several results are always ads for me now, such that I usually have to scroll to get ito good results. I don’t begrudge the ads; ddg doesn’t track users, and ads are how they fund the service.
Lately, I’ve switched my default engine to a good searx instance. When I’m not looking for a business, it gives me better results. However, when I am loojing for products or services, DDG is better. DDG seems to prioritize commercial interests, either intentionally or not. I suspect it has something to do with SEO; maybe searx ignores a lot of that.
I also find that Bing is providing better results than Google, lately.
Finally, here’s one of the best search engine resources I’ve come across recently:
Duck duck go IS Bing. So of course they’re both getting better/worse at the same time. They’re the same search engine.
deleted by creator
no and it’s ALL googles fault. It’s not a walled garden problem, It’s a google problem. I’m searching for specific items to buy and look for small shops with online presences. Google will NOT give me results for shops that don’t advertise with them. I can even type the name of the shop into the search. Sometimes Bing, sometimes duck duck go will give the results.
I can have the site open in one window and use another to type the description of an item I am looking at AND the name of the site I am searching on google and it’s like ‘Nope’ never heard of them. i have to type the url in to the search bar then it will return a link.
Now sponsored links pop up a plenty.
We are the product being sold to advertisers. Search is working as intended.
deleted by creator
This experience predates the AI fad.
I moved to Kagi paid search engine and haven’t looked back.
There are open source search engines albeit you’ll need to host it somewhere.
Any major search engine (think Google, bing, etc) are just place for companies to pay to get into the top results.
I’ve been using Kagi for about a month and I do like it. It’s my first time using a paid search engine though, and it does feel weird and expensive.
Yeah I’ve been using searxng, It takes the aggregate of Google and Bing and all the rest and gives you rankings based on the aggregate.
As long as the same exact company doesn’t advertise in all the browsers they don’t end up getting higher return.
Any major search engine (think Google, bing, etc) are just place for companies to pay to get into the top results.
Although Google has been trying hard to blur the lines between legitimate search results and ads, there’s still a distinction. For the results that aren’t ads, they legitimately try to rank the best results first. After all, if people stop using Google search, they won’t make as much off selling the search ads.
The bad “legitimate” results near the top of the search are often the results of people gaming the Google algorithm(s). SEO is still a cat-and-mouse game with Google, and it often works. If there were legitimate competition in search engines, SEO people would have to optimize for multiple search algorithms and it wouldn’t work as well. But, since they only have to target Google, it often works well. That’s one of the reasons you get bad recipes with tons of junk content before you get a tiny recipe when it’s a recipe you’re searching for.
A smaller search engine will have the benefit of not being the target of SEO optimization. OTOH, Google’s massive scale and huge investment in search does give it better results when it can beat the SEOs. It searches deeper and is much more recent than a smaller alternative could afford to be without spending hundreds of millions on infrastructure alone.
