I just searched local restaurants near me and tried to sort by distance and the first option was 800 miles away, the second was 600 miles away. It’s not just Google search getting worse.

Pretty soon the internet will be almost completely ruined. Within a few years. AI bots will have spammed everything. Searches and web pages will be entirely faked bs. Reddit and Lemmy will have enough ai Bots commenting and pushing agendas/products that no one will have a clue who’s a real person. Information that’s true will be almost impossible to verify online.

In short, if you think the web has gotten bad now, you ain’t seen nothin yet.

I think this is part of why Google holds on to youtube despite it not making them money. Without that Google would just be the map and email company. They would completely lose the appearance of “owning” any part of the internet.

Yeah, DDG skips all the sponsored links but I generally find what I’m looking for faster on Google if I just skip half the page rather than trying to find the right incantation to bring up what I’m looking for on DDG.

I honestly think there’s something wrong with Google’s individual customization. They’re leaning in a little too hard on things you’re likely to be searching for rather than what you’re actually searching for.

DDG gives me better results for random searches on things I’m not usually looking for. When I was looking for Godot exercises yesterday every hit on DuckDuckGo for ages was just exactly what I wanted. When I went over to search Google there was a lot of more varied topics. Now, hands down if I need what time a certain store closes at a certain location Google will give me exactly what I’m looking for. Likewise if I need to know what’s near something else Google is absolutely superior to DDG. Google’s image search is also far more accurate and useful.

But then I come back and look for a medical condition for my cat that I’ve never heard of before, You passed by the sponsors and they’ve got a couple of random pages about it maybe a Reddit article or two that’s now blocked, but it quickly devolves to adjacent searches.

But if I go and search for any of my usual suspects, The rankings come back pretty decent.

Yeah, the paper shows a startling lead for Google, more than I would have expected.

I try to swap to DDG every so often (usually once a year, giving it about a month), but every time search ends up being frustrating enough so I don’t stick around. Nevermind their boneheaded decision of using Apple Maps over something that actually wants to be useful like OpenStreetMap. But what I didn’t expect was just how big the difference between the two is when analyzed, damn.

Just note that startpage uses google search results. It just proxies your queries so your searches are anonymous to google.

Startpage is owned by an ad company. Always been a bit sketched out by that.

So you use Google.

I recently switched to it, and it’s night and day, it saves me a lot of time when I find exactly what I’m looking for right away. I love it!

it’s decent, but I’ve stopped using it because I’m not fond of the decisions they’ve been making chaos.social/@scy/111704636274463611

I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. Here in the Netherlands, DuckDuckGo results are poor for anything local. I fall back to Google relatively frequently, although for day to day stuff it’s quite okay. I do often head straight to Wikipedia…

DDG is largely Bing search at the backend, unless I’m much mistaken. They do value-add work around privacy, but in the basic sense of “does a DDG search return good results”, it’s largely the same as Bing.

Since you say DDG is better, what’s your take on the link we’re discussing here, then? After all, the paper they talk about shows that DDG (and Bing, which is the vast majority of DDG’s input) is signficantly worse than Google.

Or, to quote from the page instead of having to go into the paper:

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.

Oh, wow. Very insightful there.

Idk, I use DDG as my default, but I find myself adding !g to many queries after checking out the first page of results; so much so that my brain has made such a strong connection to “!g -> better results” that I often find myself automatically typing it in Google as well when my results are unsatisfactory.

And yet the very link you’re saying this under is essentially about how much better Google is than DDG or Bing. 😅 Just saying, the headline is garbage, while Google got worse, DDG and Bing (both also analyzed) got worser, faster, harder.

I am also using SearcXNG and the search results are usually good even though sometimes on the light side and I still have to resort to other search engines.

Ecosia is just Bing, and as the link shows Bing got shittier faster than Google and is producing worse results.

It seems there is an arms race between search engines and content creators

No. It’s an arms race between content creators and spam.

Anyone who creates genuine good content has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google.

10 minutes ago I wanted to find out what the hell a float needle is. I couldn’t.

Huh? The top result for “float needle” in Google seems like a great description to me.

As a result SEO optimised pages are so bloated that I truly hate them.

Yeah. In fairness to Google entire industries have risen around the sole-purpose of manipulating their system for nefarious reasons. That’s a hard thing to deal with.

I feel the future will be personal chat assistants, but that will also start spitting out ads in the future unless a foss version is used.

don’t forget about every single device collecting as much information as possible.

Amazon’s not good at shipping?

I don’t like a lot of their business practices, but holy shit do they get stuff to my house fast and reliably. Most of the time, same or next day.

They quit innovating so what tech?

What about DuckDuckGo?

For me the specific question remains unanswered. There are a lot of results about the health effects on respiration, but none about specifically after a sinus surgery. Might be a question so specific that the internet at large has no answer to it.

What I do not get (on Google, search from Germany) is what you describe, my results are all relevant on the first 3 pages barring 2 results about the surgery instead of the fireplace.

Your story is obviously anecdotal but I think it pretty much aligns with what what we’ve all experienced. You search for something and get results for something else. You change your search to try to get results you asked for and get… literally the exact same results. It’s infuriating.

This is why I use Bing Chat for specific questions.

“Hello, this is Bing. I’m sorry to hear that you had sinus surgery and that you’re feeling cold. 😟

According to some sources, it’s best to avoid exposure to smoke, dust, and other irritants after sinus surgery, as they can interfere with the healing process and cause inflammation. Therefore, lighting a fireplace fire may not be a good idea for your recovery.”

Bing Chat provides sources to the claims so you can verify:

realself.com/…/cambridge-ks-pain-sinuses-weeks-af… www.healthline.com/health/phantosmia

I don’t the answers section very very hit or miss

Often it will link you to a highlighted section with noting relevant.

Interestingly according to the linked paper, DDG (and naturally Bing) are significantly performing worse than Google, even in the face of Google having gotten worse.

I always had a gut feeling about that when using DDG, but interesting to see the numerical difference. (31% vs 23% vs 9% spam)

I keep hearing about Kagi, are they reputable? I moved from Google to DDG and I do a fair bit of searching so I would be interested, but I guess there’s a bit of a one-company-knowing-my-search-history going on (totally unironically).

You were downvoted - presumably by people that don’t like some of the things Brave does but surely they don’t think Google isnt far, far worse.

Personally, I use Kagi, but still.

What are the pros/cons of brave (what is it even)? Are they actually a search engine, or just re-skinning Bing or something like DDG does?

Did they say they stopped?

Per your edit, there might be a blind spot in the study. Consider when you’ve searched for a recipe, and the top result you find always starts with "My cousins showed up one day and I had to scramble to make something . . . ". A big story you don’t care about before you can get to what you want. That’s happening because Google is giving those kind of recipe posts a higher rank. Ironically, adding this human story to the post is there for the sake of robots, not people.

I wouldn’t classify posts like that as spam, exactly. I still find the recipe I want. But they do make the experience worse.

Since when? last i checked you get one page with the most popular results for the query, and the rest is unrelated recommendations

I hadn’t thought about this, but you may be on to something. I had a car issue, googled it, found nothing but crap and generic articles. I searched the same on YouTube and found a couple videos about fixing the exact issue on my type of car.

Really interesting observation.

Other search engines are better. Subjectively mostly, but to the point where I think I van almost day objectively. I used DuckDuckGo for 5 years now, and it’s crazy to see the difference.

I’m a Linux user too and there it’s the dame thing. I look at windows users and just wonder why people put up with all that shit while o have this super nice, legally free, stable system that doesn’t fuck around with me.

It feels like people are crazy but obviously it’s not that. It’s just that people don’t know any better. You search? That’s Google. The company got their brand and logo cemented in so many people’s brains that they’ll never fail, no matter how bad they get

It used to be great for answering very specific, sometimes niche, questions. Now it just brings up irrelevant answers, outdated forums and Amazon ads.

I don’t get why it just doesn’t work in some browsers.

How so? Genuinely curious.

Not related to anything but I showered this morning and my feet already smell of sweaty feet.

Cannot confirm.

I use google maps regularly, and it mostly works fine.

However, google search engine (and youtube recommendations) have gone on a steeply downhill rollercoaster ride. Nowadays, I have difficulty researching even the most basic topics on Google, because it is so clustered with ads that I cannot tell anymore whether any website is genuine or trying to scam me.

As in? For me, Google search is a joke, but Google maps and mail at least still work reasonably well.

“Worked directly with Google” yeah, I don’t think they did. Google doesn’t need partners for adwords or SEO. They’re really the only game in town, and SEO companies are notorious for misrepresenting themselves as “subsidiaries of Google” in order to make sales.

SEO grifters have definitely gamed the system so much so that even if you have a junkyard dog mentality about SEO, you’re competing with every Tom, Dick, and Harriet that ever picked up Wordpress For Dummies. For your average user just trying to search for a local business or news article, you’re hit with ads and competitors trying to outbid each other on adwords. What a mess.

Jesus Christ would have wanted a decent nail puller.

Though in your particular example I’m reasonably confident that the tool most people use to remove nails is indeed the claw on the back of their hammer. Where it fucked up was that you asked for the best, not the most common.

You know what the claw end of the hammer is for right?

Actually 2 hammers are really good to take out a nail sometimes. You use one hammer to tap the claw of the other one under the nail.

Honestly I have a cat paw type nail puller but 9/10 hammer is the answer.

Seamus.

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…”

Exactly what it feels like if I’m asked to “write an 700-word article” somehow. Most of it is just filler material, really.

It’s funny because those essays are a symptom of SEO ranking. We’d better be certain that any automation we try to employ to fix this doesn’t lead to a worse problem.

librey.devol.it

They are great at sifting throught the garbage and giving you direct garbage.

Seconded. Looking up a past event on a subject (like a band) that has had a more recent, especially “viral” event happen to it, is like wrestling a shaved bear.

Nevermind that all of the recent shit is just articles quoting eachother, adding virtually nothing of value except noise.

Android has more freedom than iOS but feels developmentally behind on most fronts in terms of end user experience

That’s the one point I strongly disagree with you: Android, for all it’s flaws, has free and open source spin-offs (LineageOS, for one), that are the ONLY chance you have as an end user to own your phone / privacy (barring hardware backdoors or installing stupid apps)

I agree with most, but android has better UI than IOS by a mile. And I don’t really see a maps competitor coming close, maybe Apple maps.

It doesn’t feel like there’s any real alternative to Google search. Most of the privacy based search websites are really just Google or Bing on the backend. The only other index is Yandex the Russian one, which, yeah. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but the internet search space is approaching peak enshittification, and it doesn’t look like anyone is stepping up to meaningfully change anything. No private companies seem willing to actually square up with Google, considering the investment it would take. Honestly I don’t see things getting better anytime soon. This is just another symptom of the erosion of the social contract in the US and the rampant greed that’s driving it. Nothing we can do can’t be enshittified by bad actors in this environment. Not to be too US centric, most of the big tech companies are based here so our garbage culture fucks over everyone.

tell us you’ve never used Android without telling is you’ve never used Android lmao.

The vast majority of Google’s revenue comes from advertising, which will remain relevant even if search more or less dies. They put ads in almost every other one of their products, not to mention the ad space they buy and then resell on other sites.

Yeah but I’m on there taking a piss against my work van so I’m prepared to forgive it a lot.

Google Maps is always dead on for me. I regularly drive very long distances across the US. The time estimates are within minutes of accurate even when there are sudden or extreme backups like in Los Angeles. There’s plenty to criticize Google for, but it isn’t Google maps for me.

Yeah ok maybe it’s all garbage now but they’re making more money than ever.

They annoyed me to no end when they genocided iGoogle pages in favor of Google+, which ended up getting purged too.

Its like, all the Google’s products are Stalin’s ministers and no one knows who is going to get offed and why.

IMO It’s not just optimization or monetization. It’s the abandonment of the open internet (blogs, forums, etc) in favor of walled garden apps that are closed off and operate like a black box. SEO itself is just metadata and helps find things during search nothing malicious about it, but the problem is due to web abandonment, the things there are to find are so low effort you stick to big tent apps like reddit instead of sifting through blog spam

Especially if you somehow tryout some popular program, for example wordpress. The most search results are just different best of xy plugins lists. Even if you search for issues. Its like you are suddenly in a whole different bubble of the internet and everything is broken.

Lemmy is tiny in comparison

Try asking Lemmy a question. I was fiddling with FF earlier and thought “I wonder what the best FF addons are atm”. Instead of Googling and getting a bunch of 3-10yo irrelevant blog posts I just posted in Ask Lemmy for peoples opinions. Lemmy may be small, but people like helping. Not only do you get your answer but you help Lemmy grow!

It’s a cliche but it’s perfect right now - Lemmy is at the perfect moment for you to “be the change you want to see in the world”

This will shock you but… most search engines derive results either directly from google results or from a few other providers which generate results in very similar ways.

Can you elaborate? I’ve just started using Kagi for several weeks and I love it, seriously reminds me of 2012 Google

kagi is pretty good tho

Personally I’m noticing the opposite.

I tend to do a lot of technical-related searches. I’m finding I’m getting consistently better results from DuckDuckGo / Bing – what I’m looking for is usually available on the first page without having to faff around.

With Google however, it was drawing parallels to what I’m looking for but not what I explicitly queried. I had to either enable verbose search, or manipulate the search to look for specific words. Even then what I was looking for was in the 3-4 page.

idk about bing, but duckduckgo either seems to be missing the index itself, or only works when you give it specific queries instead of generic keywords like Google.

I hear this a lot, but I changed from google to DDG about a year ago and haven’t even considered looking back. I can find everything I need quite easily and can only think of maybe a handful of times that I have had to resort to using a bang to try and find something using another search engine. I’m very curious what the difference is between my experience and that of others who have problems DDG.

I don’t know much my opinion matters: but the unique features in kagi honestly really help me find what I need. I can lower domains, or raise other ones, it can search archives and has a general set of features that make digesting and finding relevant results easier. It’s like a breath of fresh air, I can search and find not just endlessly search.

Anecdotal evidence, but I swapped out Google for DDG about 5-6 years back and haven’t missed it. I do use Google sometimes but it’s once in 4-5 months when DDG fails me, which is acceptable to me.

It’ll be a frigid day in hell before I pay some company to store my search history keyed to my CC for the inevitable sellout day. I’ll get by with DDG, which frankly works better than a search engine that doesn’t track your clicks has any right to.

I need to try kagi, in my usage I’ve found brave is best of the alternatives, and I’d put qwant after brave, though I might be biased by how nice qwant looks 😅

Try a Searxng instance. It’s a meta search that pulls form multiple engines (incl. Google).

Instances here: searx.space

They did for ~20yrs and probs still do to an extent but it’s an arms race[1]. Every time Google implement anti-spam features, SEO companies adapt. The problem is the webmaster guidelines Google published openly are often the backbone of any decent SEO.

I’ve been a web dev since I left uni in 2005 and worked for several SEO companies and even founded one. IN that time they’ve successfully destroyed multiple SEO/marketing agencies with their tweaks. They’ve decimated entire industries with their monopolistic practices (flight information, shopping comparison, mapping, etc).

I don’t wanna get into the blame game between Google vs SEO companies except to say: Google are cunts and you should vote by leaving them. They are not a benevolent company. They are the Micro$oft of the web and have ruined businesses[2] worldwide. They’re just very good at PR and keep a lot of the bullshit they do out of the public eye.

[1] Matt Cutts was a fascinating guy and was at the forefront of Google’s spam fight and communicated regularly with web devs/marketers.

[2] In addition to the mentioned flight information and price comparison monopolising. They fucked smaller e-commerce companies effectively handing business to big players like Amazon and eBay by forcing PAID usage of their shopping comparison and Adwords service.

Recommended Alternative Search Engines

• You.com - has AI chatbot as well as standard search using Bing
• Searxng - a meta search engine with multiple independent & tweaked instances. E.g. searx.be
• DuckDuckGo - uses Bing and Yandex but also has “nag operators” to quick private search other engines.

Takes a big person to admit a change like that.