This is what happens when everyone does ‘SEO,’
It really seems like nowadays that internet search is just people trying to game the system for clicks. But it has made everything superficial and fake. Not to mention, utterly useless.
I don’t know what the solution is really. It’s easy to say ‘dont do SEO’ but people will just find some way to game that system too. It was great when Reddit wasn’t complete shit, because the subreddits dedicated to a particular topic had great insights into whatever topic you wanted to know about. But now that it’s a cesspool, and Lemmy is tiny in comparison, id say get used to the Internet being like this for a while.
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
I agree. So much of the web now functionally happens on the socials which are not indexed/accessible to crawlers.
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”
Looks like those theories about algorithms becoming recursive and ineffective will be proven sooner than we expected. I wonder if the emergence of crap AI sped the process up.
Despite how bad Google Search had become, DuckDuckGo and Bing are somehow still worse. While Google displays the result in the first few, DDG and Bing have no idea what I’m looking for.
Gotta try Kagi sometime.
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 recently switched aswell and am surprised how well it works. I thought it didn’t worked good enough but I never failed to find what I was looking for so far. Very nice.
On technical stuff, I find DDG better than google since I don’t have to wade through their sponsored ad and results. Google is getting unusable that way. I try it every few months when I can’t get an answer on DDG and it doesn’t work any better.
I totally agree with that. I’ve also found Google worse about being influenced by SEO tactics (probably just because it’s targeted for that) and so you get bogus results like GeeksForGeeks that are often really poorly written and irrelevant, sometimes even wrong, up at the top.
The amount of AI articles that are a bunch of padded bullshit designed to get indexed as more credible “long form” sources is getting out of hand. Sometimes it takes a couple minutes to wade through the intro bullshit where they give a bunch of background yammering, and then you find out it’s recycled trash is really starting to make research take time again.
IDK how you get around this but whichever search engine does will be very successful.
TBH I didn’t even notice that I was using DDG when switching to librewolf other than the icon on the top bar. I have found everything I have needed, though I usually use “site:lemmy.world” (for example) anyways.
Yeah I can’t actually notice the difference. Granted I’m not paying much attention, but that means most of the times I’m finding satisfying results with ddg.
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.
On google, I started seeing too many of the first results tagged as “ad”. It became even more concerning when those tag dissapeared but the same websites showed up.
I used to able to trouble shoot nearly anything I needed to, but now I come across completely unrelated posts more than I come across solutions.
I was iffy about bing, I still kind of am, but at least I find what I’m looking for most of the time. I’m personally going to wait a bit before trying out other browsers, when there’s a bit less risk of them selling. I remember a good android launcher that used to be trusted before they sold to another company
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.
DDG just kinda sucks for basic information. When I took up a business, google gives me the location, phone number and some relevant information about the business. DDG gives me their website.
…and the website should have all that information, right?
Yeah I’m the same. I’ve got DDG set as my default search, if the results aren’t useful then I go to google as backup.
Same here, I can usually find everything within the first 3-4 entries unless it’s a bit too abstract than it ends up at the bottom of the 1st page. I don’t understand people complaining about it so much as I depend on search engines for day to day and work related stuff so literally several times everyday. Although it’s possible I got used to how it works but if so then I would have had to swap between ddg and google alot if the quality actually was that low.
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 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.
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 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: https://searx.space/
Google has literally killed itself. Maps, Google.com, YouTube… It’s all garbage now.
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.
btw i hate how google+ used plus sign for tagging people, they even changed YouTube to use them (even though YouTube comments were very loosely coupled wot g+)
Yeah ok maybe it’s all garbage now but they’re making more money than ever.
Google is ripe to be supplanted, but all mega corps that could disrupt them are stale and stagnant and smell like investor class rot.
Goog can’t fail it’s SIGINT
Weird take.
You could same the same of any incumbent who’s been an industry leader for a couple of decades… “they’re ripe to be supplanted!”.
Google has done a pretty great job of diversifying and building out an ecosystem though. As in, if you invented superior search today google would barely notice because everyone still uses chrome and android and is funnelled into google search. Google would have years to emulate that superior search before their user base was significantly impacted.
Weird take.
I think google is the best and has our best interests at heart. surely there must a reason we non genius minds can’t understand as to why google made things the way they are.
All hail google, I would give my baby to google in the hopes they will turn them into a superhuman google baby
I’m not a fan of google at all, but that doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge that they’re not about to topple over.
It would be helpful if google actually responded and actioned on reports. i see malicious websites on search every day that I have reported numerous times.
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. https://searx.be
- DuckDuckGo - uses Bing and Yandex but also has “nag operators” to quick private search other engines.
Google Maps as well. Very inaccurate at times.
Yeah but I’m on there taking a piss against my work van so I’m prepared to forgive it a lot.
Latitude and Longitude or it didn’t happen
Good effort, hope it’s not identifying
It’s identifying, and I feel no shame!
Pics or it didn’t happen, etc…
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.
Is it just me, or has autocorrect on phones also gotten way, way worse? When would I ever want to type ‘thbnks’?
“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.”
Click bait headline. I see they’re good at SEO themselves.
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’ve tried, many times over the years, to use DDG and you are 100% spot-on. I find it damn-near impossible to find what I need without some deep voodoo magic to somehow craft the perfect query. It’s been a decade+ since I’ve gone to page 2 of a Google search. Using DDG I can be 3 or 4 pages deep before maybe finding the answer. There is SOOO much irrelevant stuff to filter through.
It sucks, I don’t want to use Google, but there doesn’t seem to be a great alternative.
just use a
!gif you don’t get what you want the first time on ddg and you’ll still get a proxied google search result.
LMGTFYWNMGSN
Let Me Google That For You, Wait, Never Mind, Google Sucks Now
SearX because Kagi is hailcorporate
Can you elaborate? I’ve just started using Kagi for several weeks and I love it, seriously reminds me of 2012 Google
They’re talking about the open source privacy search engine SearXNG and saying hailcorporate prob cuz Kagi charges and there are a ton of people in this thread advertising it
Ah, I think paying for things that make your life better is a good thing, not everything has to be FOSS, unless there’s a differentiator that makes it better, it ends up being a “I’m better than you” without any value. I am wondering if there is any value add from alternatives though.
You have to pay for it? Bro. I’ll leave the Internet forever before I’ll pay for a search engine.
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kagi is pretty good tho
As long as they keep getting money out of it. and with record numbers year over year. they have no incentive to change course. Google has a monopoly over search engine that affords them the unique position of not giving a dime about user satisfaction. the users are trapped anyway!
I used to be an enthusiastic gargler of Google’s balls but they enshittified just like everything else.
Takes a big person to admit a change like that.
I switched to DDG and then to Kagi based on all the praise it gets here. So much better than Google!
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).
I haven’t done extensive research, but as it’s a paid product, they have the user’s interest in mind, instead of ad revenue.
Amazon’s no longer any good at shipping, and Google’s no longer any good at searching. What a terrible year to be a tech nerd.
They quit innovating so what tech?
Just tried looking up if it’s safe to light a fireplace fire after having had a sinus surgery. (It’s very cold here in Seattle tonight and I had septoplasty/FESS/turbinate reduction yesterday afternoon.)
All my results were about smoking cigarettes and a result for whether it’s okay to box after surgery. Not a single source to suggest a fire being safe or not.
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:
https://www.realself.com/question/cambridge-ks-pain-sinuses-weeks-after-fess-surgery https://www.healthline.com/health/phantosmia
That is really good to know! Thanks so much for the heads up on this! Never knew this was a thing.
You can also use perplexity.ai if Bing ai is not your cup of tea.
Was just going to say, I’ve been defaulting to perplexity way more recently. It is really good (even the free tier)
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.
What about DuckDuckGo?
I don’t the answers section very very hit or miss
Often it will link you to a highlighted section with noting relevant.
