- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
You’re Not Imagining It: Google Search Results Are Getting Worse, Study Finds::Google swears everything is fine. A new study—and many people’s lived experience—says different.
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…Fuck using quotes or a negative search still won’t get you what you want. I’ve had it still pull up results with the negative words in it.
It’s the same on YouTube. One time I added a negative term and I ONLY got that term in the results. I don’t understand how you can break such an important part of search.
I’ve used terms like “ItemA”+“ItemB”
And still get results which have the disclaimer “Missing: ItemB | Show results with: ItemB”
I ALREADY TOLD YOU TO
Yeah, so they changed it so it defaults to the “new” way where quotes and -UnwantedTerm don’t function the way they used to, but when you fill out the search box, hit “Google Search”, and it fails to perform the way you want it to, once you’re on the results page, go to “Tools” click on “All Results” and change it to “Verbatim”.
Or I’m just gonna stop using Google
Query: “list of item locations in game”
Results:
- YouTube
- YouTube
- YouTube
- List of item locations in other game of the series
- YouTube
- YouTube
- IGN (their article is a just bunch of videos)
- Irrelevant SEO bait
That website was so jam packed with crap popping up that it wasn’t worth reading
If you use Firefox, the reader view works great when you want to look at just the article and nothing else.
Or Safari.
So far, I’ve moved to Kagi.
I like kagi, too. The small subscription fee is worth it to me because I get decent search results and they don’t track you or bubble you…
If you’re interested in an engine that pulls from different sources, doesn’t tie you to an account, doesn’t fund a sketchy man who runs a sketchy company, and doesn’t cost money… Those exist too!
Well fuck. I want nothing to do with kagi now.
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It’s frustrating. But not surprising. Indexing the internet ain’t cheap.
I’m so technologically illiterate I couldn’t figure out how to access the sears.space website. All I can find is versions and instances and a GitHub page
Every site on the leftmost column is a SearX instance. e.g. https://searxng.site/
It’s like… Lemmy, actually.
I picked up from their response that they’re just using the public API, not in any kind of partnership?
That’s not an engine, it’s a metaengine. The results are still tied to the engines used, which means if they are trash, you get trash. Kagi uses a mix of google/yandex/brave etc. and then elaborates them as well, in addition to have their own scraper for things like the small web (which is great to surface personal blogs).
They are not comparable. Also, kagi’s privacy policy is exemplar and the account can be paid in crypto now (if you don’t want to use CC).
Besides, there is no such thing as free hosting, similarly to Lemmy, it’s just someone paying.
That’s not an engine, it’s a metaengine
Really strange nitpick to bring up as a first point. If Kagi is a meta-engine, then SearX is too. Maybe you simply haven’t tried it, because it cites multiple sources per search.
And Brave has ties back to using Google data:
Brave’s search is optimized against Google search results. Ever since its Cliqz ancestry, documented on the Cliqz blog, it optimizes its ranking algorithm to match Google ranking as closely as possible. Brave’s search discovery project uses clicks on Google’s results in the Brave browser to discover new sites. In other words, it’s not sufficiently different from Google to really diversify the search results.
there is no such thing as free hosting, similarly to Lemmy
People who host Lemmy and SearchX instances are doing it charitably. And SearX does not pay any big company back, AFAICT.
Kagi is a for-profit corporation that postures as not being one, even talking about “fundraisers” and “humanizing the web.”
Big difference.
Kagi is an engine, searx is a meta-engine. That’s what I meant. Which means kagi does not simply collate results from multiple source (like searx does), but implements its own logic. This means that - for example - it deranks website with many trackers, or can implement various features on top of the results. So it’s not a nitpick, it’s a substantial difference between an engine (kagi) and a metaengine (searx), which is essentially a proxy + aggregation of other engines.
It’s a known fact that brave optimizes result based on google data, and the kagi guys themselves in fact added that - with it being cheaper than google API - it could be a vector to eventually reduce cost for google API without impacting results.
That said, AFAIK kagi does not pose as a nonprofit, I think they make extremely clear that running searches (scraping, paying API, etc.) cost money and that they need to be profitable. Their stance is that by using a subscription model, their business interests align with user’s interests of providing good searches, rather than results that benefit advertisers, which is completely reasonable. This is literally written in their “why pay for searches” article that is presented when they show the pricing.
Of course it is a big difference, and you can argue for pros and cons of both options. I personally think the internet should not be based either on megacorp nor on free labor. Would I prefer kagi being a co-op? Sure. But it’s not like relying solely on free labor is free from any moral implication either (sure, you can donate, and I do to Lemmy for example, but only a minority does).
Kagi is an engine, searx is a meta-engine… it’s a substantial difference between an engine (kagi) and a metaengine (searx), which is essentially a proxy + aggregation of other engines.
This is more of a distraction than a distinction.
Kagi’s results mostly come from others. Its community is criticizing it for the results coming from others.
A criticism that, I note, you don’t seem to touch. If you must respond to anything, I would love to hear your response to their corporate decision to fund a shady company run by a shady man.
It’s a known fact that brave optimizes result based on google data
… Known by who? It’s definitely not common knowledge.
[Paying Brave] could be a vector to eventually reduce cost…
Which is a pretty good demonstration that Kagi as a corporation is seeking profit first and foremost.
That said, AFAIK kagi does not pose as a nonprofit
Then you only nitpick the label I gave my examples, not the “we’re all in it together” emotional appeals aping the language of a non-profit. For example,
“We exist to make the internet a healthier, happier place for everyone”
Which I found on the business’ page you mentioned, is written more like they are a cutesy nonprofit than anything.
This is more of a distraction than a distinction. Kagi’s results mostly come from others.
No, this is a big distinction. If you don’t care about it or you don’t appreciate the differences, there are plenty of resources online where these are explained. For once, an engine can parse the query and search based on its own logic. A metasearch will always just use your query and get results from the sources.
Its community is criticizing it for the results coming from others. A criticism that, I note, you don’t seem to touch. If you must respond to anything, I would love to hear your response to their corporate decision to fund a shady company run by a shady man.
First of all, the criticism is from a tiny fraction of the community, and it is about which others the results are coming from, looking at it from a very narrow angle. It is not about the fact that the results are coming from others, but only from the fact that they are coming also from Brave.
My opinion is fairly simple: I believe the damages of funding bad companies is less than the benefits of having a good one, with a good product which can have a substantially good impact on the infosphere, thrive. I believe that Google is a way worse company compared to what Brave will ever be, for example. However, I understand that if Kagi stopped taking results from anything which is not minor scrapers and its own scraper, Kagi wouldn’t exist (or at least, it would be a completely unusable product). If Brave integration can mean less money to Google in the medium term, it is a net-positive change from where I stand. And I am saying this as a de-googled taliban who stopped using any of their services for years. Considering that they integrate Google, Yandex, Mojeek and Brave, I would say that Brave is actually the less-worse of the major ones.
… Known by who? It’s definitely not common knowledge.
Known by whoever read the very conversation on kagifeedback. The company even answered to this particular point:
Brave API is cheaper than Google API. If we can figure out a way to do use it transparently without negatively impacting search results, we can use this to lower our costs (currently we serve both, but this is not the plan long term).
Which is a pretty good demonstration that Kagi as a corporation is seeking profit first and foremost.
That’s extremely surprising for a company which is not profitable and did not even get VC funding. Also, the company has a good track of caring about its users. When they brought costs down, not long ago, they modified the plans and expanded the amount of searches (bringing the middle tear to unlimited searches), passing down the savings to the users. This was effectively reverting a change they implemented half a year earlier -> https://blog.kagi.com/unlimited-searches-for-10.
With new search sources proving more cost-efficient, the improved efficiency of our infrastructure, and the broader market embracing Kagi, we can again offer an unlimited experience to a broader group of users. We’re excited that this change will let many more people enjoy a fun, ad-free, and user-centric web search.
Marketing move? I don’t know, but what I know is that they did something many other companies would never do.
hen you only nitpick the label I gave my examples, not the “we’re all in it together” emotional appeals aping the language of a non-profit. For example, “We exist to make the internet a healthier, happier place for everyone” Which I found on the business’ page you mentioned, is written more like they are a cutesy nonprofit than anything.
So, I am quoting the fact that the company is extremely transparent about its business strategy, it doesn’t hide the fact that needs to earn money, it is transparent about its costs (incl. per search). You are applying your own bias and interpretation on sentences which in no way lead to intend that they are a non-profit (“utilizing the language of” is not “pretending to be”).
I mean, if you want to believe that they are trying to act like a non-profit, I can’t change your mind. There are direct quote of the CEO talking about profitability, e.g.,
This is part of the reason we included these search results - now we have 4 search indexes to work with and are much more resilient to any one killing the relationship on a whim. This also allows us to optimize cost as we can use different indexes for different queries, which is another important consideration for us as Kagi is not profitable yet.
There are entire forum threads where they discuss subscription models and profitability. It’s overwhelmingly clear that they are a for-profit company, which just decided to use a different business model with the idea of serving internet users (their customers), and therefore “humanize” the web. Now, you can filter out the corporate marketing BS, if you wish, but I see absolutely no ground to support that they are acting in bad faith trying to present themselves as a non-profit.
The main point is that profit is not bad by default. A co-op generating profit is absolutely great, for example. The point is how that profit is generated, and how it is distributed. If the model is based on a fair and transparent relationship with customers, which does not involve squeezing them so that the execs can buy their 3rd yacht, I don’t have a problem with that. If it’s not based on destroying users’ privacy to serve businesses (advertisers), I don’t have a problem with that. I will say more, in a capitalist world, this is the most we can hope for and if all companies would act like this, we would be way better than we are today.
I seriously can’t recommend Kagi enough! Make an account and do a hundred searches (FREE) that aren’t monetized and/or used to advertise to you or steal your data. It’s incredible what a difference it makes.
I was reluctant to jump on the Kagi bandwagon, but I’m now a week in and genuinely enjoying it.
Before, I’d have to search things across Google/Bing/AskJeeves a few times to finally arrive at an answer - I’ve yet to leave Kagi this last week.
The different AI engines you can also use and the customization for styling are pretty darn good, too. I’m now using it as my dedicated search on all my android phones, my laptop, and my desktop. Time will tell if things hold up, but so far so good.
Only con so far is that it’s sometimes slow to provide results. It isn’t devastating, but it’s like a 5 second delay which “feels” slow, but it’s whatever.
+1
Also, I wish we’d have a kagi community for Lemmy
Because I’m too lazy to do my own research; does someone have actual good experience with something else?
I’m using Brave search and it’s good for most things if I add an extra keyword, but not good for local results.
Thanks in advance for all the Brave downvotes.
DuckDuckGo finds some things. I’m no expert.
Yeah but those are just privacy protective Bing results, right?
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
I’ve heard people say that the answer is no, but in looking into it just now myself it looks like rather it is sometimes yes as well.
Basically the best way to describe it seems to be that it is “NOT Google, and MOSTLY does not want to be FULLY Bing (but still is somewhat, they’re wanting to work on it, but to be clear they do have embedded Microsoft trackers that they are forced to leave in due to their licensing agreement)”.
I would NOT use it for shopping, I tried that recently and got a ton of really sketchy looking sites with way too cheap products that had no internet presence before this month. This might be more pronounced if you search specific product model numbers like I was rather than general terms.
I’ve had it be mostly okay on other stuff. I use it over Google but mostly because I don’t want to pay for a search engine.
Tbf, do those sketchy sites also show up with Google?
I’d have to repeat the search to check again, but I don’t remember seeing the same sites when I repeated the search on Google, at least not on the first page in the top few spots the way it was on DDG.
So maybe that’s the genius of DDG - you skip right past the predatory SEO-optimized sites straight away to the predatory sketchy ones:-D.
LOL! Yeah I’m paranoid enough about buying from strange sites that it’s not a problem, and frankly I expect the AI generated SEO optimized spam to be more likely to be riddled with malware.
Hrm, maybe Google screens those, so they are more purely a waste of your time rather than something that can be actually reported to a federal agency? :-P Or perhaps it is just a better scam, to keep a site up there for longer = more clickbait dollars, with less risk of angering someone so much that they track the scammers down and send them a “package” of explosive fun!:-D (the easiest profits come when the harmed party does not even realize that they have lost anything)
I’m giving searx a try. There’s a list of public instances here: https://searx.space/
Https://qwant.com , a french privacy first search engine that has alright search results but great privacy control
Duckduckgo has turned into to a google clone at this point i’ve found - you get pretty much identical results with the added aggravation you can’t exclude keywords.
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I’m disappointed with the number of brave downvotes you are receiving. Recommend you stop supporting Brave. Kagi has been really great, I’ve never looked back. I value ux, search, and privacy enough to feel it’s worth the price.
My problem seems to stem from the fact that my searches are often obscure and commercial interests probably wish I was searching for something else.
i was wondering what would it take to make a free/open/noncommercial search solution maintained by a collective (like wikipedia or something). search is too important to be ruined for everyone by corporations.
Like searx? https://searx.be/search
Searx is a search aggregator. It masks your identity from the search providers, but under the hood it’s still just a middle man for google/bing results. I don’t see how this helps if the results themselves are getting worse.
I think it’s related to paid search and SEO tactics. All my browser have adblocks for years and I think it helps. By my own experience I don’t think it’s worse, and to be honest I still think it’s unmatched. I’ve been using duckduckgo sometimes and it’s alright and all but it’s definitely not better.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For the past few years, a growing number of users, analysts, and experts raised alarms about a truth that feels obvious to a lot of people who surf around in web browsers: the quality of Google results is in serious decline.
That’s according to a new study by a team of researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, first reported by 404 Media Tuesday.
According to the study, those efforts aren’t working, but “search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam.” These changes often lead to a “temporary positive effect,” but the spammers just find new loopholes.
Just last week, Gizmodo covered a bizarre situation that saw Google turning up what looked like a child’s homework assignment for a search about former president John F. Kennedy’s stance on the death penalty.
It’s gotten so hard to find authentic, useful results that people have started adding the word “Reddit” to search terms to turn up content written by someone who actually cares, instead of someone just trying to make money.
In 2023, a Gizmodo investigation found the tech news outlet CNET deleted thousands of articles because its team felt that would aid in the site’s performance on Google Search.
The original article contains 1,257 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
For most of my usual search any search engine does the job. For the rest :
I bookmarked that.
I don’t need a study to know that.
I switched to DuckDuckGo years ago, never looked back
By coincidence, yesterday I had to use my Virtual windows machine to test some windows software with a a scanner (my own machine is Linux). So i go to the browser in there, search for the brand and model for the driver and lo and behold, all the results were sponsored or incorrect. Correct the browser configuration to DuckDuckGo, retry, and there is the first result!
Now I know, DuckDuckGo is now apparently just Microsoft Bing, and I hate Microsoft, but at least this works. I know that DuckDuckGo is also getting worse and I’m about to look into self hosted open source alternatives, see what that gets me…
Something like Searx?
Ecosia is pretty sweet if you fancy helping the planet. It’s also privacy conscious as in does not sell or store any personally identifiable information. They also anonymize search data.
important to note that Ecosia does collect some non-personal information, such as search terms and click data, to improve search results and analyze usage patterns.
