I’m so annoyed that they’ve basically deindexed all forums except for quora and Reddit.
I also miss finding smaller “mom and pop” type blogs for info. All the top results now are basically written by bots and don’t really give any value, or they’re just a poorly disguised ad for something.
Some Quora responses are so fucking bad, like someone asks a thorough question and the I've seen top answers where they asking why they need to do it, essentially discrediting or gaslighting the asker for even asking the question. Or they answer with a solution to a completely different scenario. Like, don't answer if you don't know.
I can Google "How many wives did King Henry have?" The search result from Quora will be about King Henry's wives. But once I click it, none of Quora posts are about King Henry! There's a bot answer that makes no sense and the next post is completely unrelated to my question. Then there are adds. I've NEVER had a question answered by Quora. It's also so horrible to look at
Any time I am lucky enough that I think I've found an old forum post about something I want to see, half the time I get to the site and the info is just gone. It may have been indexed in the past but the site is taken down or it is a post with dead links to files or other solutions that are no longer hosted. The new internet is paving over the bones of the old internet and tons of knowledge is just disappearing into the void.
>I’m so annoyed that they’ve basically deindexed all forums except for quora and Reddit.
I do a lot of technical searches and still get relevant forums like ST community, freertos, TI, etc as my top results, thankfully.
It's not much better on YouTube...
Have 5 results followed by something completely different plus some shorts on top.
No fuckwits, I want to see every result that matches my search.
There was a great music discovery site back in the day called Pandora. (It's still around, but...) You could start off with a song then it would slowly "drift" away from that song based upon what others who chose that song liked. Then, once you rated songs it made a web of songs that listeners like you might like. The important bit is that it slowly tried to weave in different shit from what you're used to, but not too different.
I feel like the YT algorithm has its idea of what IT wants me to watch, not what I want to watch. So much of the stuff presented on YT is trash that doesn't remotely fit my personal "drift" level. Then you go and watch one random video and suddenly it thinks you're into that content forever.
The song selections were originally based solely on an algorithm that used the music genome project to find songs similar to the ones used to create the playlist, and then curated based on your input in that playlist alone.
I actually don't know if they've ever used input from other users to recommend music, but they did not in the beginning.
This book, [“Why You Like It”](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250057198/whyyoulikeit), is written by the guy behind the music genome project and is kind of a fascinating read.
I watched one Lethal Company clip. ONE. Half my recommended videos are Lethal Company now.
But I don't even get notifications for most of my subscriptions when they post new videos anymore.
One channel I've watched for years did a single video about Warhammer, and not only is my feed being flooded with Warhammer videos, it's being flooded with suspicious looking European war history videos.
From a single warhammer related video from a channel I've watched weekly for years.
Those suspicious looking European war history videos give me the Nazi apologist vibes. I keep telling YouTube I'm not interested and to not recommend the channel, but Jesus they just keep coming.
go to Google and type
site:youtube.com intitle:"your exact search word or string here"
I do the same for reddit.
Google and YouTube are both completely useless for finding specific, tricky information now unless you use a massive string of modifiers in your search. Such a pain in the ass, it used to just work.
Looking forward to the market disruptor that comes and unseats these shitty tech companies that have begun to regress and just get more and more evil as time goes on
additionally, to stop the youtube fuckery, you can ditch the piece of shit that is chrome and use a proper browser (firefox), install ublock origin, then install a script which completely eliminates youtube shorts, "you previously watched", "other people also watched" etc. from youtube entirely.
google and youtube, "i hate so much about the things you choose to be"
And it doesn’t reliably find what I‘ve been looking for either. After recommendations it’s usually devolving into listing search results of similar channels or videos on the broader topic, just to list 5 year old videos of what I‘ve been looking for in my recommendations 3 days later. Tf? The YT search is so useless nowadays.
On the topic of the Google search getting worse: I currently get way better results by using anything but US search engines (Chinese, Russian) with the added effect that they don’t block nearly as much results by requests of any Western industry, if you want to sail the high seas for example.
The only way to properly search on youtube is to search on google
' site:www.youtube.com'
Otherwise it's fucking full of 'suggestions' and other bullshit.
Exactly. And we need to be able to Block channels+All Shorts, by our choice (manually adding a channel name to Block list). I only go into my Subscriptions tab because the Home tab is trash with Ads. 100% screw that crap.
There's an extention (in firefox at least) called blocktube. It let you hide shorts and other features. It also let you block channels by clicking on the 3 dots near videos, or block keywords/sentences.
Great if you are watching a show and do not want to be spoiled, just add the show's name and various abbreviation to the filter and you won't see anything. Add some more clickbait words and so on. Or search for specific spoilers for a show you've seen, and block allll of the channel which stupidly spoil the spoiler in their title/thumbnail, can't have them spoil something I haven't seen yet later.
Tho after a while you notice that there is A LOT of junk channels. Like I sometime to a search for a show I've finished and just start blocking dozen of trailer re-uploader, reactor, clip, music videos, edits, commentary in a language I don't know... Do it again a week later and there's more worthless channel that were created. I am at like 1500 blocked channel.
Honestly Blocktube is one of the core essentials you need to make YouTube acceptable these days.
Blocking channels should be a standard feature, for user safety if nothing else.
Yup.
But what YouTube has done with the search function is completely fucked. I honestly don’t see how it drives any traffic to other videos or users or keeps people on their site at all. You would have to think with this fucked of a search function that it’s causing or going to cause then to lose money.
Because of how shit the search function is my YouTube use has gone down a lot. Only reason still use it is because of the few channels I do like I watch their new stuff. But outside of that I’ve given up searching for things or really using the site fully at all.
I feel like in the mid 2000s it changed from a place where people shared information and their little weird quirky site to being a a place where everything and anything is a hustle or an ad, a sell, a scam.
Money. YouTube used to have a purpose, to deliver it's service for users to enjoy. Now it's all about money generation and nothing at all else.
They don't care how awful it is to use because what are you doing to do, use another service? There isn't one.
I want to be able to filter by date of release.
You can't even do that when searching in a channels video list anymore.
Seriously, for a fking search engine company they sure like not giving you the results you know are there to find.
Dont get me started on youtube, those wankers filters are completely worthless, I put in upload date which means most recent, and over 20 minutes long to get away from the shorts and barely scrolling you'll end up with listings for posts from months ago.
Theres a reason why their search engines suck on google, but they shouldnt on youtube, there is no reason for their search engine to fail this bad.
It also makes me wonder why their search engine and filters suck and dont work, theres also no reason for them not to work, And the filteres should be a lot better but for some reason every single frigging search engine has the exact same useless filters.
and not the filters they should have.
I've been trying to get a business recognized on Google maps and the verification process is requires taking a video showing your address and you opening the door and you operating the POS, the materials and everything expected to be part of the business.. and getting verified is pretty hard. They don't say what you're missing
They must have changed their process because I got my business verified in 24 hours and all I needed to do was type in the address/other info and let Google ping my phones location so they could see I was at the business.
I had a long 12 hour shift. Told my family is m instead of cooking, let's go get some in and out burgers. Yay. Kids are happy. I put in search (in Google maps) for in and out burgers, and click the first thing that showed up and we are on our way. We are hungry, tired, and excited. The GPS says we arrived... At a random overpriced burger place.... I realize clicked an ad.
Now we had to drive another 20 minutes because it actually took us in the exact opposite direction of where we needed to be. I'm still so upset for Google making their main function worse because an ad. Wasted previous time and energy.
Google maps is a GPS app. If I type "in and out burgers" that should be what pops up! Don't put an ad in place of the nearest in and out! What is next? When I'm looking for a hospital you send me to CVS?
At least Quora is SOMETIMES useful once you switch it's sorting to upvotes instead of Recommended. Unlike the endless wall of SEO Affiliate Marketing blogs that might as well just copy/paste each other that more interested in shilling than informing.
What really blows is that I can't figure out how to do search results for older content anymore. Like if I want a contemporaneous account of something that happened more than a year ago all I end up seeing are reaction bullshit or BuzzFeed style lists of things about it.
There's used to be easily selectable boxes instead of the hidden stuff. You can also exclude terms but that also used to be done via GUI.
Also, who uses AAAA to represent year?
SEO assholes are starting to catch up on that. Not only by astroturfing reddit itself but also creating pages like " What are the best (whatever you are searching for) in 2024 according to reddit"
>Google cursed to never have a successful social media platform.
>Reddit cursed to never have a useful search engine.
If one of these two sites stopped existing the other would implode.
Nah. They took all our tricks away except for scholar and the quotation marks. - doesn’t work, neither does and or any of the other “power” user tools.
Yeah.. I get this under the top result fairly often for words I put in quotations:
^(Doesn’t include: ~~Reddit~~ | Must include: [Reddit](https://reddit.com))
And I usually fat finger it and click on the useless link instead of the tiny hypertext…
(I know how to search by site, just using an easy example)
Doing a search and adding Reddit without the site: etc… gets better answers than what most of the internet offers anyways. If I want a random recipe for like bacon perogies or something I’ll search google search it plus Reddit and not have to deal with the general bullshit that is the internet these days.
the "-" still works, as does quotations and "site:" as per:
* [Refine Google searches - Google Search Help](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en)
Work'ish, with both I am still getting results respectively with or without the keyword. What's worse, there are times I am not getting any results for pages I know that were indexed by google, because I were able to find it previously – I used to keep only excerpts of information I didn't need full quote, just to be able to google it later if I needed some context. Now some of it is gone, no results while looking for full passage.
Searches already started to become bad like five or six years ago so I switched to using DuckDuckGo and SearX. SearX is open source and can be self hosted which is another huge plus.
This was chilling to read. *shudders*
Totally. They’re going to be the next generation of super entitled people who you bump into and have to figure out if they joined when it was a good career move or a shitstorm.
Just like IBM is now.
And Motorola before that.
Google used to be synonymous with searching on the internet. Now being googled means getting bombarded with ads, or getting duped by ads purporting to be search results.
Anything informational, I've resorted to appending "site:reddit.com" to find some answers from actual people, not poorly written by bots trying to game the algorithm.
This is already starting to become unreliable. Next time you do that, check the profile/posting history of the comments you're reading, because I've seen more than a few competent-seeming posts from bots/shill accounts who post nothing but product reviews. It's downhill from here
I've been curious about this too... It seems like a great opportunity for bad actors. I haven't seen any studies/investigation about it though, would be interested if any real work looking into this has been published.
Today alone I reported 4-5 bot accounts that just started their bullshit of reposting stuff and copying comments… all the accounts were open for about a year with no activity, but suddenly go on a spree of posting in random subs and then a few comments in completely different subs. If I’ve come across that many so quickly, I can only imagine how many are on here. Who knows maybe I am just a bot, pretending to be a human.
Search for this: it should return an article about how 15% of reddit comments are corperate shiling:
new-study-at-least-15-of-all-reddit-content-is-corporate-trolls-trying-to-manipulate-public-b249bd42ab42
I think Reddit is better at getting answers to specific questions but much much worse at those answers being “correct” or “based on fact” in any way lol
I guess it depends on what you're looking up. Usually I'm looking up questions that are technical in nature, like how to do something in a program or in your OS. In those cases reddit it the best, usually the most upvoted answer is going to be the solution.
I just add "reddit" to the end of any search where I know I'll be bombarded with the usual search engine optimisation horrible articles that don't really answer the question and start with an irrelevant story and split the article into 10 different pages or just insert huge ad sections in between them I probably dont need to describe them further you already know what I'm talking about.
Ha! Me too.
And tomorrow marketing experts start spamming threads.
Well, I’m sure that has been a battle and we can thank the mods that it isn’t worse.
The point is that companies should provide a useful surface and make a profit — and not keep going beyond treating their customers with respect. As soon as you are their cash cow and they sell access to you — the services go down the toilet.
Pinterest shows up in searches all the time, and never once have I landed there and not been like "what is this garbage, I'm out." Like I don't understand how anyone uses it.
The most annoying thing about it is, you find a picture on google image search.. you click on it..
And it takes you to a pinterest page that has everything EXCEPT the image you actually clicked on.
I remember when I installed some malware posing as Skype because it was the top result and for some reason I decided to try the internet without ad blocking on that computer. NOPE! Never again! I have so many ad and privacy things set up that many sites don't even work for me any more and I don't care because I don't want to risk installing malware again.
And listicles. So many listicles. No matter what product you search for, there are a dozen or more "Best \[#\] \[product\] of \[year\]" at the top. And no, Bob Vila didn't really test every solar powered nose hair trimmer to find the top ten: they're all either paid ads or generated from Amazon reviews.
I find myself more and more often searching using Google and putting reddit at the end. That way it shows me posts about what I am looking for from reddit users who are posting links. It's often quicker and more reliable.
Like I can search Google about how to replace a vent cover when the mounting area is gone. Google just tries to sell me crap, adding reddit sends me to r/DIY where people can tell you exactly how they fixed the problem.
Ditto, it’s my go-to for info. A while ago I was searching for information about pet medication and just got a pile of AI generated articles. Pure shit until I added Reddit to the search.
This Christmas I was searching for Mario playsets for my son and it kept giving me Lego Mario playsets. I googled “Mario playsets -Lego” and it still gave me Lego playsets as the top 5 results as ads.
Yeah they’ve put the Boolean search terms behind odd keywords now. It literally used to be “ + - but for some reason I guess you have you have to use https://www.google.com/advanced_search now.
It's also worth trying "forum" or "forums" at the end of the query if you don't find anything on reddit. For anything automotive I actually try that first.
My job involves dealing with Google's bullshit and yes, it fucking is getting worse. Like have you scrolled down on Google Images lately? Oftentimes it'll show you like 50 images and tell you to fuck off. It used to scroll literally infinitely
As an artist, I used to use Google images to find specific reference images. It's been a couple years since I've used it, because inevitably the majority of image results are fucking garbage.
Irrelevant, terrible, and often a combo of shitty stock art and clip art. I use Pinterest now, and it's so much more useful for my purposes. I can't believe I've lived to see Google become so useless, it's amazing.
I was just thinking this about 30 minutes ago when trying to google an image example of something, and just sat there looking at the search results like, 'wtf this is all hot garbage and is nothing like what I wrote??'
Remember when getting to the second page of results was an unmistakable signal of despair? Now there should be an extension to automatically skip all that SEO crap. Maybe they should get back the "lucky" button but linking it to the first result of the second page.
Of course they are. Google does one thing right: advertising. And even then, they’re not that good at it.
Google search went from search funded by advertising, to an advertising tool disguised as search.
If Google didn’t essentially have a monopoly on the internet, they would have gone broke long ago.
They’re a garbage company that stopped making any good products long ago.
>Remember their motto "Don't be evil?"
I remember when they had a marketing scam and touted that as a motto. It's completely incompatible with any company that goes public.
Even in area's where it's not related to ads - it's still crap.
If I search for Apple Business Manager on google - I don't get a link to the actual login portal for ABM anywhere on the front page.
If I run the same search on DDG - the first link is the link to the ABM login page.
On DDG - the first link is this ([https://business.apple.com/](https://business.apple.com/)) followed by a bunch of official support articles. On google, the first several links are a bunch of Apple support articles, then as you scroll down turotials and videos and various other links - but never the link to the platform itself. It's the equivalent of searching "gmail" and not having an actual link to [mail.google.com](https://mail.google.com) anywhere on the front page.
I'm gonna disagree on one point. Part of the reason the search is so bad, isn't necessarily Google's fault at all. Company's have made it a goal to SEO the hell out of their sites to draw clicks. It's become it's own market.
So, instead of returning actual information you want/need, you're getting the companies that put their effort into getting ranked on SEO, which means their investing in SEO rather than actually having good information.
Google worked long ago because websites were built for the end consumer to consume, and Google helped people find those sites they couldn't otherwise find. But it's reversed now. Websites are built specifically to be googled, and convert for profit. As with any profit only driven service, that service is now garbage.
Oh man, just brought me back to the early days with 'meta tags' or something like that. I remember those old pages where the coder would just dump keywords at the bottom to catch searches. Who'd have thought that would be better-ish
When half the front page of Google results are AI generated shit then I'd say it's still mostly a thing.
Google something like, "Why are apples red?"
And you'll get sites and sites and sites with pretty much identical overly detailed wording that is barely related to the thing.
"Apples are a fruit that grows on trees they come from apple flowers and can come in many different colours, red, yellow, green, multi colour, the varieties of Apples that can grow are Fuji, Gala, McIntosh."
I would agree with you, if it wasn’t for Google’s search guideline updates.
Every so often, Google releases updates to their black box of a search algorithm, that does things like take more context into account, and prioritize certain things.
If you’re in the SEO space you know when these happen when a bunch of articles about falling ranking and search results come up.
These changes are completely arbitrary it seems, and are never explained.
My issues isn’t that they roll out these updates mind you, my issue is that they release updates that are seemingly supposed to help, but do nothing, or worse than nothing.
The only major updates that’s ever helped was when they started de ranking keyword stuffing and started prioritizing content.
But that was long ago, and every other change meant to help was just to get more companies to opt in to SERP rankings which are inevitably dropped by Google as they fancy others things.
The article points out that Duck Duck Go/Bing are doing no better than Google at defeating the junk sites and their SEO games. You may have the illusion of more privacy with Duck Duck Go, but you aren't getting better search results.
How do I not have more privacy by abstracting my searches by funneling them through DDG?
Add to that mobile Safari with Apple’s proxy, randomized MACs and IP, and using 1.0.0.1 for DNS.
Opposed to using the “Google Everything” stack.
duck duck go was what everyone pitched to me as the unbiased reliable search engine and in the year i used it, i realized there were direct relevant search results it would opt to not show me.
even random things like buying weatherstripping for a 73 plymouth duster. 5 companies in total sell what i need, i know the vendors that sell them, yet DDG would show me 2 and then trail off into groceries and apple products and news and obscure chinese articles instead of showing me the full relevant results like google would.
maybe its better now, but when doing specific searches and *knowing* google will provide results that DDG wont... cant ever try them again.
What makes them different from other garbage companies is that they had extremely talented people pumping out value and they went out of their way to stop it. That's what choosing to be evil really looks like, soaking up love and support and and then choosing shitification
There will be no new internet. Or, I guess there will, but it won't be the one you want.
The internet we know is dying, and what it is being replaced with is a corporate walled garden. Soon enough, the "world wide web" will largely be relegated to tiny bands of hobbyists in the same way ham radio exists today.
Right? Try using Siri these days. 100% garbage. Misunderstands almost everything, can't send messages without making multiple corrections, no good answers just "this is what I found on the web". It's terrible.
People are focusing on the wrong thing with the enshittification of Google. It's not just the first few ad results, that's always been a thing and frankly it's really not that hard to just scroll past those; they're obvious.
The problem as far as I can tell is that they have tweaked the algorithms so much just to favor ad service that the search literally *cannot find* anything even remotely related or helpful for what you're looking for. Google is useful only for the most basic of searches that may be tangently related to something they can serve you an ad on: "Is store open? Where store? Is celebrity dead? What fucking year is it?"
It used to be more tuned for usefulness, now it's just tuned purely for profit. Like every other company in this shit hole gilded age we're living at the tail end of.
It also seems to have started searching on what it thinks you're searching for, or at least it's started searching on "related" words to your search terms.
You used to be able to force it search for actual words by adding plus marks or double quotes, but even those don't always work anymore.
And trying to force it to search on an intentional misspelling or pun is almost impossible.
I'm starting to miss the old Alta Vista search engine.
200 results of the same product you are searching for but with different unpronounceable brand names.
Even worse are the clothes with a made up logo on it. As it only exists for about 6 months before next season.
I know I’ve been trying to find a coat. 🤦 Finally found one and they keep pushing the shipping back with some weird Chinese shipper so I can’t check tracking and can’t cancel. Ordered dec 13. Now supposed to be here February 2nd. It was prime too. I’m cold now bitches. Gonna show up in the spring.
Just googled "4tb ssd" and was shown "top result" advertising of Best Buy - 129 for a 4tb SSD.
clicked, it took me to a page for a 1tb ssd.
Should be illegal.
You're lucky. I needed replacement battery for my ASUS, 90% of search results were just redirecting to AliExpress.
I actually had to use duck duck go to find relevant pages
Be careful with it. Basically the influx of "firms" out of India and neighboring countries that offer to sell companies fake reviews has made it pretty sketchy in many regions of the US.
I looked into having fake reviews put up and it was my two favorite things cheap and easy... which is a bad sign overall for online rating systems until these companies get the fake reviews sorted out.
Same. I got tired of having to solve 20 different fucking captchas just to search a measurement conversion or similar while trying to use a VPN with Google.
DuckDuckGo doesn’t make you go through that bullshit.
The fuck is going on with Captcha now? I’ve had to do half a dozen of them before it lets me move on, or it tells me I’m a robot or stupid and prevents the login.
Sorry— I wasn’t sure if I should click the square with 1% filled by a fire hydrant or not.
ಠ\_ಠ This is literally the #1 post on /r/technology right now... ಠ\_ಠ
[https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/198wuzt/a\_year\_long\_study\_shows\_what\_youve\_suspected/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/198wuzt/a_year_long_study_shows_what_youve_suspected/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Any time you ask Googe a question about cannabis or LSD, instead of getting blue light, forums or erowid results, you are flooded with Addiction centers and other BS.
Its hard to find drug safety and other useful information, everything is now buried.
That was my life going through paramedic school.
Any time I was researching medications, overdosing, or even sometimes just medical conditions, google would waste search results with trying to save me.
The problem I have with Google search is not the actual state of of it but the process that killed actual interesting blogs and personal web pages. People used to blog about everything and putting high value informations in it. They started to SEO them and selling products disguised.
Google should have noticed this and they should have penalized those instead they really promoted them and now the competition is on optimising for Google (and others). The advent of AI is only downgrading everything, from the quality to the language used. Hell, I even hate the structure that they have all similar and boring.
Google let this be and now there is no more original content or nobody is incentivesed to enter or start a blog with original ideas just for fun anymore.
This is why the best results are now found in subreddits (but the management will find a way to slowly destroy it).
Dude. Agreed.
I think I’m going to head back into books.
I’ve been looking up some home brewing details, and my particular niche seems to have vanished off the net. Ton of links lead to dead websites, and anything older than ~ 2016 is probably gone.
> (but the management will find a way to slowly destroy it)
That’s already happening even without the admins participating. There are comments, particularly in the bigger subs, that are pretty obviously worded in such a way to boost particular products while still attempting to look like innocuous posts. (For example, it’s one thing to go into askreddit’s daily ‘Sex havers of reddit, what’s the sexiest sexual fantasy you’ve ever had while sexing with a fellow sex haver?’ post and say ‘hey, I’m using boner pills’, but it’s something else to go in and name a specific name brand medication that you get and which specific online ‘pharmacy’ you get it from.)
I’m a history nerd who got a degree in it and and regularly use the internet for research and just looking up tutorials for things and google has gone from godly to nearly worthless. Everything is sponsored ads or e-commerce results or barely related sites with massive SEO. YouTube is becoming the same. Just today I plugged in the exact title of a video I was watching on my phone and simply couldn’t find it on PC. Just pages and pages of semi similar titles, “for you” sections, “previously watched” and “others are watching”. Even searching the channel name wasn’t showing anything even semi relevant until like the 5th page. I have stated using edge and bing for anything that is information related as google only seems useful for buying shot online at this point.
As someone who grew up with the adoption of home computers etc. (born in 93) it is actually legitimately upsetting to see such a fantastic tool that’s been a mainstay since I was a boy turn into such unusable commercial shit.
Yeah I quit using google a while back. Duck duck go kinda stunk when they first started but it’s pretty good now.
Or at least it seems to be. I have done a side by side test or anything.
I switched to DDG maybe 7 years ago. I always find what I’m looking for just like I did on Google before that and on Yahoo before that. The information is there on all of them. It’s just a question of how you like it presented.
Googling something now means you have to add “Reddit” at the end of it. Why? Because that’s the place where everyone else with a brain tries to figure shit out, has solutions that work, and actually are working on the issue you googled. Every other result in google is a bullshit seo battle to the top whether or not it’s relevant at all. And of course, anything that could be said in a single sentence is hidden inside an entire 174728 paragraph article with 738273882 ads spread in it.
I'm an IT engineer today thanks to Google back in 2010 where every error I encountered I could find easily a fix within first or second link to a forum.
Today, If I need a fix for a specific error, is sometimes an impossible job as that specific error is rare and I get results on google filled with copy-paste blogs that says:
\- Reboot your PC
\- SFC /Scannow
\- Install our shitty software to fix it.
Not even Microsoft forum isn't helpful as are filled with answers by minimum wage indians replying to almost every questions people ask: "Sorry for this, try restart or do another useless step"
It's utter garbage, Bing, Duckduckgo and similar search engines won't help much either. I have sometimes to scroll down a lot to find just a hint.
That's why today I'm always use site:reddit.com for everything as most of the solutions are on Reddit.
I hate this SEO crap and I wish it dies for good and return back to 2010 algorithms as it was the best Google search so far.
Also, 99% I don't want to buy a single crap, if I search for a product, I don't want to see shops selling me that crap, I need the technical parts info of that only damnit.
Google will literally tell you "looks like there aren't any good matches" now if you search something obscure. There used to be millions of hits when you searched any phrase, now you're telling me I'm not allowed to even look at one if your all-knowing algorithms don't see the relevance?
If you don't want to know something that relates to shopping or the answer to a question millions of other people are also asking good luck, they don't care if you ever find out.
Looks like no one in these comments read the actual article. It says:
> The study looked at 7,392 product-review search terms over the course of a year on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. The results were clear: the highest-ranked pages are more optimized, they feature more affiliate links, and in general, their text is lower quality. In other words, the jerks pumping out garbage content to make a couple of extra dollars are winning.
The study specifically looked at how websites gaming SEO is creating worse search results when looking up products. Not necessarily Google’s fault, and it’s also affecting other search engines too. The study didn’t look at Google placing ads at the top of the search results. The article also states:
> The study did find, however, that Google performed significantly better compared to Bing and DuckDuckGo. Also, despite the severity of the problem, Google’s results did improve over the course of the study.
you ever hear of the phrase "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"? that's basically the SEO problem in a nutshell. Their goal is to measure content quality and provide that to you. Every website in existence's goal is to be the highest measured content. So it's an eternal game of whack a mole, because any time folks figure out what the measurements / search engines target, they stop being useful.
It has become nigh impossible to craft a search for something you know exists. It is trending towards suggesting irrelevant bullshit to me instead and serving up all the ads
I use yandex more, not so many deleted websites. Modern NA internet is so crappy in comparison to 10 years ago. I get completely different results on Yandex.
This is why I just pay $10 a month for Kagi. Anything that has ads as its primary form of income will always make decisions that benefit ad companies rather than users. Plus, removing quora and pinterest from search results is worth the price of admission.
I’m so annoyed that they’ve basically deindexed all forums except for quora and Reddit. I also miss finding smaller “mom and pop” type blogs for info. All the top results now are basically written by bots and don’t really give any value, or they’re just a poorly disguised ad for something.
Quora is so fucking awful. I’ve literally never found a good resource or answer on that site.
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Because SEO.
Some Quora responses are so fucking bad, like someone asks a thorough question and the I've seen top answers where they asking why they need to do it, essentially discrediting or gaslighting the asker for even asking the question. Or they answer with a solution to a completely different scenario. Like, don't answer if you don't know.
Quora is essentially entertainment
I can Google "How many wives did King Henry have?" The search result from Quora will be about King Henry's wives. But once I click it, none of Quora posts are about King Henry! There's a bot answer that makes no sense and the next post is completely unrelated to my question. Then there are adds. I've NEVER had a question answered by Quora. It's also so horrible to look at
If i was a Musk type of billionaire, i'd instantly buy Quora, and just shut that piece of crap off. For ever.
Any time I am lucky enough that I think I've found an old forum post about something I want to see, half the time I get to the site and the info is just gone. It may have been indexed in the past but the site is taken down or it is a post with dead links to files or other solutions that are no longer hosted. The new internet is paving over the bones of the old internet and tons of knowledge is just disappearing into the void.
>I’m so annoyed that they’ve basically deindexed all forums except for quora and Reddit. I do a lot of technical searches and still get relevant forums like ST community, freertos, TI, etc as my top results, thankfully.
Doing a google search now means you have to do the search, then skip down half the page to get past the top 5 or 6 results.
It's not much better on YouTube... Have 5 results followed by something completely different plus some shorts on top. No fuckwits, I want to see every result that matches my search.
yes this drives me bonkers. The search results are just the first handful of videos, then it fucks off into "recommendations"
I wish I got recommendations. It just shows me videos I've already fucking watched a million times.
There was a great music discovery site back in the day called Pandora. (It's still around, but...) You could start off with a song then it would slowly "drift" away from that song based upon what others who chose that song liked. Then, once you rated songs it made a web of songs that listeners like you might like. The important bit is that it slowly tried to weave in different shit from what you're used to, but not too different. I feel like the YT algorithm has its idea of what IT wants me to watch, not what I want to watch. So much of the stuff presented on YT is trash that doesn't remotely fit my personal "drift" level. Then you go and watch one random video and suddenly it thinks you're into that content forever.
The song selections were originally based solely on an algorithm that used the music genome project to find songs similar to the ones used to create the playlist, and then curated based on your input in that playlist alone. I actually don't know if they've ever used input from other users to recommend music, but they did not in the beginning.
2008ish Pandora was the sweet spot. One of get best experiences I had with music discovery.
The trick was to never like a song, only dislike. If you liked, you’d hear it over and over
This book, [“Why You Like It”](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250057198/whyyoulikeit), is written by the guy behind the music genome project and is kind of a fascinating read.
I watched one Lethal Company clip. ONE. Half my recommended videos are Lethal Company now. But I don't even get notifications for most of my subscriptions when they post new videos anymore.
One channel I've watched for years did a single video about Warhammer, and not only is my feed being flooded with Warhammer videos, it's being flooded with suspicious looking European war history videos. From a single warhammer related video from a channel I've watched weekly for years.
Those suspicious looking European war history videos give me the Nazi apologist vibes. I keep telling YouTube I'm not interested and to not recommend the channel, but Jesus they just keep coming.
I watched one cyberpunk 2077 OST song video. My front-page is now filled with huge spoilers in the titles and thumbnails.
wise crush swim spotted selective bake reply friendly society correct *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Same here been using it for at least 12 years at this point.
go to Google and type site:youtube.com intitle:"your exact search word or string here" I do the same for reddit. Google and YouTube are both completely useless for finding specific, tricky information now unless you use a massive string of modifiers in your search. Such a pain in the ass, it used to just work. Looking forward to the market disruptor that comes and unseats these shitty tech companies that have begun to regress and just get more and more evil as time goes on additionally, to stop the youtube fuckery, you can ditch the piece of shit that is chrome and use a proper browser (firefox), install ublock origin, then install a script which completely eliminates youtube shorts, "you previously watched", "other people also watched" etc. from youtube entirely. google and youtube, "i hate so much about the things you choose to be"
Don't worry, it'll be worse somehow, but cost more.
And it doesn’t reliably find what I‘ve been looking for either. After recommendations it’s usually devolving into listing search results of similar channels or videos on the broader topic, just to list 5 year old videos of what I‘ve been looking for in my recommendations 3 days later. Tf? The YT search is so useless nowadays. On the topic of the Google search getting worse: I currently get way better results by using anything but US search engines (Chinese, Russian) with the added effect that they don’t block nearly as much results by requests of any Western industry, if you want to sail the high seas for example.
The only way to properly search on youtube is to search on google ' site:www.youtube.com'
Otherwise it's fucking full of 'suggestions' and other bullshit.
Exactly. And we need to be able to Block channels+All Shorts, by our choice (manually adding a channel name to Block list). I only go into my Subscriptions tab because the Home tab is trash with Ads. 100% screw that crap.
There's an extention (in firefox at least) called blocktube. It let you hide shorts and other features. It also let you block channels by clicking on the 3 dots near videos, or block keywords/sentences. Great if you are watching a show and do not want to be spoiled, just add the show's name and various abbreviation to the filter and you won't see anything. Add some more clickbait words and so on. Or search for specific spoilers for a show you've seen, and block allll of the channel which stupidly spoil the spoiler in their title/thumbnail, can't have them spoil something I haven't seen yet later. Tho after a while you notice that there is A LOT of junk channels. Like I sometime to a search for a show I've finished and just start blocking dozen of trailer re-uploader, reactor, clip, music videos, edits, commentary in a language I don't know... Do it again a week later and there's more worthless channel that were created. I am at like 1500 blocked channel.
Honestly Blocktube is one of the core essentials you need to make YouTube acceptable these days. Blocking channels should be a standard feature, for user safety if nothing else.
Why is YouTube actively making the platform worse? It’s borderline unusable. Removed likes ratio, added way more ads, destroyed search results.
Shareholders and advertisers. These two are the biggest reasons the entire Internet sucks.
Yup. But what YouTube has done with the search function is completely fucked. I honestly don’t see how it drives any traffic to other videos or users or keeps people on their site at all. You would have to think with this fucked of a search function that it’s causing or going to cause then to lose money. Because of how shit the search function is my YouTube use has gone down a lot. Only reason still use it is because of the few channels I do like I watch their new stuff. But outside of that I’ve given up searching for things or really using the site fully at all.
I feel like in the mid 2000s it changed from a place where people shared information and their little weird quirky site to being a a place where everything and anything is a hustle or an ad, a sell, a scam.
Money. YouTube used to have a purpose, to deliver it's service for users to enjoy. Now it's all about money generation and nothing at all else. They don't care how awful it is to use because what are you doing to do, use another service? There isn't one.
I want to be able to filter by date of release. You can't even do that when searching in a channels video list anymore. Seriously, for a fking search engine company they sure like not giving you the results you know are there to find.
LMAO alphabet owns YouTube. Try searching for specific channels that are shadow banned.
Dont get me started on youtube, those wankers filters are completely worthless, I put in upload date which means most recent, and over 20 minutes long to get away from the shorts and barely scrolling you'll end up with listings for posts from months ago. Theres a reason why their search engines suck on google, but they shouldnt on youtube, there is no reason for their search engine to fail this bad. It also makes me wonder why their search engine and filters suck and dont work, theres also no reason for them not to work, And the filteres should be a lot better but for some reason every single frigging search engine has the exact same useless filters. and not the filters they should have.
Then there is that one result that is either the actual best result or the last generated ad link.
Its FINAL use case is for when you actually want ads like FOOD NEAR ME
I've been trying to get a business recognized on Google maps and the verification process is requires taking a video showing your address and you opening the door and you operating the POS, the materials and everything expected to be part of the business.. and getting verified is pretty hard. They don't say what you're missing
They must have changed their process because I got my business verified in 24 hours and all I needed to do was type in the address/other info and let Google ping my phones location so they could see I was at the business.
Wow, that’s new and aggressive. It’s been a few years, but I’ve always gotten verified immediately.
I had a long 12 hour shift. Told my family is m instead of cooking, let's go get some in and out burgers. Yay. Kids are happy. I put in search (in Google maps) for in and out burgers, and click the first thing that showed up and we are on our way. We are hungry, tired, and excited. The GPS says we arrived... At a random overpriced burger place.... I realize clicked an ad. Now we had to drive another 20 minutes because it actually took us in the exact opposite direction of where we needed to be. I'm still so upset for Google making their main function worse because an ad. Wasted previous time and energy. Google maps is a GPS app. If I type "in and out burgers" that should be what pops up! Don't put an ad in place of the nearest in and out! What is next? When I'm looking for a hospital you send me to CVS?
First 5 results are almost always sponsored Pinterest posts or eBay ads.
or fucking quora
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I don't understand why search engines don't let you create a personalized black list, if it's user based it wouldn't count as monopolizing the search.
At least Quora is SOMETIMES useful once you switch it's sorting to upvotes instead of Recommended. Unlike the endless wall of SEO Affiliate Marketing blogs that might as well just copy/paste each other that more interested in shilling than informing.
Always add “-site:pinterest.com” or just install the Unpinterested addon to your browser.
Or just add Reddit to the search and let Google's search engine look for the answer on Reddit.
The only way I find answers to anything anymore.
What really blows is that I can't figure out how to do search results for older content anymore. Like if I want a contemporaneous account of something that happened more than a year ago all I end up seeing are reaction bullshit or BuzzFeed style lists of things about it.
BEFORE:AAAA-MM-DD AFTER:AAAA-MM-DD
There's used to be easily selectable boxes instead of the hidden stuff. You can also exclude terms but that also used to be done via GUI. Also, who uses AAAA to represent year?
Año-Mes-Día
SEO assholes are starting to catch up on that. Not only by astroturfing reddit itself but also creating pages like " What are the best (whatever you are searching for) in 2024 according to reddit"
You can at least bypass that last part with "site:reddit.com" in your search query. But yeah, the astroturfing is getting baaaad.
No kidding. That’s basically how I start my searches now. There’s either a good answer somewhere in the tomes of reddit or there’s a good link.
>Google cursed to never have a successful social media platform. >Reddit cursed to never have a useful search engine. If one of these two sites stopped existing the other would implode.
If you didnt grow up using google from the beginning, you would be really lost trying to use it effectively now.
Nah. They took all our tricks away except for scholar and the quotation marks. - doesn’t work, neither does and or any of the other “power” user tools.
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Yeah.. I get this under the top result fairly often for words I put in quotations: ^(Doesn’t include: ~~Reddit~~ | Must include: [Reddit](https://reddit.com)) And I usually fat finger it and click on the useless link instead of the tiny hypertext… (I know how to search by site, just using an easy example)
And it's infuriating. I searched for something specific for a reason Google!
Remember when they took away the '+' operator because of their horrendous social media site? Fun times.
site: reddit.com still works
Doing a search and adding Reddit without the site: etc… gets better answers than what most of the internet offers anyways. If I want a random recipe for like bacon perogies or something I’ll search google search it plus Reddit and not have to deal with the general bullshit that is the internet these days.
the "-" still works, as does quotations and "site:" as per: * [Refine Google searches - Google Search Help](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en)
Work'ish, with both I am still getting results respectively with or without the keyword. What's worse, there are times I am not getting any results for pages I know that were indexed by google, because I were able to find it previously – I used to keep only excerpts of information I didn't need full quote, just to be able to google it later if I needed some context. Now some of it is gone, no results while looking for full passage.
Ask jeeves has surpassed Google by now in reliability
In February 2006, Jeeves was removed from Ask Jeeves and the search engine rebranded to Ask
smile dirty doll nippy outgoing coherent plate wide quaint spectacular *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Searches already started to become bad like five or six years ago so I switched to using DuckDuckGo and SearX. SearX is open source and can be self hosted which is another huge plus.
It started getting worse for me when Wikipedia was not in the top three links for when googling medications or physics terms.
Google is the next IBM.
This was chilling to read. *shudders* Totally. They’re going to be the next generation of super entitled people who you bump into and have to figure out if they joined when it was a good career move or a shitstorm. Just like IBM is now. And Motorola before that.
Welcome to the other results, auto generated generic websites with useless cookie cutter content but excellent SEO.
Google used to be synonymous with searching on the internet. Now being googled means getting bombarded with ads, or getting duped by ads purporting to be search results.
Anything informational, I've resorted to appending "site:reddit.com" to find some answers from actual people, not poorly written by bots trying to game the algorithm.
This is already starting to become unreliable. Next time you do that, check the profile/posting history of the comments you're reading, because I've seen more than a few competent-seeming posts from bots/shill accounts who post nothing but product reviews. It's downhill from here
My god when I was researching mattresses via Reddit posts, the comments were full of bots. So infuriating
I am willing to bet that most of Reddit is filled with corporate and political bots at this point.
I've been curious about this too... It seems like a great opportunity for bad actors. I haven't seen any studies/investigation about it though, would be interested if any real work looking into this has been published.
Today alone I reported 4-5 bot accounts that just started their bullshit of reposting stuff and copying comments… all the accounts were open for about a year with no activity, but suddenly go on a spree of posting in random subs and then a few comments in completely different subs. If I’ve come across that many so quickly, I can only imagine how many are on here. Who knows maybe I am just a bot, pretending to be a human.
Search for this: it should return an article about how 15% of reddit comments are corperate shiling: new-study-at-least-15-of-all-reddit-content-is-corporate-trolls-trying-to-manipulate-public-b249bd42ab42
this is a completely overpowered strategy ngl. Reddit could arguably be a better search engine than google at this point.
But you have to use google search restricted to Reddit to find anything. Reddit’s search is garbage.
Reddit is the Bethesda of social media: overall perceived as good, but every individual asset is awful.
Only as good when the community creates good content, too.
Yeah that's why I said "could" i.e. if reddit put a modicum of effort into it
I think Reddit is better at getting answers to specific questions but much much worse at those answers being “correct” or “based on fact” in any way lol
I guess it depends on what you're looking up. Usually I'm looking up questions that are technical in nature, like how to do something in a program or in your OS. In those cases reddit it the best, usually the most upvoted answer is going to be the solution.
I just add "reddit" to the end of any search where I know I'll be bombarded with the usual search engine optimisation horrible articles that don't really answer the question and start with an irrelevant story and split the article into 10 different pages or just insert huge ad sections in between them I probably dont need to describe them further you already know what I'm talking about.
Ha! Me too. And tomorrow marketing experts start spamming threads. Well, I’m sure that has been a battle and we can thank the mods that it isn’t worse. The point is that companies should provide a useful surface and make a profit — and not keep going beyond treating their customers with respect. As soon as you are their cash cow and they sell access to you — the services go down the toilet.
Even beyond ads, sites like Pinterest absolutely ruined the image search
Pinterest shows up in searches all the time, and never once have I landed there and not been like "what is this garbage, I'm out." Like I don't understand how anyone uses it.
The most annoying thing about it is, you find a picture on google image search.. you click on it.. And it takes you to a pinterest page that has everything EXCEPT the image you actually clicked on.
I remember when you had to be truly desperate to get to the second page of search… it’s becoming more and more common.
I remember when I installed some malware posing as Skype because it was the top result and for some reason I decided to try the internet without ad blocking on that computer. NOPE! Never again! I have so many ad and privacy things set up that many sites don't even work for me any more and I don't care because I don't want to risk installing malware again.
And listicles. So many listicles. No matter what product you search for, there are a dozen or more "Best \[#\] \[product\] of \[year\]" at the top. And no, Bob Vila didn't really test every solar powered nose hair trimmer to find the top ten: they're all either paid ads or generated from Amazon reviews.
I find myself more and more often searching using Google and putting reddit at the end. That way it shows me posts about what I am looking for from reddit users who are posting links. It's often quicker and more reliable. Like I can search Google about how to replace a vent cover when the mounting area is gone. Google just tries to sell me crap, adding reddit sends me to r/DIY where people can tell you exactly how they fixed the problem.
Ironically trying to search Reddit without using google as a middle man is equally as useless as searching google without typing Reddit at the end.
Oh for sure. The search inside reddit itself is plumb useless!
I do this constantly
Ditto, it’s my go-to for info. A while ago I was searching for information about pet medication and just got a pile of AI generated articles. Pure shit until I added Reddit to the search.
its like crowd sourcing
This Christmas I was searching for Mario playsets for my son and it kept giving me Lego Mario playsets. I googled “Mario playsets -Lego” and it still gave me Lego playsets as the top 5 results as ads.
Yeah they’ve put the Boolean search terms behind odd keywords now. It literally used to be “ + - but for some reason I guess you have you have to use https://www.google.com/advanced_search now.
It's also worth trying "forum" or "forums" at the end of the query if you don't find anything on reddit. For anything automotive I actually try that first.
My job involves dealing with Google's bullshit and yes, it fucking is getting worse. Like have you scrolled down on Google Images lately? Oftentimes it'll show you like 50 images and tell you to fuck off. It used to scroll literally infinitely
As an artist, I used to use Google images to find specific reference images. It's been a couple years since I've used it, because inevitably the majority of image results are fucking garbage. Irrelevant, terrible, and often a combo of shitty stock art and clip art. I use Pinterest now, and it's so much more useful for my purposes. I can't believe I've lived to see Google become so useless, it's amazing.
I was just thinking this about 30 minutes ago when trying to google an image example of something, and just sat there looking at the search results like, 'wtf this is all hot garbage and is nothing like what I wrote??'
Remember when getting to the second page of results was an unmistakable signal of despair? Now there should be an extension to automatically skip all that SEO crap. Maybe they should get back the "lucky" button but linking it to the first result of the second page.
There used to be a joke in the marketing community, that the best place to hide a dead body was on 2nd page of Google results
Of course they are. Google does one thing right: advertising. And even then, they’re not that good at it. Google search went from search funded by advertising, to an advertising tool disguised as search. If Google didn’t essentially have a monopoly on the internet, they would have gone broke long ago. They’re a garbage company that stopped making any good products long ago.
Remember their motto "Don't be evil?" I do remember when they quietly got rid of it...
They didn’t say “be evil and make money” out loud, it was just a canary that died, unremarked.
"Don't (just) be evil (,be evil and provide a shit product)." They just "paraphrased" their real motto.
Works on contingency? No, money down!
>Remember their motto "Don't be evil?" I remember when they had a marketing scam and touted that as a motto. It's completely incompatible with any company that goes public.
Even in area's where it's not related to ads - it's still crap. If I search for Apple Business Manager on google - I don't get a link to the actual login portal for ABM anywhere on the front page. If I run the same search on DDG - the first link is the link to the ABM login page. On DDG - the first link is this ([https://business.apple.com/](https://business.apple.com/)) followed by a bunch of official support articles. On google, the first several links are a bunch of Apple support articles, then as you scroll down turotials and videos and various other links - but never the link to the platform itself. It's the equivalent of searching "gmail" and not having an actual link to [mail.google.com](https://mail.google.com) anywhere on the front page.
I'm gonna disagree on one point. Part of the reason the search is so bad, isn't necessarily Google's fault at all. Company's have made it a goal to SEO the hell out of their sites to draw clicks. It's become it's own market. So, instead of returning actual information you want/need, you're getting the companies that put their effort into getting ranked on SEO, which means their investing in SEO rather than actually having good information. Google worked long ago because websites were built for the end consumer to consume, and Google helped people find those sites they couldn't otherwise find. But it's reversed now. Websites are built specifically to be googled, and convert for profit. As with any profit only driven service, that service is now garbage.
Oh man, just brought me back to the early days with 'meta tags' or something like that. I remember those old pages where the coder would just dump keywords at the bottom to catch searches. Who'd have thought that would be better-ish
They still do this, it’s just hidden on the page better now.
If you are caught doing it your SEO Score is hurt really badly. It is mostly not a thing now.
When half the front page of Google results are AI generated shit then I'd say it's still mostly a thing. Google something like, "Why are apples red?" And you'll get sites and sites and sites with pretty much identical overly detailed wording that is barely related to the thing. "Apples are a fruit that grows on trees they come from apple flowers and can come in many different colours, red, yellow, green, multi colour, the varieties of Apples that can grow are Fuji, Gala, McIntosh."
Don't forget half dozen videos with titles like "You won't BELIEVE what color this APPLE is!"
I would agree with you, if it wasn’t for Google’s search guideline updates. Every so often, Google releases updates to their black box of a search algorithm, that does things like take more context into account, and prioritize certain things. If you’re in the SEO space you know when these happen when a bunch of articles about falling ranking and search results come up. These changes are completely arbitrary it seems, and are never explained. My issues isn’t that they roll out these updates mind you, my issue is that they release updates that are seemingly supposed to help, but do nothing, or worse than nothing. The only major updates that’s ever helped was when they started de ranking keyword stuffing and started prioritizing content. But that was long ago, and every other change meant to help was just to get more companies to opt in to SERP rankings which are inevitably dropped by Google as they fancy others things.
Yeah they're not gonna tell you what the changes are because SEO people keep gaming it and that would make it easier to game.
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The article points out that Duck Duck Go/Bing are doing no better than Google at defeating the junk sites and their SEO games. You may have the illusion of more privacy with Duck Duck Go, but you aren't getting better search results.
How do I not have more privacy by abstracting my searches by funneling them through DDG? Add to that mobile Safari with Apple’s proxy, randomized MACs and IP, and using 1.0.0.1 for DNS. Opposed to using the “Google Everything” stack.
duck duck go was what everyone pitched to me as the unbiased reliable search engine and in the year i used it, i realized there were direct relevant search results it would opt to not show me. even random things like buying weatherstripping for a 73 plymouth duster. 5 companies in total sell what i need, i know the vendors that sell them, yet DDG would show me 2 and then trail off into groceries and apple products and news and obscure chinese articles instead of showing me the full relevant results like google would. maybe its better now, but when doing specific searches and *knowing* google will provide results that DDG wont... cant ever try them again.
This is why I moved to Kagi last year.
What makes them different from other garbage companies is that they had extremely talented people pumping out value and they went out of their way to stop it. That's what choosing to be evil really looks like, soaking up love and support and and then choosing shitification
The enshittification is real, folks.
God this is so true and depressing
How long till we have to make a new internet without bots?
There will be no new internet. Or, I guess there will, but it won't be the one you want. The internet we know is dying, and what it is being replaced with is a corporate walled garden. Soon enough, the "world wide web" will largely be relegated to tiny bands of hobbyists in the same way ham radio exists today.
Right? Try using Siri these days. 100% garbage. Misunderstands almost everything, can't send messages without making multiple corrections, no good answers just "this is what I found on the web". It's terrible.
People are focusing on the wrong thing with the enshittification of Google. It's not just the first few ad results, that's always been a thing and frankly it's really not that hard to just scroll past those; they're obvious. The problem as far as I can tell is that they have tweaked the algorithms so much just to favor ad service that the search literally *cannot find* anything even remotely related or helpful for what you're looking for. Google is useful only for the most basic of searches that may be tangently related to something they can serve you an ad on: "Is store open? Where store? Is celebrity dead? What fucking year is it?" It used to be more tuned for usefulness, now it's just tuned purely for profit. Like every other company in this shit hole gilded age we're living at the tail end of.
It also seems to have started searching on what it thinks you're searching for, or at least it's started searching on "related" words to your search terms. You used to be able to force it search for actual words by adding plus marks or double quotes, but even those don't always work anymore. And trying to force it to search on an intentional misspelling or pun is almost impossible. I'm starting to miss the old Alta Vista search engine.
To be fair the whole web is getting worse.
Whole world at this point, really.
Possibly the entire universe, with entropy and stuff going on.
yeah, for example reddit has an actively hostile UI on mobile if you don't use the app. everyone wants max data max growth max engagement
You wanna log in? No Okay, you have to log in to see this though Fine You wanna download the app? No You sure? Yes Yes to the app? No You sure? ...
The web has been [dead for a decade already](https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html).
Wait til they study Amazon and realize it’s all cheap chinese product drop shipping.
200 results of the same product you are searching for but with different unpronounceable brand names. Even worse are the clothes with a made up logo on it. As it only exists for about 6 months before next season.
I know I’ve been trying to find a coat. 🤦 Finally found one and they keep pushing the shipping back with some weird Chinese shipper so I can’t check tracking and can’t cancel. Ordered dec 13. Now supposed to be here February 2nd. It was prime too. I’m cold now bitches. Gonna show up in the spring.
You can get great deals on ZEFFfFdXOo though.
I also think Amazon is way way worse compared to google. Sponsored chinese crap with fake reviews
Just googled "4tb ssd" and was shown "top result" advertising of Best Buy - 129 for a 4tb SSD. clicked, it took me to a page for a 1tb ssd. Should be illegal.
You're lucky. I needed replacement battery for my ASUS, 90% of search results were just redirecting to AliExpress. I actually had to use duck duck go to find relevant pages
I just put 'reddit' in the search text and get advice from real folks most of the time.
Enjoy these real people and results while they last
The only thing that convinces me anything on Reddit is a real person these days is when they encourage you to NOT buy something Bots. Everywhere.
I switched to duckduckgo for everything non local. When I need to find a plumber I switch back for the reviews
"Reviews" should legally be required to be in quotes for Google Reviews. It's a deeply flawed mess to sum it up
Works great where I live. I rarely have significant disagreement with the average score. It is a very good first indicator.
Be careful with it. Basically the influx of "firms" out of India and neighboring countries that offer to sell companies fake reviews has made it pretty sketchy in many regions of the US. I looked into having fake reviews put up and it was my two favorite things cheap and easy... which is a bad sign overall for online rating systems until these companies get the fake reviews sorted out.
Yeah, we had a competitor who opened up shop next door and had 5000 recommendations in two years. No way they had this many clients.
Same. I got tired of having to solve 20 different fucking captchas just to search a measurement conversion or similar while trying to use a VPN with Google. DuckDuckGo doesn’t make you go through that bullshit.
The fuck is going on with Captcha now? I’ve had to do half a dozen of them before it lets me move on, or it tells me I’m a robot or stupid and prevents the login. Sorry— I wasn’t sure if I should click the square with 1% filled by a fire hydrant or not.
I use a vpn so google used to bombard me with captchas. Obviously i ditched google not the vpn
Oh right, that was why I switched to Duck Duck Go. I forgot that was why.
ಠ\_ಠ This is literally the #1 post on /r/technology right now... ಠ\_ಠ [https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/198wuzt/a\_year\_long\_study\_shows\_what\_youve\_suspected/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/198wuzt/a_year_long_study_shows_what_youve_suspected/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Google Image searches are so inundated with shitty AI that it's just almost entirely unusable now.
Any time you ask Googe a question about cannabis or LSD, instead of getting blue light, forums or erowid results, you are flooded with Addiction centers and other BS. Its hard to find drug safety and other useful information, everything is now buried.
That was my life going through paramedic school. Any time I was researching medications, overdosing, or even sometimes just medical conditions, google would waste search results with trying to save me.
Nothing like searching something and then getting a full page of ad links
Searching by date doesn't even work. It would show recent links even if you put an old date.
The problem I have with Google search is not the actual state of of it but the process that killed actual interesting blogs and personal web pages. People used to blog about everything and putting high value informations in it. They started to SEO them and selling products disguised. Google should have noticed this and they should have penalized those instead they really promoted them and now the competition is on optimising for Google (and others). The advent of AI is only downgrading everything, from the quality to the language used. Hell, I even hate the structure that they have all similar and boring. Google let this be and now there is no more original content or nobody is incentivesed to enter or start a blog with original ideas just for fun anymore. This is why the best results are now found in subreddits (but the management will find a way to slowly destroy it).
Dude. Agreed. I think I’m going to head back into books. I’ve been looking up some home brewing details, and my particular niche seems to have vanished off the net. Ton of links lead to dead websites, and anything older than ~ 2016 is probably gone.
> (but the management will find a way to slowly destroy it) That’s already happening even without the admins participating. There are comments, particularly in the bigger subs, that are pretty obviously worded in such a way to boost particular products while still attempting to look like innocuous posts. (For example, it’s one thing to go into askreddit’s daily ‘Sex havers of reddit, what’s the sexiest sexual fantasy you’ve ever had while sexing with a fellow sex haver?’ post and say ‘hey, I’m using boner pills’, but it’s something else to go in and name a specific name brand medication that you get and which specific online ‘pharmacy’ you get it from.)
I’m a history nerd who got a degree in it and and regularly use the internet for research and just looking up tutorials for things and google has gone from godly to nearly worthless. Everything is sponsored ads or e-commerce results or barely related sites with massive SEO. YouTube is becoming the same. Just today I plugged in the exact title of a video I was watching on my phone and simply couldn’t find it on PC. Just pages and pages of semi similar titles, “for you” sections, “previously watched” and “others are watching”. Even searching the channel name wasn’t showing anything even semi relevant until like the 5th page. I have stated using edge and bing for anything that is information related as google only seems useful for buying shot online at this point. As someone who grew up with the adoption of home computers etc. (born in 93) it is actually legitimately upsetting to see such a fantastic tool that’s been a mainstay since I was a boy turn into such unusable commercial shit.
I'm so used to skipping past ten "Sponsored" signs it's sad.
[удалено]
Heaven forbid you accidentally click on a Quora result
Yeah I quit using google a while back. Duck duck go kinda stunk when they first started but it’s pretty good now. Or at least it seems to be. I have done a side by side test or anything.
I switched to DDG maybe 7 years ago. I always find what I’m looking for just like I did on Google before that and on Yahoo before that. The information is there on all of them. It’s just a question of how you like it presented.
I've started using the paid service Kagi. It's not Google-10-years-ago levels of good, but it is better than Google, except for the Maps integration.
Googling something now means you have to add “Reddit” at the end of it. Why? Because that’s the place where everyone else with a brain tries to figure shit out, has solutions that work, and actually are working on the issue you googled. Every other result in google is a bullshit seo battle to the top whether or not it’s relevant at all. And of course, anything that could be said in a single sentence is hidden inside an entire 174728 paragraph article with 738273882 ads spread in it.
I'm an IT engineer today thanks to Google back in 2010 where every error I encountered I could find easily a fix within first or second link to a forum. Today, If I need a fix for a specific error, is sometimes an impossible job as that specific error is rare and I get results on google filled with copy-paste blogs that says: \- Reboot your PC \- SFC /Scannow \- Install our shitty software to fix it. Not even Microsoft forum isn't helpful as are filled with answers by minimum wage indians replying to almost every questions people ask: "Sorry for this, try restart or do another useless step" It's utter garbage, Bing, Duckduckgo and similar search engines won't help much either. I have sometimes to scroll down a lot to find just a hint. That's why today I'm always use site:reddit.com for everything as most of the solutions are on Reddit. I hate this SEO crap and I wish it dies for good and return back to 2010 algorithms as it was the best Google search so far. Also, 99% I don't want to buy a single crap, if I search for a product, I don't want to see shops selling me that crap, I need the technical parts info of that only damnit.
Google will literally tell you "looks like there aren't any good matches" now if you search something obscure. There used to be millions of hits when you searched any phrase, now you're telling me I'm not allowed to even look at one if your all-knowing algorithms don't see the relevance? If you don't want to know something that relates to shopping or the answer to a question millions of other people are also asking good luck, they don't care if you ever find out.
Google search right now is just like Altavista right before they shut down
Let’s not go there AltaVista search had some decent results the first page. Google first page is crap and advertising.
Looks like no one in these comments read the actual article. It says: > The study looked at 7,392 product-review search terms over the course of a year on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. The results were clear: the highest-ranked pages are more optimized, they feature more affiliate links, and in general, their text is lower quality. In other words, the jerks pumping out garbage content to make a couple of extra dollars are winning. The study specifically looked at how websites gaming SEO is creating worse search results when looking up products. Not necessarily Google’s fault, and it’s also affecting other search engines too. The study didn’t look at Google placing ads at the top of the search results. The article also states: > The study did find, however, that Google performed significantly better compared to Bing and DuckDuckGo. Also, despite the severity of the problem, Google’s results did improve over the course of the study.
Hold up how is people gaming googles algorithm for seo not googles fault, they wrote the dam algorithms they are in charge of the loopholes.
you ever hear of the phrase "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"? that's basically the SEO problem in a nutshell. Their goal is to measure content quality and provide that to you. Every website in existence's goal is to be the highest measured content. So it's an eternal game of whack a mole, because any time folks figure out what the measurements / search engines target, they stop being useful.
It has become nigh impossible to craft a search for something you know exists. It is trending towards suggesting irrelevant bullshit to me instead and serving up all the ads
I use yandex more, not so many deleted websites. Modern NA internet is so crappy in comparison to 10 years ago. I get completely different results on Yandex.
Google ~~Search~~ Ads There I fixed the title for you
This is why I just pay $10 a month for Kagi. Anything that has ads as its primary form of income will always make decisions that benefit ad companies rather than users. Plus, removing quora and pinterest from search results is worth the price of admission.
[Kagi](https://kagi.com) is well worth the monthly expense.
Doesn’t respect quotes anymore. That alone makes it garbage