- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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Google SEO has homogenized the internet with vapid marketing content. The internet is one big commercial. The reason Reddit got popular was because communities found and shared good content and created more by talking about it. Now ads are disguised as posts and memes.
The internet is getting as bad as radio.
Oof, that last sentence hits home.
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Google’s ranking algorithms are also to blame. If you publish anything on a new website it will take you eternity to rank up against copycat sites and websites that have nothing to do with the search query, they will outrank your publication just because their websites have had 5+ more years presence than you, have paid their way through the ranker, and their article has only one of the six keywords mentioned in the search query but isn’t relevant to the whole search query, your article will linger on page 10. you will put 5 times more work to move your post to the 9th page than the time it took you to research and write the post.
google has shaped the internet into what American democracy is, those with more money get more exposure
I don’t have an Instagram, a YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter account, and I still hate Google search. It’s nearly useless unless I’m specifically trying to find something to purchase.
It’s not about what you as the searcher has. It’s about where the content you’re searching for is located. If the entity or company you’re searching for has only published within walled gardens such as Instagram or Facebook, then you are less likely to successfully find that information in Google. If they had published a normal website, then Google would be better able to index that information and provide you the result you want.
I feel that, but also, the content I am looking for is indeed typically posted on regular websites without walled gardens, and Google still seems to want to show me a whole page of garbage before the site I’m looking for, whereas on DuckDuckGo(bing), my desired sites are usually the first or second result. Google is better if I’m looking to buy something, or find local restaurants etc, but ddg gives me better results in my academic and flight of fancy searches.
I just hate the google search UI 😊 but of course this is not the only reason that DDGO is my default private and bing my default while working. We are a full on Microsoft software company with all the teams stuff etc. So using bing allows to search not only in the internet, but in the company SharePoints as well.
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It’s even bad for finding something to purchase honestly. I’ll search for a specific part number, and most of the results are other similar but not interchangeable products. No Google I cannot just shove this random other battery pack into my UPS, but thanks anyway.
I tried searching for airtight drawers and all the results were either airtight or drawers. Only one was both and it was a ten thousand dollar museum specimen cabinet.
It’s especially terrible if you care about the fiber content of your clothes. Searching for linen or even 100% linen gets me linen blend, linen-look, linen color. 100% wool gets mostly acrylic wool blends. Wool toe socks gets me either wool socks or toe socks but again, not both.
Plus I can’t block Amazon and Walmart from the results anymore, so that’s a ton of extra junk to filter through manually.
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DuckDuckGo is the same. I searched for “ham and cheese recipe” and Yummly is the top result.
My top result is tasteofhome.com.
Oh, you’re looking for a part number for something relatively common? No can do. However, I’m sure you’d be interested in pages of Chinese phone numbers that carry 3 digits in a similar order to your search.
You can use quotation marks to filter only results that have a certain word or phrase in it, rather than related content.
You would think so wouldn’t you? But Google usually still tries to be “helpful” about everything. “100 linen” does work better, although still not perfect.
That also doesn’t fix the issue with being unable to ignore Amazon and Walmart. On the standard search, the dash to ban a specific term makes it not the first result but it still shows up further down the page. On the dedicated product search it doesn’t seem to do anything at all.
Here’s an example of how well search operators do these days.
I just signed up for the free trial of Kagi, I’ll have to see how it compares.
The only REAL replacement I’m still looking for is YouTube. Sure, Peertube and proxy sites for YouTube exist. But the amount of content I am interested in is by dozens of decimals larger an YouTube than on any other alternative combined.
And, yes, of course, the search engine.
Odysee seems to be doing relatively well. Probably 20-30% of the YouTubers I watch are also on there.
I legit didn’t know about this service, looks cool, but I don’t fully understand how it works.
I hope alternatives to youtube like Nebula and peertube find their footing, but I can’t help but suspect that youtube has and will continue to find the successful path in this social media era. I’m not a youtuber or anything, so I don’t really know any details about how it works, but the way they seem provide a platform with monetisation and brand building possibilities built in seems pretty effective/pragmatic for a platform that needs to find someway to work within capitalism.
Just use duck duck go. Its better in all regards.
Its better in all regards.
I wish it was true. My strategy is to use ddg in first try to find something and switch to google when ddg ducks in wrong way. Currently google is better in images and searching for “this particular site” instead of answer on any site
I truly wish this was true. But for work, everything I search on ddg is just not useful
I tried DDG many times for work. Often I don’t find the result I want at all. I try different queries and all, but I only find barely relevant shit. I switch to Google, and immediately the top result is exactly what I want.
Exactly the opposite for me
Try Nebula! It’s a bunch of YouTube creators who got together to make their own platform for video content. The price is quite reasonable and the videos are the same you would see on YouTube but often a few days early and with the sponsorship ads removed.
I use nebula more than youtube now tbh, only reason I hop on YouTube is to watch people that aren’t on Nebula
Nebula is excellent! If you have more money, you can try Floatplane too.
I would rather not support Linus.
Duck Duck Go has been nothing but great since I switched a few months ago. It’s like Google from 10 years ago.
If I need to find really obscure stuff Google is still better.
I like Google products but the search engine really has become shit. I’m not sure there’s anything they can do about it though.
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I don’t think the algorithm is the problem. The problem is that sites started to capitalize on your attention. Everybody wants your sweet little attention so they can earn money from it. Internet also moved into walled gardens of money making machines (like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok).
It doesn’t matter which algorithm is used. Somebody will crack it and abuse it for their own good.
There’s no reversing this.
It doesn’t matter which algorithm is used. Somebody will crack it and abuse it for their own good.
If the algorithm gives a bigger shit about giving the answer people are actually looking for, and doesn’t emphasize length, formatting, and other bullshit… And people crack the algorithm by giving exactly that answer I’m looking for, I’d be ok with that.
But it all starts with the algorithm
That’s easily abused. Search engines before Google were pure keyword search, but those were quickly abused. People just made websites with all types of keywords just to get on top of search results. Google’s PageRank fixed this - temporarily. People were quick to abuse it too.
It doesn’t matter what you try to do. Somebody will figure out how to abuse it.
But to do that, the algorithm has to know the right answer in the first place. Meaning a human has to tell it what’s right and what’s wrong.
Have you seen Google’s generative AI tests? They’re trying to do exactly that and it’s mostly useless.
This is exactly right but assumes the nature of the internet must remain the same. The problem is the content and people wanting your sweet little attention. The internet described in the article - the blogosphere and Usenet and the rest, was an internet created by people for people and existed for its own sake. What google has access to now is 3 billion people all trying to scam the others for money. Its a fundamentally different user base and there’s no way a better algorithm can find content that isn’t there
They simply need to change the way relevancy is measured. They need to implement some mechanism that can evaluate the quality of the page. The algorithm should penalize sites that have content very similar to other sites (like those that scrape github or stackoverflow), low effort sites, or sites that are infested with too many ads.
And since so much quality information is in youtube videos, and they already generate transcripts, why can’t you search through those?
Any metric that isn’t direct human curation can be gamed.
Just out of curiosity what google products do you use?
Most of the big ones. Gmail, calendar, maps, YouTube, YouTube music, photos, tasks, pixel…
It’s more interesting to say the ones I don’t use tbh: Drive and Chrome.
I avoid Google products as much as possible these days, especially anything launched within the last 2-3 years, because it will soon be abandoned and unsupported. Their search results are worse than they have ever been. The only Google app I actually like is Google Maps.
Yeah the search has gone to shit. I’ve been using Duck Duck Go but I guess that is Bing based?
Also been trying out Kagi. The format is unsettling at first but it is nice to see the results I am looking for at the top instead of a bunch of bullshit ads / sponsored results and whatever along with crappy results below the fold.
Maps is also seriously going down the gutter.
- There are ads in maps now.
- It works OK if you know a name, but not the location, but not the other way around. If there’s any concentration of businesses, you can zoom in all you want but it will only show 1 in 2 places.
- Many search terms now result in residential places near the top results. I suppose these are mostly small webshops run out of homes for the same terms, but that isn’t usually what one is looking for when using maps.
Maps isn’t doing too hot either.
there’s been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users.
I hate when journalists use data from Arse Research Institute to boost sensation
But if that last 25 years of Google’s history could be boiled down to a battle against the Google bomb, it is now starting to feel that the search engine is finally losing pace with the hijackers. Or as Marwick put it, “Google has gotten shittier and shittier.”
“To me, it just continues the transformation of the internet into this shitty mall,” Marwick said. “A dead mall that’s just filled with the shady sort of stores you don’t want to go to.”
Worth citing
Dash is one of the web’s earliest bloggers. In 2004, he won a competition Google held to google-bomb itself with the made-up term “nigritude ultramarine.”
DarkBlue.com is not Google
https://web.archive.org/web/20071011225539/http://dashes.com/anil/2004/06/nigritude-ultra.htmlI always wondered if "using X app instead of Google as search engine should be interpreted as sign of generalized computer illiteracy (not being able to distinguish between two different contexts/products) or a product of our own doing (convergence between desktop and mobile, interfaces harder to visually differenciate between apps and its functions).
Either way we have a long way ahead.
translation: Google Search is still an important tool, but it is no longer the only way people find information.
I wish. Unfortunately it will probably live on for all eternity like Facebook is somehow living on.
It’s no surprise that Facebook is hanging on, the average nerd might avoid it like the plague but the average person doesn’t care
It’s far from over
We had some good variety of search engines back in the day. Alta vista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Yahoo… Now it’s just Google, or slightly worse versions.
I know people say to use DuckDuckGo but I never get as useful results there as on Google. I just have to scroll past a lot more ads on Google to get to the actual links.
The fact you’re saying you’re still getting useful results on Google means you haven’t used Google for the past year to me.
They said as useful as Google. Not that Google gives objectively very useful results. And I agree with them. I use DuckDuckGo every day and pretty much every time I have to add !g to send my query to Google because the DDG results are shit in comparison.
I’m talking about on the desktop btw. With adblocking and script blocking. I accidentally used Google on my phone yesterday and I think I got cancer.
What’s the difference between using !g and going to Google directly?
The results are still tailored to you on Google, based on past usage and tracking history. They aren’t with a bang.
Thanks, nice to know!
This is incorrect.
DDG just just performs a simple redirect to Google with the query, where the latter has access to cookies, past usage (especially if one is logged in to Google), etc.
So you say that there is no difference in googling on Google.com or using DDG with !g?
Yes. The !bangs in DDG are for convenience and not for privacy. The convenience of not opening the intended website, and typing/pasting the query to perform the search.
Same boat here. I set DDG as my default but still end up using !g around half the time.
Seriously. If I want to hope to get any result that is mildly useful, I’m obligated to add a specific site on the query, either wiki or reddit.
There is brave search, which seemed pretty good to me, even though i am using kagi search now. And to be honest, so far kagi seems really solid, and if you go past the fact that you have to pay for it (on most other search engines you are the product) then give it a try, the first 100 searches are free.
I hope it’s true, but honestly I don’t believe sites and opinions that have to do with google from sites like the verge.
Because sites like the verge are in reality rivals to google. For example verge is owned by voxmedia which has an advertising company and a web advertsing platform. They are rivals to google which also is an advertising company. They hate google because they want google’s money lol. I seriously doubt they can be objective especially to google.The point of the article is that whatever is replacing Google is not going to be better. It’s not Google that is broken. The entire web is.
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