Google is getting worse as it loses its fight against search engine spam::Aggressive SEO tactics are ruining search results on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, a team of researchers in Germany says.
Here come the totally organic Kagi users to tell us paying for search is worth it. Use DDG or anything else that’s free.
I mean, expecting everything on the internet to be free without question seems to be the beginning of some troubles. A more human and direct connection between people and the makers of the things they use seems to me a better scenario.
Agreed, folks have gotten far too used to the majority of internet being free without considering that the backend systems cost money to maintain and operate. Take Lemmy for example, we’re fortunate to have such a dedicated group of volunteers literally spending time and money to operate instances like Lemmy.world. However, the admins of LW have been fairly transparent about how much work it is to keep the instance running relatively smooth. Now imagine a service that’s handling millions of users versus tens of thousands, it just isn’t feasible to run it without crowdsource funding it, similar to how Wikipedia funds itself.
Join us man. It really is awesome.
Google has become even more worse because of all the sponsored content.
Is it correct to write more worse?
worserer
like the sauce
Worserer - A very incompetent sorcerer
Grammatically, probably not, but it definitely seems appropriate.
Self hosted whoogle front end for the win
Still doesn’t get rid of the seo
Of course, but having a privacy respecting frontend without any sponsored searches makes it significantly better
Yeah. Better than nothing. Btw have you tried alternative search engines? I mean from scratch search engines, not meta/outsourced search engines like searx, duckduckgo, whoogle, startpage. It is the only way to get rid of the seo, if the engine’s index is authentic. Personally, I have settled on Brave Search
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I’ve noticed that using more advanced syntax helps to alleviate the issue, in both DDG and Google. Specially apostrophes (to force exact terms) and the minus (to remove results containing a certain word or expression).
I noticed recently that Google has been ignoring my commands sporadically on Mobile. They still work if I switch to desktop mode tho
Commands? Those are wishes! //Google
*Search engine optimization spam. Spamming your bings and duck duck go won’t do anything.
I left everything google makes long ago, and I haven’t had any problem.
Block or Highlight Search Engine Results - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/
Takes some doing, but anytime you see a link to a garbage website that you don’t care to ever see again, add it to the shit-list. You’ll get better and better results the more you use it. Works on quite a few search engines.
I’ve been pretty happy with SearxNG as a stand-in as it collates from multiple search engines.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
These days, search engine results are filled with spam content, according to a new paper from a team of researchers in Germany.
And it’s making it harder for people to access helpful information online — the core function of the internet.
Though webpages that have more affiliate links and are more optimized are more likely to come up in search results, on average, they also “show signs of lower text quality,” the researchers said.
And as content generated by AI continues to flood the internet, the researchers said search engine results are likely to get worse.
“Affiliate marketing itself is in part responsible for what online content looks like now,” Janek Bevendorff, a research assistant at Leipzig University and coauthor on the paper, told The Register.
“Banning it entirely is probably not a solution” since many legitimate websites rely on affiliate marketing and SEO optimization as an important revenue stream, Bevendorff told the outlet.
The original article contains 402 words, the summary contains 154 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Paywall article. Please copy and paste.
Except the results from DDG are also a dumpster fire of affiliate spam “listicles,” Pinterest garbage, and unrelated SEO BS. Oh, and Reddit sure has risen in all the results since the APIpocalypse. Almost like big business is all starving each other’s backs.
Sadly haven’t found a search engine that beats it
Adding “site:” before a search string can help if you know what you’re looking for. Like site:wikipedia or site:GitHub.com
This kills off AI spam by constricting search results to pages from that site.
But google’s other problem that this doesn’t solve (just like Amazon) is that the first few results are always paid ads, and not actual search results.
Right, except if I knew beforehand which site has the results I need, why would I even use Google?
Sites that have discussions almost always have useless search functions. Using site: on those would likely give you better results then searching globally (even if it takes multiple searches).
