I feel like very recently— like, the last month— Google has gotten massively worse about aggressively correcting acronyms to unrelated, similarly-spelled words. Like look at this search where I search for the wiki for the C# game library FNA, and Google simply decides, without even offering a "Did you mean…", that it would be more interesting if I had instead been looking for "FNAF"
@mcc I think they also have turned this up on mobile. Like, if you search on desktop, it assumes maybe you typo'd one of your words, and if the spellchecked version has more results, it gives you that.
But on mobile it assumes two or three words are typo'd, so you get way less relevant results!
@mcc actually I just tried your search on android using the search widget and it gave me the fna github wiki , the wiki for some YouTube cartoon called "battle for dream island", and fna github wiki again.
So... I don't know
@mcc I did just realize that google search on my phone knows that I have the github app installed. so it may have adjusted my results based on that. The desktop version of google can't know that
@foone Hmm, I'm logged into google search which means it in principle knows my Android download history, but I don't know if privacy policy allows it to check that.
@mcc I've switched to Duckduckgo but they're not that different, sadly. Would kill for a search machine that has a "no, that is not what I want, stop correcting me" button, like Google used to.
@mcc I would love to see a collective recognition on at what point each search engines got worse for different people. I'd say Google fell off the usefulness for me around 2022, caveat being I don't allow personalised searches and Google searching in Chinese is always like googling each individual letters rather than words. But I also noted a new, more malicious thing where it will intentionally change terms. Like looking for "dairy-free" and it will give you all the promoted dairy products.
@mcc Also, Google Images, which has stepped up from showing unrelated images to outright refusing to show any images at all. Reverse image searching, once a thing I do exclusively with Google, has been replaced by the vastly inferior and heavily censored Google Lens. It has gotten to the point where I’m having to use Bing and Yandex to get reasonably uncensored results.
@mcc This is a big part of why I switched to Duck Duck Go. Google has gotten so bad they’re basically the same on many searches, only I find the DDG interface far less annoying. They closed the gap on themselves.
There has got to be a tipping point coming. I don’t know who is next, but Google‘s unassailableness just seems gone.
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