I don't think you understand, we are the ones who are getting fucked. Search results are getting worse and harder for you to find what you need with all the ads, fake news, sponsored sites, ai generated articles, etc.. Google doesn't care if you find high quality results, they will still gett traffic and their money because people won't just stop using it.
Google absolutely cares if people can't find quality results. They're not the only game in town at this point there are other alternatives. If people can't find what they're looking for they'll look elsewhere.
If you're not opposed to just moving to another big corporation then Bing is better in most ways than Google. Ecosia will give you the same results as Bing but they plant trees for every search. Duck Duck Go is good too
I've been hearing some good things about Kagi so i have been contemplating to try it.
It is subscription based but still;
If there is a service that serves me as a customer to better my experience using a search engine than I'll gladly pay for it.
I have been a Kagi subscriber for about a year and a half now. It is so much better than Google and DDG and everything else I've tried. It took a while for me to bite the bullet and pay, but now I'm paying for the year up front (for a nice discount, too). I would be very disappointed if I had to use another engine. They've even implemented a few feature requests I've had. That would never happen with Google.
With the rewrite rules, lenses, custom bangs, and domain raising/lowering, I get exactly what I need out of search.
It feels weird to pay at first, but it's a great service.
@krevassi@IcyPractice@CookieJarObserver@DeriHunter@Stijn, anyway, don't confuse AI search with AI chats, like ChatGPT, because these have a maybe better Language model, but it's knowledge base is limited (the one of ChatGPT is from 2021), they don't search in the web. Because of this the answers are not reliable or at least outdated.
@CatWeazle Tried out andi and it is excellent, looked for jobs in my area and it gave me a list of links, all relevant. Also you have an option to only read the linked articles, no need to visit the page so you can bypass gdpr-bs and advertisement. That's going to be bookmarked permanently.
@krevassi@IcyPractice@CookieJarObserver@DeriHunter@Stijn, Andi is also my favorite, it is perfect for most cases and one of the most privacy-protecting browsers. It also allows you to view YouTube videos directly in the results. It supports !Bang commands such as DDG and also to generate poems and even Haikus by putting /Generate or /Write before the question, other commands in the help.
You can add it directly to your search engines, so you can use it direct in your adress/searchbar
@krevassi@IcyPractice@CookieJarObserver@DeriHunter@Stijn, soon all search engines will include AI, DDG the next. Normal search engines like Startpage have many result pages, but most of them have nothing to do with your search, if it is more than one word, AI however allows direct complex questions and gives you a direct answer, also mentioning the sources for further investigation. It is only convenient to avoid the search engines of the big companies with results that are often interested
Try Searx. It is a free, open source metasearch engine so it gets results from other engines. Albeit much more privately than accessing those services directly.
It doesn't solve the issue that the answer you're looking for is on Reddit and isn't accessible anymore...
I mean, good for us for screwing up Reddit, but the transition impacts more than just Reddit itself because subreddits are going private and people are deleting their posts, that's a whole lot of knowledge just disappearing from the internet overnight and that's never a good thing! I don't know how many times I tried to find solutions or answers to tech related questions and the only place I could find an actual answer was on Reddit because it was actual people speaking to each other!
It took ten years for Reddit to reach that point, that's a whole lot of info that people probably won't talk about again but that might concern some people, just not as many as when the subject was new.
Example, my soundbar has technical issues when plugged in a certain way and that can be solved through some settings on the TV, the only answer I found was on Reddit on a sub that is now locked down. That soundbar isn't for sale anymore and hasn't been for a couple of years, so now I'm have to troubleshoot the issue by myself if I ever unplug it and if I sell it to someone when I upgrade then they're shit out of luck 🤷
Google is already an awful search engine and was most useful only for reddit. Search Engine Optimization killed it.
For example, do you know why every recipe Google shows has a 35 page life story article before the recipe? Because it takes you longer to scroll through the page and find the recipe and see if that's what you want. So Google says oh, this website is good and entertaining and full of so many words! This goes higher up! They don't write the stories because the bloggers care. They write stories because it's the only way to get their website seen on Google.
Meanwhile the website you actually want... The one with a simple recipe and no fluff? Well that's not going to sell itself to the Search Engine Optimization. So it's much further down on the list, several pages down.
The same shitification is happening with every website. Every website is a little bit worse than it has to be simply to optimize it's position on the almighty Google.
When you look for the "top shoes for running" or "best phone of 2023", those are just rushed articles with no research done by people with the sole purpose of pumping out millions of articles just to get some spots on Google.
Google was only good for linking to reddit because reddit could never get their search engine working no matter how many times they tried it.
because reddit could never get their search engine working no matter how many times they tried it
In their defense, writing a good search engine is very hard, even if you own all the data yourself.
There's a good reason why the litte search bar on reddit, on every forum ever created and on every corporate website is basically useless.
It's also why, among other minor technological challenges (like caching and indexing the entire fediverse), there is no search engine for Lemmy. Nor will there likely ever be one. Which is actually a pitty, because finding valuable information in a comment stashed on some minor instance will be nearly impossible - even for google.
Reddit was one of the last places on the internet where you could read content without logging in. Almost all of the internet is Dark Web now, inaccessible unless you log in.
@IcyPractice please add a link (archived link if current version is unavailable) to the article, whose image/screenshot you have shared, both on this post, and the crosspost. It becomes an issue for blind users to be able to read context of the post you share. And make it a habit.
One long-term solution would be to ask the relevant question in a relevant community on lemmy every time this happens to you. Then answer it yourself (or wait for other to), perhaps using the other site (via archive.org) as a reference when writing it up.
The important bit is to make sure the answer here is complete and not just a link to outside sources. That way it won't disappear if those other sites go offline.
With enough people doing this we can push lemmy into those search results and build a useful & independent repository of knowledge.
It was a terrible place to get info. Most answers were either deleted, someone showing off about the topic but not actually answering the question or OP saying "never mind, I figured it out" and riding off into the sunset.
Not just with subs going private, but with users purging their comments and posts along with their accounts. Just last night I was talking to a friend about something and wanted to pull up a post from a while back. Lo and behold, deleted and gone.
all attention to this mess is good imho. also remember chat gpt was trained on reddit data i until fall 2021 so should be able to pull on archived zeitgeist for a quick and dirty answer
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