It would be helpful if google actually responded and actioned on reports. i see malicious websites on search every day that I have reported numerous times.
They did for ~20yrs and probs still do to an extent but it’s an arms race[1]. Every time Google implement anti-spam features, SEO companies adapt. The problem is the webmaster guidelines Google published openly are often the backbone of any decent SEO.
I’ve been a web dev since I left uni in 2005 and worked for several SEO companies and even founded one. IN that time they’ve successfully destroyed multiple SEO/marketing agencies with their tweaks. They’ve decimated entire industries with their monopolistic practices (flight information, shopping comparison, mapping, etc).
I don’t wanna get into the blame game between Google vs SEO companies except to say: Google are cunts and you should vote by leaving them. They are not a benevolent company. They are the Micro$oft of the web and have ruined businesses[2] worldwide. They’re just very good at PR and keep a lot of the bullshit they do out of the public eye.
[1] Matt Cutts was a fascinating guy and was at the forefront of Google’s spam fight and communicated regularly with web devs/marketers.
[2] In addition to the mentioned flight information and price comparison monopolising. They fucked smaller e-commerce companies effectively handing business to big players like Amazon and eBay by forcing PAID usage of their shopping comparison and Adwords service.
Recommended Alternative Search Engines
You.com - has AI chatbot as well as standard search using Bing
Looks like those theories about algorithms becoming recursive and ineffective will be proven sooner than we expected. I wonder if the emergence of crap AI sped the process up.
Despite how bad Google Search had become, DuckDuckGo and Bing are somehow still worse. While Google displays the result in the first few, DDG and Bing have no idea what I’m looking for.
I don’t know much my opinion matters: but the unique features in kagi honestly really help me find what I need. I can lower domains, or raise other ones, it can search archives and has a general set of features that make digesting and finding relevant results easier. It’s like a breath of fresh air, I can search and find not just endlessly search.
Anecdotal evidence, but I swapped out Google for DDG about 5-6 years back and haven’t missed it. I do use Google sometimes but it’s once in 4-5 months when DDG fails me, which is acceptable to me.
Same here, I can usually find everything within the first 3-4 entries unless it’s a bit too abstract than it ends up at the bottom of the 1st page. I don’t understand people complaining about it so much as I depend on search engines for day to day and work related stuff so literally several times everyday. Although it’s possible I got used to how it works but if so then I would have had to swap between ddg and google alot if the quality actually was that low.
DDG just kinda sucks for basic information. When I took up a business, google gives me the location, phone number and some relevant information about the business. DDG gives me their website.
Do you know how many scams happen because it’s ridiculously easy for anyone to edit the “knowledge” panel? I’d rather click an extra button and get the real number from the business’ own website than trust whatever is on Google.
“You’re not this obtuse are you?” – uncalled for, but, I guess you are who you are. So, you do you, buddy.
This is beyond stupid. The panel gives basic information, if you’re making anything beyond a decision to follow up based on that you deserve whatever you get. I also know how easy it is to manipulate the website. Information is malleable, it seems your brain is not.
I am. In this case though the stupidity presented warrants being noted. stupid ass bitches crying over being called stupid ass bitches isn’t anything new.
idk about bing, but duckduckgo either seems to be missing the index itself, or only works when you give it specific queries instead of generic keywords like Google.
I need to try kagi, in my usage I’ve found brave is best of the alternatives, and I’d put qwant after brave, though I might be biased by how nice qwant looks 😅
I tend to do a lot of technical-related searches. I’m finding I’m getting consistently better results from DuckDuckGo / Bing – what I’m looking for is usually available on the first page without having to faff around.
With Google however, it was drawing parallels to what I’m looking for but not what I explicitly queried. I had to either enable verbose search, or manipulate the search to look for specific words. Even then what I was looking for was in the 3-4 page.
On google, I started seeing too many of the first results tagged as “ad”. It became even more concerning when those tag dissapeared but the same websites showed up.
I used to able to trouble shoot nearly anything I needed to, but now I come across completely unrelated posts more than I come across solutions.
I was iffy about bing, I still kind of am, but at least I find what I’m looking for most of the time. I’m personally going to wait a bit before trying out other browsers, when there’s a bit less risk of them selling. I remember a good android launcher that used to be trusted before they sold to another company
I hear this a lot, but I changed from google to DDG about a year ago and haven’t even considered looking back. I can find everything I need quite easily and can only think of maybe a handful of times that I have had to resort to using a bang to try and find something using another search engine. I’m very curious what the difference is between my experience and that of others who have problems DDG.
Yeah I can’t actually notice the difference. Granted I’m not paying much attention, but that means most of the times I’m finding satisfying results with ddg.
On technical stuff, I find DDG better than google since I don’t have to wade through their sponsored ad and results. Google is getting unusable that way. I try it every few months when I can’t get an answer on DDG and it doesn’t work any better.
I totally agree with that. I’ve also found Google worse about being influenced by SEO tactics (probably just because it’s targeted for that) and so you get bogus results like GeeksForGeeks that are often really poorly written and irrelevant, sometimes even wrong, up at the top.
The amount of AI articles that are a bunch of padded bullshit designed to get indexed as more credible “long form” sources is getting out of hand. Sometimes it takes a couple minutes to wade through the intro bullshit where they give a bunch of background yammering, and then you find out it’s recycled trash is really starting to make research take time again.
IDK how you get around this but whichever search engine does will be very successful.
I recently switched aswell and am surprised how well it works. I thought it didn’t worked good enough but I never failed to find what I was looking for so far. Very nice.
TBH I didn’t even notice that I was using DDG when switching to librewolf other than the icon on the top bar. I have found everything I have needed, though I usually use “site:lemmy.world” (for example) anyways.
It’ll be a frigid day in hell before I pay some company to store my search history keyed to my CC for the inevitable sellout day. I’ll get by with DDG, which frankly works better than a search engine that doesn’t track your clicks has any right to.
They’re talking about the open source privacy search engine SearXNG and saying hailcorporate prob cuz Kagi charges and there are a ton of people in this thread advertising it
Ah, I think paying for things that make your life better is a good thing, not everything has to be FOSS, unless there’s a differentiator that makes it better, it ends up being a “I’m better than you” without any value. I am wondering if there is any value add from alternatives though.
This will shock you but… most search engines derive results either directly from google results or from a few other providers which generate results in very similar ways.
As long as they keep getting money out of it. and with record numbers year over year. they have no incentive to change course. Google has a monopoly over search engine that affords them the unique position of not giving a dime about user satisfaction. the users are trapped anyway!
It really seems like nowadays that internet search is just people trying to game the system for clicks. But it has made everything superficial and fake. Not to mention, utterly useless.
I don’t know what the solution is really. It’s easy to say ‘dont do SEO’ but people will just find some way to game that system too. It was great when Reddit wasn’t complete shit, because the subreddits dedicated to a particular topic had great insights into whatever topic you wanted to know about. But now that it’s a cesspool, and Lemmy is tiny in comparison, id say get used to the Internet being like this for a while.
IMO It’s not just optimization or monetization. It’s the abandonment of the open internet (blogs, forums, etc) in favor of walled garden apps that are closed off and operate like a black box. SEO itself is just metadata and helps find things during search nothing malicious about it, but the problem is due to web abandonment, the things there are to find are so low effort you stick to big tent apps like reddit instead of sifting through blog spam
Especially if you somehow tryout some popular program, for example wordpress. The most search results are just different best of xy plugins lists. Even if you search for issues. Its like you are suddenly in a whole different bubble of the internet and everything is broken.
Try asking Lemmy a question. I was fiddling with FF earlier and thought “I wonder what the best FF addons are atm”. Instead of Googling and getting a bunch of 3-10yo irrelevant blog posts I just posted in Ask Lemmy for peoples opinions. Lemmy may be small, but people like helping. Not only do you get your answer but you help Lemmy grow!
It’s a cliche but it’s perfect right now - Lemmy is at the perfect moment for you to “be the change you want to see in the world”
You could same the same of any incumbent who’s been an industry leader for a couple of decades… “they’re ripe to be supplanted!”.
Google has done a pretty great job of diversifying and building out an ecosystem though. As in, if you invented superior search today google would barely notice because everyone still uses chrome and android and is funnelled into google search. Google would have years to emulate that superior search before their user base was significantly impacted.
I think google is the best and has our best interests at heart. surely there must a reason we non genius minds can’t understand as to why google made things the way they are.
All hail google, I would give my baby to google in the hopes they will turn them into a superhuman google baby
btw i hate how google+ used plus sign for tagging people, they even changed YouTube to use them (even though YouTube comments were very loosely coupled wot g+)
Google Maps is always dead on for me. I regularly drive very long distances across the US. The time estimates are within minutes of accurate even when there are sudden or extreme backups like in Los Angeles. There’s plenty to criticize Google for, but it isn’t Google maps for me.
It’s kind of shocking how bad it has gotten. I never thought SEO would win in the end, but they did and now Google is fairly useless. Like if AI doesn’t work out long-term what are they left with? A bunch of inferior products people don’t trust anymore or have better/comparable alternatives. GCP sucks compared to AWS and Azure, Android has more freedom than iOS but feels developmentally behind on most fronts in terms of end user experience. Google Search is now about even with Bing and otherwise privacy focused Search Engines have improved to the point of being viable for most cases. Gmail has let in more spam than ever and there’s a lot of alternatives now as well with bo meaningful improvements coming to it. Maps is still probably the market leader there, but more competition in this space too. Google harvests your data to an extreme amount and consumers are privacy aware than previous generations which adds to the distrust of a target demographic. Lastly Youtube is making the user experience worse with every update. While there is no real alternative right now given the overhead required, there is at least a desire for a good alternative should one ever come about.
Feels like Google is losing on every front and bet the farm that AI will save them. We’ll see I guess.
I agree with that - iOS looks good but Android is actually more functional to get stuff done in. Though, caveat being whose Android - some vendor customizations are horrifying
It doesn’t feel like there’s any real alternative to Google search. Most of the privacy based search websites are really just Google or Bing on the backend. The only other index is Yandex the Russian one, which, yeah. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but the internet search space is approaching peak enshittification, and it doesn’t look like anyone is stepping up to meaningfully change anything. No private companies seem willing to actually square up with Google, considering the investment it would take. Honestly I don’t see things getting better anytime soon. This is just another symptom of the erosion of the social contract in the US and the rampant greed that’s driving it. Nothing we can do can’t be enshittified by bad actors in this environment. Not to be too US centric, most of the big tech companies are based here so our garbage culture fucks over everyone.
Brave has their own index as well. And if you want Google results in not-enshittified, try Kagi.
That aside, the biggest frustrating in the search space is the complete lack of innovation. All those search engines and their alternatives do the same thing and look the same. There haven’t been new features or new sources of information in about a decade. The whole space has been extremely stagnant.
The only new thing we got recently was ChatGPT, but as search engine replacement it really doesn’t cut it right now, it can enter Wikipedia-style general knowledge question ok’ish, but completely falls apart on anything even mildly obscure (e.g. summaries of lesser known movies are completely wrong). I hope that something good comes from all the AI development, but BingChat so far is a really lack luster and ham-fisted attempt at integrating search with AI, often performing much worse than plain ChatGPT instead of better.
The vast majority of Google’s revenue comes from advertising, which will remain relevant even if search more or less dies. They put ads in almost every other one of their products, not to mention the ad space they buy and then resell on other sites.
Android has more freedom than iOS but feels developmentally behind on most fronts in terms of end user experience
That’s the one point I strongly disagree with you: Android, for all it’s flaws, has free and open source spin-offs (LineageOS, for one), that are the ONLY chance you have as an end user to own your phone / privacy (barring hardware backdoors or installing stupid apps)
Lineage is cool. It’s an edge case though, and while relevant for folks on Lemmy, it is probably less than 1% of Android users and not really a selling point for the argument that Google is going in the right direction, main point of the post. I do love the project and ran it as my daily for several years, hope it gets more traction.
It’s not a selling point for google at all, I was just mentioning it to state that the code base of Android is also the base for the only viable free phone OS for now. postmarketOS is getting there, but too slow and with too little support. SailfishOS was cool until it got taken over (financed) mostly by the fascist government of Moscovia.
One thing I have noticed is any search is more likely to pop up a news article with that word vs a good article on it. Look up say a band and I will get a lot of articles about some recent things they did vs the website for the band or an indepth look at the band. I really don’t need twenty versions of the same article from news networks all copying each other. It feels like it is favoring new stuff first and can’t see that it is repeating itself.
Seconded. Looking up a past event on a subject (like a band) that has had a more recent, especially “viral” event happen to it, is like wrestling a shaved bear.
Nevermind that all of the recent shit is just articles quoting eachother, adding virtually nothing of value except noise.
Then if do you click the link, the article has almost nothing to do with the title. No confirmations, no details, just random claims from someone who you’ve never heard of before.
SEO, people trying to game SEO in a hundred different ways, and garbage scammy websites with no clear purpose have pretty much ruined search results. I remember the ancient days of Google when search brought you maybe 3 or 4 pages of results. This is why AI has become necessary, to winnow through the garbage and give you direct, and hopefully correct, answers.
I’ve played with Bard a little, asking it for details in public-domain novels I’ve read, and 3/4 of the time it is just making shit up. But it’s great at solving quadratic equations.
Google has gotten really bad with the sponsored links. Not only are they only identified with a small “ad sponsored” disclaimer that is easy to miss on a phone screen but I’ve run into sponsored results that are blatant scams that I’ve had to report to google. Seemingly no effort on their part to screen these before they let them get posted.
I’ve also had to resort to altering my search engine results to always filter out quora and pinterest because they have gamed SEO so badly that they choke my results with garbage. Both demand you open accounts to see much (nope) and quora is a cesspool of bad answers and trolls.
Looking for product reviews is a real struggle. I’ll see the same review plastered across a bunch of sketchy websites at the top of my results. They look like they only exist for manufacturers to post paid reviews.
A no bullshit search engine that will make you feel like back in the day when you search for something, you actually get results for what you searched for.
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