At some point in the last two years I completely stopped using Google search in browser and just use Google maps to find businesses or ddg for searches. Actual Google search just has too many sponsored or promotional links
I just searched local restaurants near me and tried to sort by distance and the first option was 800 miles away, the second was 600 miles away. It’s not just Google search getting worse.
Was over for me when I opt out out of some of their data tracking shit and they started captcha’ing me everytime I browsed there. Like wtf Google what are you anymore? Sounds dumb but them changing the banner every week was the start of the end.
Here’s the thing, Google has changed. Over time, they’ve restructured themselves, initially purposefully, but now they’re facing the consequences of that.
Google genuinely does still have amazing programmers and engineers.
The trouble is that their expertise is in crafting systems that harvest personal information; expertise in other areas has been left to rot because there’s no point in improving them.
Gmail is already entrenched, as is search, YouTube, maps, android, etc.
They aren’t going to attract a significant amount more customers, so their main avenue for continued growth has been to become better at harvesting and processing data.
For a while that was fine, but now that this expertise has been lost, Google can’t make good products. They don’t have the ability to do so, it’s not that they don’t want people to use their software and think “wow this is actually pretty great”, it’s that they genuinely can’t do it anymore. Not unless the product you want is a telemetry system, in which case I doubt you’ll find anybody that can do such a stellar job.
It’s a part of why Google starts then kills so many projects. They want to expand to collect more data, but they don’t have the ability to create good services anymore, so it just ends up being an advanced data collector with a sub-par app/website on top of it. The company just isn’t structured to make things in any other way.
Pretty soon the internet will be almost completely ruined. Within a few years. AI bots will have spammed everything. Searches and web pages will be entirely faked bs. Reddit and Lemmy will have enough ai Bots commenting and pushing agendas/products that no one will have a clue who’s a real person. Information that’s true will be almost impossible to verify online.
In short, if you think the web has gotten bad now, you ain’t seen nothin yet.
I agree with the sentiment, but lack of AI has not stopped SEO hacking in the past. Sure it will help them go farther, but there are already tons of garbage websites hacking the top 1-5 results of any search
In the past I remember it made using search engines less rewarding than using web directories, web rings, asking people on forums etc. That was slower, but gave you results (and acquaintances). While using search meant looking through dozens of pages of search results, mainly SEO.
I am more optimistic on that one. AI provides a pretty clear way out of this, since it allows you to automatically detect the bullshit. Meaning either the bullshit has to raise so much in quality that it is indistinguishable from good content, in which case it would not be bullshit anymore, or it will get filtered. AI can also transform bad websites into good ones, like a super-powered ReaderMode, AdBlock and more all rolled into one, so a lot of the “lets plaster everything with ads” will lose effectiveness.
The problem over the last decade was that Google completely lost interest in being a search engine, they are just an ad company and as long as search leads you to more ads, they are quite happy. So the user experience went down the toilet.
The real problem with AI is that it will remove the incentive for the authors. Content producers want to get paid, with AI you can just extract the information from an article without ever viewing the article or the ads around it.
At some point, probably soon, AI content will generate so much data it becomes untenable to store all the scraped data.
We’ll also reach a point where it becomes much more costly to parse the data for AI spam+trustworthiness+topics. If you need LLMs just to filter spam, that is a large step up in costs and infrastructure vs current methods.
When that happens what happens to search? The quality will have to degrade or the margins will drop off sharply.
They have already been trying to use ai to combat and identify ai in college and highschool papers. So far it’s been severely ineffective. AI has gotten pretty good at writing out a sentence or two that looks like it’s real. If ai improves enough I doubt they’ll be much of a way to identify it all.
It’s not about identifying AI or even spam, but about extracting useful information. Are the claims made in a source backed by other sources? Do they violate information from trusted sources? That’s all stuff that an AI can reason about and then discard the source as junk or condense it down to the useful information in it.
Basically you completely skip browsing the Web yourself and just use the AI to find you what you want. Think of it like some IMDB or Wikipedia, but covering everything and written and curated by AI. When the AI doesn’t already know some fact, it goes crawling the Web and finding it out for you, expanding its knowledge base in the process.
Or see the ship computer from StarTrek, you don’t see the people there browsing the Web, you see them getting data in exactly the format they need and they can reformat and filter it as needed.
At the moment there are still some technical hurdles, the AI systems we have are all still a little to stupid for this. But that seems to be the direction we are heading, things like summarizer bots already do a pretty good job and ChatGPT is reasonably good at answering basic questions and reformatting it the way you need it. Only a matter of time until it gets good enough that you couldn’t do a better job yourself.
You’re looking at it in a flawed manner. AI has already been making up sources and names to state things as facts. If there’s a hundred websites for claiming the earth is flat and you ask an ai if the earth is flat, it may tell you it is flat and source those websites. It’s already been happening. Then imagine more opinionated things than hard observable scientific facts. Imagine a government using AI to shape opinion and claim there was no form of insurrection on Jan 6th. Thousands of websites and comments could quickly be fabricated to confirm that it was all made up. Burying the truth into obscurity.
You have plenty of literature that can act as ground truth. This is not a terribly hard problem to solve, it just requires actually focusing on it. Which so far simply hasn’t been done. ChatGPT is just the first “look, this can generate text”. It was never meant to do anything useful by itself or stick to the truth. That all still has to be developed. ChatGPT simply demonstrates that LLM can process natural language really well. It’s the first step in this, not the last.
I think this is part of why Google holds on to youtube despite it not making them money. Without that Google would just be the map and email company. They would completely lose the appearance of “owning” any part of the internet.
“Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers’ measures.”
Click bait headline. I see they’re good at SEO themselves.
Yeah, the paper shows a startling lead for Google, more than I would have expected.
I try to swap to DDG every so often (usually once a year, giving it about a month), but every time search ends up being frustrating enough so I don’t stick around. Nevermind their boneheaded decision of using Apple Maps over something that actually wants to be useful like OpenStreetMap. But what I didn’t expect was just how big the difference between the two is when analyzed, damn.
Yeah, DDG skips all the sponsored links but I generally find what I’m looking for faster on Google if I just skip half the page rather than trying to find the right incantation to bring up what I’m looking for on DDG.
Would you be able to give an example of what you couldn’t find with DDG that was simpler to find with the help of Google? Sounds interesting to me, as I use DDG pretty much exclusively.
I don’t remember the specific case, most of the things I Google are local businesses. I find for local businesses Google is a top tier resource. Google can tell me how busy a business is right now, or if they’re closed because of the weather. I often have to do some digging to find the business’ page on DDG, if they have one. If I’m looking for a local contractor, like a water heater or drywall repair guy, the ads aren’t even that intrusive, they’re literally what I’m looking for. On DDG, I’ve got to do some clicking to find a contractor and then all the reviews are on Yelp. General contractors will have a list sometimes on DDG, but it’s not all that helpful, I’ve never seen a phone number without clicking once or twice.
But on the flipside, if that data were publically owned and anonymized I’d genuinely want that kept. Since the feature is super useful. Same with busses and so on.
I’ve tried, many times over the years, to use DDG and you are 100% spot-on. I find it damn-near impossible to find what I need without some deep voodoo magic to somehow craft the perfect query. It’s been a decade+ since I’ve gone to page 2 of a Google search. Using DDG I can be 3 or 4 pages deep before maybe finding the answer. There is SOOO much irrelevant stuff to filter through.
It sucks, I don’t want to use Google, but there doesn’t seem to be a great alternative.
Honestly it’s been a yearish since I’ve tried and my memory is shit so I don’t have any specific examples I can give now. In general though the bulk of my searches involve:
A local company I need for xyz or a specific type of restaurant
Issues/repairs for a specific make/model/year car (I do lots of my own work)
Various homelab related things (docker services for xyz)
Details about a movie or TV show (sometimes a specific episode)
Prices for products and where I can get them (trying to de-Amazon)
How to fix xyz in my home
I’m sure there are more, but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
I find that DDG is terrible at finding anything regionally specific, probably because I’m not in the US. I always get a shitload of US hits and usually some German hits if I try to specify location…neither are useful to me.
Tbh using DDG is more like using old (and I mean old) Google. Googling things used to be a skill people had. You googled things for other people because they had no idea how to get good results. That’s exactly how DDG is. It takes rewiring your brain to use it, and I’ve been using it for a year now.
I do go to Google sometimes. Specifically for opening hours in stores, and when I’m trying to look for products from smaller online stores I do not yet know of, which takes me to page 3-4 of Google but would’ve taken me far longer on DDG.
The country switch on DDG is a godsend because you can manipulate searches with it and get some really specific results if you know what you’re doing. It’s the learning curve that makes DDG worse if you just want to find something without having to teach yourself to search. Which is definitely a point to Google, but if you want a very specific result it’s better to battle that learning curve.
I should also add that I’m not really anti Google in any way. I just stopped finding what I was looking for about 70% of the time, and instead found products and shit to consume. It’s very useful for that stuff, but I never find obscure tech solutions with Google.
All true. DDG is my default search engine now. Yeah. I use others often enough, Google, Bing, searXNG…but I find that if I can’t find it relatively easily on DDG it means I’m going to have to sift through a bunch of SEO sites and sponsored links on Google to find it. It won’t be much easier. One of the most frustrating thing about Google is the “fuck you” they’ve given to search modifiers. The “-“ and quotes are pretty much meaningless. For instance one can enter an error code from a program, perfectly quoted, and Google will tell you there aren’t any good search results. BS. They just can’t figure out how to jam ads into what you’re looking for or something. Bing or DDG will return what you need, it might just be on page 2.
I mean, kagi is great. I too got frustrated with the shittiness of DDG and others like ecosia. Paying for a search engine sounds crazy but I’m not going back. Google’s results are absolutely terrible compared to kagi so 🤷♀️
I honestly think there’s something wrong with Google’s individual customization. They’re leaning in a little too hard on things you’re likely to be searching for rather than what you’re actually searching for.
DDG gives me better results for random searches on things I’m not usually looking for. When I was looking for Godot exercises yesterday every hit on DuckDuckGo for ages was just exactly what I wanted. When I went over to search Google there was a lot of more varied topics. Now, hands down if I need what time a certain store closes at a certain location Google will give me exactly what I’m looking for. Likewise if I need to know what’s near something else Google is absolutely superior to DDG. Google’s image search is also far more accurate and useful.
But then I come back and look for a medical condition for my cat that I’ve never heard of before, You passed by the sponsors and they’ve got a couple of random pages about it maybe a Reddit article or two that’s now blocked, but it quickly devolves to adjacent searches.
But if I go and search for any of my usual suspects, The rankings come back pretty decent.
I’ve run into that, I recently started playing The Finals (which I recommend), and Google searches have a hard time not changing my searches to American football, even if I put “video game” in the search
I switched to using startpage.com recently based on a comment I read on Lemmy and I’ve been generally pretty pleased with the results. Just one more google service I can stop relying on.
I nearly left them after reading through all that, but I kinda reached the conclusion that they have open discussion about it on the company portal with users, they’ve given their justifications, and they are listening. Who knows though, maybe they’re just funnelling through brave to save money, and it’s got nothing to do with search results.
To me, it’s an icecream with a smell of dogshit, rather than an icecream topped with dogshit. It’s not completely perfect, but it’s a struggle to find any service that’s 100% agreeable nowadays.
It really is terrible. I was a DDG early adopter and then Kagi. It’s been a while since Google has been my daily driver, but I do sometimes use it and the results are just bad. There’s so much spam and the results page is a mess. To my eyes, Google is worse than either Kagi or DDG in just about every way except speed. The only other thing I can really think of where Google is much better is in local search. They are damn good at that.
I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. Here in the Netherlands, DuckDuckGo results are poor for anything local. I fall back to Google relatively frequently, although for day to day stuff it’s quite okay. I do often head straight to Wikipedia…
DDG is largely Bing search at the backend, unless I’m much mistaken. They do value-add work around privacy, but in the basic sense of “does a DDG search return good results”, it’s largely the same as Bing.
Since you say DDG is better, what’s your take on the link we’re discussing here, then? After all, the paper they talk about shows that DDG (and Bing, which is the vast majority of DDG’s input) is signficantly worse than Google.
Or, to quote from the page instead of having to go into the paper:
Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers’ measures.
If I’m reading correctly, they’re saying that google is much better that filtering out SEO spam. I’m no expert, but maybe some of the supposed “spam” may have some actual relevant content, and that they are just good at gaming SEO. However, this doesn’t excuse google from blatantly placing advertised links as top search results, even if they aren’t relevant at all.
I’m okay with ads, but I find it misleading when they appear as the top search results. I’d be okay with them if they were placed after the top 3 actual relevant results. Even better if ads were on a side bar area.
So far, for most of the random things I search, ddg has given me more relevant and useful results than google (just casual testing over a month), even if they are better at filtering out SEO spam. I may check out google again for some searches, but so far, ddg has been working well for me.
My wife and I were looking up a specific calendar. The search query wasn’t particularly complicated and very clear. In Google, the first result was a 2023 version of the calendar, and the rest of the results were completely useless. In Duck Duck Go, the calendar we wanted was the top result. I can’t imagine what it’s like to use Google for a search that’s actually complicated.
And yet the very link you’re saying this under is essentially about how much better Google is than DDG or Bing. 😅 Just saying, the headline is garbage, while Google got worse, DDG and Bing (both also analyzed) got worser, faster, harder.
Idk, I use DDG as my default, but I find myself adding !g to many queries after checking out the first page of results; so much so that my brain has made such a strong connection to “!g -> better results” that I often find myself automatically typing it in Google as well when my results are unsatisfactory.
Does !g cause DuckDuckGo to search through Google’s search results - and if so does DDG do a better job of prioritizing the relevant ones? I’ve used DDG for a couple years but I didn’t know that syntax.
!g just redirects you to Google search. DDG itself is just Bing with extra marketing. If you want Google+cleanup you have to use Kagi, which gathers its results by combining different sources.
RE: potential astroturfing (my comment last time); from my comment downthread that one:
Anytime [paid search engines] are mentioned I suppose I’ll jump in and say…SearXNG is a popular non-commercial alternative. I wanted to throw Grasp in to give a commercial competitor a shout but they’ve “paused”.
Update on Grasp:
We will be back soon and will open-source our code.
Neat, wonder if SearXNG x Grasp would be synergistic.
I am also using SearcXNG and the search results are usually good even though sometimes on the light side and I still have to resort to other search engines.
I’ve been finding it very useful on various SearXNG instances to change the “language” from “auto” to “en” (English) for most of my searches, or to a specific language if I’m searching for something local or something that’s likely to be written about in that specific language. The search results change drastically!
It seems there is an arms race between search engines and content creators. The latter come up with those pages that will tell you the life history of the writer and their dogs, and 20 ads, five popups, subscription offers, allow the site to access your location and send updates questions and 'read more’s later you might find out the thing you need. All this to have more ads and rank higher in various searches. 10 minutes ago I wanted to find out what the hell a float needle is. I couldn’t. ChatGPT gave me the answer I needed in two questions.
Yeah. In fairness to Google entire industries have risen around the sole-purpose of manipulating their system for nefarious reasons. That’s a hard thing to deal with.
Doesn’t Google provide search results based on your search history? It’s algorithm probably worked against them or something. I’ve heard that anonymous searches usually get better results.
I have a gut feeling that people who frequently bemoan bad search results fall into one of two categories:
They have all kinds of tracking, and constantly watch Youtube Shorts or TikTok videos. Meaning their learned behavior is “This person enjoys low-quality spam content and lots of ads”, because let’s face it, portrait-mode shortform videos are primarily that, a vessel to push ads pretending to be genuinely content hidden among content barely better than ads in the first place.
They have tracking entirely supressed and their browser so hardened that Google can’t even know that if this user puts in “needle”, they do mean a physical object. They don’t even know the language the user is searching in, basically. As a result virtually no weighting happens which allows spam content to rise to the top based on its built-in SEO efforts.
In the end, the second case is not something Google can truly optimize for. Or rather, it’ll never be their intention to do that. Though I will say DDG’s and Bing’s equally or worse search results indicate that a certain level of tracking might actually be beneficial, but we’d need a morally trustworthy keeper of the data (as in, it needs to be owned by the people or something!), nto Google.
And in the first case, I wish they’d do something about that. I can see why before the proliferation of the constant-ads-as-content spam that is shorts, tracking video watching habits to figure out general habits made sense, but especially because you no longer actively decide on which video to watch, this can no longer be valid input to user behavior analysis.
Just putting in “float needle” gets me only relevant results, those being a mix of what a float needle is, what it does, and a few shop results for places where I can buy one.
Anyone who creates genuine good content has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google.
I’ve switched to Ecosia and while it’s not perfect, I now find what I look for, which became impossible with Google somewhere about 2014-2016, I think?
I know it’s a “secondary” search engine.
But the thing is that no, hundred times no, anyone who generates ad revenue has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google. Everyone else gets screwed.
Switching to Ecosia alone made me much more comfortable with using Web.
I’ve switched to Ecosia and while it’s not perfect, I now find what I look for, which became impossible with Google somewhere about 2014-2016, I think?
Ecosia’s results are pulled from Bing, and as the very paper linked here shows, Bing’s results are significantly worse than Google’s, even accounting for Google’s deteriorating result quality. Notice in particular the percentage of spam.
I’ve looked through the paper diagonally now, and since it’s a scanned PDF, I’ll get back to it to read it patiently.
I still see that they chose one criterion which is maybe less relevant for things I look for, which are usually not very popular. There’s probably a curve somewhere which is better for Bing, apparently, than for Google in that point.
Because it’s my personal experience that I find things much faster with Ecosia than with Google.
Yes. But it’s always been like that. The shipping quality hasn’t declined, therefore “Amazon is no longer good at shipping” makes no sense. Of all the things to complain about Amazon, that’s not it.
Nah last several times I ordered, I saw one date expected before I order. The next day the expected date changes and it takes a week to turn up. They’ve been trash for a while.
That’s the exact reason I discontinued prime. The shipping rarely was on time. I dropped prime and didn’t notice a change in shipping time. They advertise to you in hopes you’ll forget or something and I’m sure a fair amount of people do.
I think the key is not good at shipping compared to themselves in the past. Same with Google.
They’re still better than the alternatives, but they’ve gotten much worse in quality all around, and they squeezed out competitors years ago so there’s no viable alternatives that aren’t WAY worse.
It’s anecdotal, but for me they’ve been better than ever over the last year.
Agreed about the competitor issue, although I don’t recall any competitor who was even close or looked like on the path to become close.
I tried ordering something from Newegg the other day just to avoid using Amazon. I didn’t need it right away, but then saw ETA was 2 weeks. From Amazon it was next-day (so I could do the thing I wanted to do that weekend). Cancelled the Newegg order.
I don’t know how we get a viable competitor on that front, but damn, there is no one that seems close on the logistical front.
I’m hoping some antitrust effort will lead to Amazon being forced to open up its warehouses/shipping to other retailers, I guess.
Just tried looking up if it’s safe to light a fireplace fire after having had a sinus surgery. (It’s very cold here in Seattle tonight and I had septoplasty/FESS/turbinate reduction yesterday afternoon.)
All my results were about smoking cigarettes and a result for whether it’s okay to box after surgery. Not a single source to suggest a fire being safe or not.
That page is pretty misleading, though: it’s mostly talking about ‘Instant Amswers’ which is its AI (presumably) paid partnership answer bot thing at the top of the results. Further down, it says: “Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing.”
So, although they don’t use Bing exclusively, that’s where the majority of non AI-answer-bot stuff is coming from. And I’m guessing the AI is Bing/Microsoft powered anyway, although I can’t be sure.
For me the specific question remains unanswered. There are a lot of results about the health effects on respiration, but none about specifically after a sinus surgery. Might be a question so specific that the internet at large has no answer to it.
What I do not get (on Google, search from Germany) is what you describe, my results are all relevant on the first 3 pages barring 2 results about the surgery instead of the fireplace.
Can’t you ring up your usual doctor to ask? Or well, I guess you’d need to call a lung specialist, but they ought to be able to answer that, no? Or your surgeon who did the surgery.
No the surgeon isn’t available to talk to, but you can call and speak directly to a ENT department nurse for after surgery issues. This is a far better option than ANY search engine answer.
Your story is obviously anecdotal but I think it pretty much aligns with what what we’ve all experienced. You search for something and get results for something else. You change your search to try to get results you asked for and get… literally the exact same results. It’s infuriating.
This is why I use Bing Chat for specific questions.
“Hello, this is Bing. I’m sorry to hear that you had sinus surgery and that you’re feeling cold. 😟
According to some sources, it’s best to avoid exposure to smoke, dust, and other irritants after sinus surgery, as they can interfere with the healing process and cause inflammation. Therefore, lighting a fireplace fire may not be a good idea for your recovery.”
Bing Chat provides sources to the claims so you can verify:
I keep hearing about Kagi, are they reputable? I moved from Google to DDG and I do a fair bit of searching so I would be interested, but I guess there’s a bit of a one-company-knowing-my-search-history going on (totally unironically).
Interestingly according to the linked paper, DDG (and naturally Bing) are significantly performing worse than Google, even in the face of Google having gotten worse.
I always had a gut feeling about that when using DDG, but interesting to see the numerical difference. (31% vs 23% vs 9% spam)
DDG is worse, at least anecdotally. But kagi is much better. Looks like the researchers didn’t study that one though so no “proof”, but anecdotally I completely stopped using Google for search.
That is still just one specific measure. They will also have a specific definition of what they consider spam. What I have found, admittedly anecdotally, is that the results just don’t answer the search anymore. The results aren’t spam they just aren’t good.
DDG did have better results in one major instance for me in figuring out an error message that Google gave me literally no results. DDG has several appropriate answers that LED me to a solution. I don’t think that will stay the case overall but Google does need to do better.
I’ve been using brave search since their early days. They used to suck, but I pushed my feelings aside and just kept trying. Now, brave out performs google on a lot of search results. Sometimes, you have to add a bit more context to your query, but it is worth staying private and not dealing with all the SEO garbage. If the results don’t fit your need, just leave feedback and it will probably be addressed soon.
I did not know that. Damn. It’s a small index, sure (so you might not get very many results for some queries) but they say they do that to avoid spam on it.
That might be a trade-off that is necessary in the future. Such a huge portion of the web has become crap that trying to index the entire web naturally makes the index you build crap, too.
lol. Everyone has the right to their own opinion. It is funny how search engines have become much like sports teams where people are very strong in their usage and opinions of one over the other. I will have to look into Kagi. I considered running my own searx instance on a raspberry pi, but have yet to try it out.
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