Has Google Search gotten so much worse in the last couple of weeks?
Has Google Search gotten so much worse in the last couple of weeks?
I know it's been getting worse over time, but I could still find what I needed after some digging.
Recently it's been like 10 minutes of adjusting search terms, still getting completely useless or irrelevant results, and me just giving up afterwards. Other search engines seem just as bad.
If you use Firefox you can add a Search Engine that removes the google cruft.
In about:config browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh Boolean, hit the plus sign to add. Exit out of that screen. Then go to Search engines in Settings and “Add” [ whatever name you want to call it ] as a new search engine. And paste this URL and save it. https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
You will see that it deletes everything but search when you use it. You can also just use the url but you must replace the %s with your search term, like red+espresso. Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=red+espresso&udm=14
I'm sure this works for other browsers, I just use Firefox.
I was honestly getting so frustrated the other day at work when searching for something very specific and coming up empty handed. Tried DuckDuckGo and even fucking Bing and found what I needed in a matter of seconds. Google search is trash now. I have to go to the second page or further just to find something that isn't an ad, AI response, or reddit. None of which are helpful.
I recommend Kagi, I've been using it for about six months now and results - especially small web results like blogs - are so much better. I also have a pretty good time image searching compared to when I was on Google.
Yes it's paid, but that to me is the price of resisting enshittification. Find a company that isn't a publicly traded for-profit world-burner and pay them for their service. Is the idea of paying for email and search an alien concept to me? Yes. But I'm either paying Google whatever €120 a year in eyeballs on ads and an increasingly worse experience, or I'm paying €80 a year and getting a markedly better experience.
Now it's up to Kagi and Proton to not turn into shitty companies while other competitors catch up and we have a thriving ecosystem again.
SEO became too well known and is now filled with bullshit.
yes. use any of the following, in no particular order:
- ecosia.org - A non-profit certified B corp that plants trees by serving ads in your search results. Bing search underneath.
- duckduckgo.com - A privacy friendly search engine. Primarily sourced from Bing but mixes in a few other sources.
- any SearXNG instance - A self-hostable search front-end to various search engines.
- marginalia.nu - specifically 'random' - An independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.
I used to a hater of Kagi but honestly its a damn good alternative search engine. They are doing some actual innovation and are very transparent. I still prefer a good searXNG instance but searxng is more for technical people who understand decentralized meta search instances. Here's my simple guide on search engine alternatives to help you get away from google best you can.
Google is finally collapsing under the weight of its own greed and lack of innovation. Now other companies are showing up to steal their lunch especial with the big monopoly case going on right now.
I stopped using it last year it got so bad, I ended up using DDG but that’s gotten shit and I’ve found myself back on Google. To me it feels 10% better than it was when I stopped.
Although everyone’s experiences with Google are so different we’re probably all being A/B tested.
They fucked it all up with that AI bullshit awhile ago and it hasn’t recovered. I use start page now and am much happier.
The internet has slowly become more and more useless over time since the pandemic. It's fucking impossible to find anything now. Half the time it's like I have better luck doing an lan search on my home network than looking it up on Google and I'm not even very deep into the self hosted everything rabbit hole.
It's like they want us all to be stupid, uninformed and not know how to do anything.
There are many factors at play here, some of which including:
- AI content is taking over the Web: with the popularization of LLM tools, there's an increasing number of AI-Generated content across the Web. Even press websites are using them for generating news and opinion articles.
- Old sites/articles are vanishing from existence: for instance, old blogs and personal web pages, which contained a lot of useful information, are being deleted due to factors such as domain expiration, hosting expiration, insufficient web traffic for the host to keep it online, etc. To make things worse, few of these sites were archived with tools such as Internet Archive and Archive Today, meaning that, when they disappear, they really disappear.
- Dominance of Reddit-owned contents and the Reddit issues: Reddit doesn't need introductions, most of the questions and content used to come from Reddit posts and comments. Things such as people (understandably) deleting their Reddit accounts make content to disappear as well.
- SEO bs and marketing spam: Google kept changing "page ranking" algorithms, sorting results according to their own will. "Search Engine Optimization" is a just a facade that led many old sites to practically vanish from search result pages. Advertisement also did harm many sites as well, even the bigger ones.
- Societal, economical and human changes: there were lots of changes upon society and humans by the last 5 years. These worldly factors also influence the digital landscape.
That said, it depends on what you're searching for. If you're searching for knowledge that used to be at old websites, you can use Marginalia to search this specific type of websites (considering that they're still online).
It is half okay, but only if they are not getting paid to screw up your results. It is a coup against democracy where freedom of information is freedom of the press and is an entire fundamental pillar of democracy. Google's entire business model has always been neo feudalism. A web crawler and search engine is like a library, it must be neutral, objective, and publicly funded as a non profit. Much the same with YT, it is our digital public commons and the most efficient form for information sharing in the primary form of human communication.
The internet has gotten worse in general, and it's accelerating.
The vast majority of online content is now AI-generated.I've been using Kagi since ~February and it's changed my views on Search. Beforehand, if use a combination of Google, Bing, DDG, and Brave and rarely find what I needed in satisfactory time. Now I'm typically finding it in the top 5 without all the cruft + have access to a handful of LLM assistants to choose from for other tasks (when needed).
I've also heard good things about SearXNG.
HAHAHAHAHAH no. Google Search has gotten so much worse in the last couple of YEARS more like.
The reason behind this is not a bug but a feature. Google wants the trip from search to result to take longer as they can show you more ads that way.
It's crap.
You can use udm14.org though.
I have fully switched to kagi, it's not perfect but for the average case it's better than google.
Try finding old band photos. Basically impossible
As a basic bitch that hasn't gone to page 2 of a google search in years I don't really notice a difference.
The ai answers, related questions, and ad results are not especially helpful but at the end of the day I will find what I'm looking for.
I tried Google again after a few weeks of DDG and gave up on the first search. DDG has some troubles with German but I can work around that
They hired the guy the ruined Yahoo to run it
all of them. the conspiracy side of me says they all want to drive traffic to the ai.
Yes. Its AI generated slop. I use SearxNG, and I have it tuned to go to Startpage first, Google second.
It took me. 12 minutes of clicking through websites yesterday to get the heat and time settings for making potato chips in the air fryer. I used to be able to just ask the Google Assistant.
I'm glad I saw this post cuz I was going to gaslighting myself over the whole thing. It really is getting way worse, isn't it....
What search engine alternatives do y'all use?
Ill add something I've never really seen anyone mention: it used to be a lot better at staying on topic without ME keeping it that way
For example: this weekend I was playing Blops 3 and googled shit like "Winslow accord bo3" and after 1-3 searches I could just type shit related to bo3 and even if it had relevant pages related to other shit, it'd remember my recent searches and keep them rather relevant even if it was on my phone or a new window rather than the same search bar
At least, it used to work that way. Now every 4-5 searches it suddenly forgets what tangent I was on and I have to start adding qualifiers again to get relevant searches
It is. It also is the best thing to find something on Reddit. And as much as I hate what it has become, it still is the best source of information. But this changes rapidly, sadly. I give it until 2027, then the information on Reddit is garbage too.
I use Ecosia instead of Google, but I know that Google recently added a "forums" category to the top of their search. Have you tried that? Hopefully it will help bring back to life independent forums.
I've started to use Qwant a few months ago when bing and duckduckgo started to give me result I had filtered out in my search. But now it is way past this stage. When I look for something I find a lot of related topic but nothing about the topic I've searched for.
I notice it was suddently become much worst about 10~15 days agoThey all suck anymore. Google fell the furthest though.
And it seems like it completely disregards search modifiers like quotes or the minus sign at this point. The modifiers are overridden by the algorithms pushing preferred sites, or Google just gives few or no returns as if there are no sites featuring your search criteria, which is completely false because it’s perfectly happy to return paid sites with the same but incorrect search term.
Permanently Deleted
I always feel a sense of dissonance (I think that's the right word?) when I see posts like this. Everyone seems to be talking about this, but I haven't noticed a difference. Honestly, when I look up something, what I'm looking for is usually in the first few results. Not really sure how to feel about my experience being so different from others.
I wouldn't know I haven't used Google search in about 3 months.