Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse
Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse
'Search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam,' says study
I haven't used Google for awhile now. It just became an ad-ridden hellhole.
That's why I like Kagi. I do almost anything to avoid ads
For people who are interested in using a search engine that
- does not fund a bigot,
- does not collect all your search results under a single account, and
- does not charge you money,
I'd recommend checking out a community-supported SearX instance instead!
I love science, like experimentally observed science or at least practical theoretical science, but Youtube tries to shove every crackpot nonsense they can at me. I watch one political thing and now they try and shove every conservative propaganda they can at me. It feels like when I was young, the internet was too much for conservitives to understand and control....not anymore. What's the one true power conservatives have? Money. Now they're ether buying up social companies or their CEOs left right and center - or at least bringing tech leadership into the ultra-rich fold. Where they are winning without exception, is in isolating the majority of their voters. Now, there's no longer a shared reality and the divide seems to wide to close. Conservatives wanted brainwashed cult followers and did everything they could to make it happen. Now Idiocy seems far more real on the right with each passing year.
There's some theory on this and it goes beyond conservatives.
Once, the internet was small enough that whatever happened on it could be seen by most users. Now, things can go viral in one 'part' of the internet and people in other 'parts' would have no idea what was going on.
The solution to this is to recognize that the internet should be treated as more of a local place, where we interact with the communities and people we want while ignoring the ones we don't.
We can't expect "the internet" to share any overarching views because there are too many people from too many places online now.
The issue I have is that so many users are uneducated and read some disinformation, take it as truth and then vote accordingly. I don’t want to see certain things but I go out of my way to use multiple sources that are as unbiased as possible. But so many consume extremely biased propaganda and live according to that constructed view that they think is reality. I know there’s no easy answer, but the problem is clear and so long as the rich can easily take advantage of the useful idiots, it’s a struggle for progress in society…
Here's my theory... Google wants to artificially fuck up it's search functionality. It wants to offer good performance for a fee. And it's going to be doing that by giving it's own AI the correct filters while at the same time tripping every other AI capable of searching the net such that the other AI results become garbage and only the Google one works correctly. Anyway that's my conspiracy theory, fuck Google with a bunch of sharp forks.
Or they just cannot complete with literal millions of people attempting to optimize their webpages for discovery using Google.
I'm finding that LLMs are doing a better job for searching for new things. If I have a question, instead of going to google or bing I'll goto chatGPT and ask some of that nature with some sources for further reading.
Never would I think that I would need to use AI to answer simple search and yet here we are because the sole purpose of a search engine doesn't really exist anymore.
The problem is, you can't trust ChatGPT to not lie to you.
And since generative AI is now being used all over the place, you just can't trust anything unless you know damn well that a human entered the info, and then that's a coin flip.
However, I find it much easier to check if the given answer is correct, instead of having to find the answer myself.
Oddly I prefer Bing because it'll cite the source!
Perplexity is great for this. It gives like 5 links in addition to the text answer so it is imo the best of both worlds.
I use Qwant for my searches. I find the results better than DDG. https://www.qwant.com/
Whoa. I did a search that would inevitably bring nothing but sponsored bullshit on Google - "best tires"
My results were cartalk, consumer reports, cnet, and the consumer insider.
Nary a national chain trying to sell me something in sight.
I think they got removed from privacy guide unfortunately.
https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/pull/342
I want to support a European based service, but unfortunately I have to stick with DDG for now.
"DDG" refers to DuckDuckGo
just writing this for others who might've been confused like i was before looking it up
I’m surprised in most posts I’ve read about this there wasn’t a mention of Yacy which is a P2P distributed indexer / search engine. It heavily focuses on privacy. I’ve used it in the past and it worked great for my use cases to bypass censorship. It’s still actively developed after all the years. Would definitely recommend it or try it out as an replacement. The installation and usage is fairy simply.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
No, it's not just you - search engine results really are getting worse as the internet is flooded with low-effort garbage from SEO farms and affiliate link sites, a group of German researchers has concluded.
After pouring over countless links for the past year, the team has concluded everyone complaining about Google's declining quality seems to be correct, and things are probably only going to get worse with the advent of generative AI - just like we predicted.
Along with that, the researchers determined that all three search engines are prone to being gamed by large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns, and their efforts to subvert such manipulation through algorithm updates have, at best, "a temporary positive effect."
Google even claimed in 2022 that it was updating its algorithm to prioritize "people-first content," but as the researchers found, those efforts have been in vain as SEO experts and spam factories have simply figured out how to game the newest tweaks to the system.
Janek Bevendorff, research assistant at Leipzig University and an author on the paper, told The Register that it's hard to say whether there's an easy way out of the current online search predicament in which we find ourselves.
"Affiliate marketing itself is in part responsible for what online content looks like now," Bevendorff said, but noted that "banning it entirely is probably not a solution," as many authentic sites use the tactic, and SEO optimization, as an important revenue stream.
The original article contains 748 words, the summary contains 242 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
What is everyone else using instead?
I use DuckDuckGo, you can configure it as your default search engine in Firefox.
I use DDG like others have mentioned, but I also like Perplexity, because it's not a chat like ChatGPT, it just answers queries without trying too hard to chat to you.
I'm using Kagi
I use DuckDuckGo Lite in Librewolf with Ublock and NoScript (amongst other addons). That combination used with ddg's !bangs got me covered. No ads, not even image search (just go to ddg directly for that), just content.
I've used searx through a docker container, and it's a strong 2nd choice, but ddg lite is just easier to set up and gives better results imho.
All said, an LLM like a local Llama and ChatGPT, can fill the gaps for very specific searches. Sadly, the modern internet takes a lot of savvy to navigate quickly and effectively.
There's a very good reason so many are typing in "reddit" at the ends of their searches, and that's if their not using Chat GPT to just get them to the answer faster, and using much more computational resources to do so...it's a big cluster fuck.
I really like Ecosia. Someone told me it’s just bing, but I still like it.
Bing has done well for me
Patience and giving up.
Ask Jeeves
Startpage.
Safoda o Google
FCC should impose regulations on search providers to make searching with Google's competition more cumbersome and less useful. You know, 'level the playing field'
I think it would be enough if other search providers would be required to give a portion of their profit from each search to Google.
sometimes i think I'm smarter than i am... you're a goddamn genius
I thought it was normal for Google search results to suck.
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