I mostly get sponsored sites or content farms that repeat the same text about things as other context farms, but no answers to what I'm actually looking for. Or I want to know about something that happened a while ago, but it only gives me results for the most recent version of the thing despite including details that should limit it to the prior one.
My search criteria is the same as I used 10 years ago when I actually got helpful results.
Search engine optimization has ruined search engines.
For much of the internet, optimization used to mean improving usefulness and usability for end users. Now that we (as a society as well as individually) can't go without the internet anymore, optimization means improving usefulness for shareholders and/or advertisers, to the detriment of the user. This doesn't matter to them anymore though, since giving up on search engines, social media etc just isn't an option for users anymore.
It's been years since I felt any satisfaction using a search engine, personally. Between the ocean of sponsored results and the ever-growing mountain of AI-generated Search Engine Optimisation-filled garbage it's so much harder to find stuff than a decade ago.
My problem is that when I search for something, I often want to find precisely the text that I'm searching for. Not just some of the words, not synonyms, and not random stuff with no apparent connection to it. Putting the search query in quotes doesn't always help.
Most people don't know advanced googling anymore, even though it largely still works.
As far as people not using bookmarks, they just refuse to close tabs until they're sure they'll never return to a given site. People even obsess over tree style tabs and other tab organizing add-ons or features rather than, y'know, using bookmarks with folders which can already handle all of that.
AI happened. Beyond the immediate issue of decabytes of garbage articles that now show up any time you search something, information on the internet has now crossed the line to "inherently untrustworthy" because anything could be AI generated. If you're not able to confirm that a real human being wrote the information you're looking at, you just have to assume it's wrong.
The internet was definitely a sketchy place in the past, but there were at least a few places you could go to get reliable information. Those places either don't exist anymore, have become buried in the avalanche of AI garbage, or have become AI garbage themselves. Bookmarking a place when you do find it, like OP is suggesting, doesn't sound like such a bad idea now.
It’s a level of hell to watch other people continue to type out the full URL while the auto complete is already there, until they make that one typo towards the end and hit enter before you had a chance to tell them.
Truth, but it's three more key presses when I can just click the bookmark under the address bar instead of clicking the address bar. Takes you three times longer!
Don't even have to bookmark. You type few words separated by spaces of anything in browser history, browser will show it as a suggestion. Example:
"steam palworld"
"Jira projectname board"
Etc.
That was me, but I found bookmarking to be better. Very rarely I've had Chrome crash and not be able to recover my tabs. With bookmarking, I don't need to worry about that. And I can pick up my browsing on a different device very easily with bookmarking, as my bookmarks are automatically synced via chrome.
I just moved to a new computer and cleaned up all my tabs.
You have Tabs Disease™ and the cure is bookmarks. Spend some time organizing your bookmarks. Set reminders to read or do things so you can close the ones you won't need in the future. This is the equivalent of living in a messy room surrounded by trash, dirty laundry, and clean but unfolded laundry. Gotta take some time away from living and playing to clean up.
I already bookmarked but with this whole enshitification I began hoarding data. All those txts, images, videos, songs that I bookmarked? Am downloading and categorizing all of it
People don't bookmark? I have dozens of bookmarks all set up in folders. It's just easier than typing every time. Plus, I have a PC connected to my TV for watching illegal sports streams. With bookmarks, I don't need my keyboard most of the time. I just have a wireless mouse and that's it.
DDG seems to still function nicely. And I've never stopped using bookmarks. Didn't know people weren't using bookmarks anymore... I mean, what do you? Search for the same website you frequently use or just make a button that can do it in one click?
DDG is complete dogshit. It's my primary search engine and it drives me mad with how useless it is. It was pretty bad but it's gotten way way worse over the past couple of months I feel.
And yeah until a couple of days ago I hadn't bookmarked anything for 13 years. I just keep tabs open, remember names of sites or search the web. But I think I'll start bookmarking again in some cases, but bookmarks suck ever since Delicious disappeared.
DuckDuck Go took getting used to for me due to it lacking all the convenient algorithms from Google that... used to in the past... contribute to getting better search results.
The lack of these conveniences is why I switched to DDG years ago in the first place. I realised Google was essentially helping everyone build their own Internet echo chambers and I didn't want to be part of that.
It does mean you actually need to be good at searching for what you want because DDG is very bad at "guessing".
Or to put it differently; I call you complaints skill issues. :)
From my personal experience it became worse in the past few years. Sometimes I couldn't find something only to find it with one search request in google or yandex /:
I group tabs I'm working on and yes I could bookmark them but my bookmark folders are such a mess. I can clean them up. So what's the reason I don't bookmark you might wonder? It's lazyness
you are way more right than you think. Now that i think about it i started bookmarking more and more in correlation with the search engine enshittification trend.
I didn't know something like that existed, I usually use a service as cloudhiker to explore interesting web pages, but I don't like the ads and the redirecting, so I am currently I am searching for alternatives.
Offline AI is a better search engine now. Even at 20% fake or made up references, it is better than a search engine.
The reverse is likely true. Search engines suck because they are actively trying to edge out the AI competition as the products that will emerge from AI will soon make search engines unprofitable for peripheral data mining through stalking people.
Bookmarks and search engines serve different purposes, though search engines can replace bookmarks. But the main purpose of a search engine is to find sites you've never been to before because they contain specific information you're looking for.
I'm saying previously you may have not bookmarked it because you'd be confident you can easily find that info again. Now that search sucks, you may not be able to find it again. So you'll bookmark good information.
Linkwarden - An open-source collaborative bookmark
manager to collect, organize and preserve webpages
March 2024 Update - Support for Sub-Collections, Bulk Actions, API Keys and more.