“We’ve ignored all the meaningful terms you were searching for. Now here’s a bunch of pinterest and quora spam.”
“hey, is that a brand name? Here’s 9 sketchy looking shopping sites selling things that have that brand name on them”
I installed the extension that removes Pinterest from searches… it’s great.
It really winds me up how results that match every search term aren’t prioritised any more. I often search for very specific pieces of hardware, and it’s been a nightmare since the late 2010s. You now have to pore over each result to check that it’s 100% what you’re are looking for.
SEO exacerbates the problem, but I’d say the root cause is the algorithm itself.
Have you tried putting your search between " " ? It usually helps improve my results.
Thought I’d add for people that may not know, the quotes mean exact match for what’s between the quotes and only give results if it includes that term (unless I mixed something up). Whenever you click on Google’s ‘must include’ it puts quotes around the term. Can be handy or make things worse depending what you’re looking for. Worse is while programming and tracking a specific issue, unless they used the exact words you won’t get a result. Better for part numbers if they never get changed.
Been awhile since I went into the nitty gritty of the searching functions so if this is incorrect please reply with the correct info, been awhile since I really had to think about what quotes does behind the scenes.
That used to work, but these days seems to do little other than sightly change the order of the same useless results.
Nah.
What the average user is looking for is almost certainly gonna be near the top of a Google search.
Half the time I look at a website or article it is just AI generated crap anyway. Oh you want a product review? Here are a half dozen articles that have summarised the Amazon reviews of an item, with no first hand experience.
Google “Best vacuum cleaner”
Top 6 hits: “We evaluated the 5 brands that paid us the most and found that they all suck up your dirt. We can’t really speak ill of any of them because this is an ad and we signed a contract. Please use our embedded links so we can have more money.”
And the website is called something like Best-Vacuum-Cleaners-Blog.com
I swear sometimes it feels like a superpower to have grown up in the 90s and learned the ground rules for multiple OSes, search tools, and file systems - the descendants of which are nearly all still in use today.
I defer of course to any oldheads who can still bang out a long .bat file or compile and configure Linux; I just mean it’s a very useful quirk of the era that skills learned on windows 3.1 or OSX are still broadly applicable, even in fields where ‘using the computer’ is a minor task of one’s workday.
I agree so much. It feels like I “understand” how a computer talks and interacts as opposed to most people I work with just learn processes by heart and have no clue what to do once their process breaks.
We need a Google successor.
Something non-profit.
Wikipedia probably has the resources to do it, wikisearch. Somebody talk them into it. But yeah, modern search engines, pretty amazing the ones from two decades ago actually worked better.
This could be interesting. The infrastructure required to scrape the internet though is going to be so daunting. Google got to build it up slowly as the internet got bigger. Bing is backed by a huge corporation that already has data centers. A new non profit player is going to take a huge coordinated effort.
I know P2P had become a dead buzzword, but what if people dedicated a portion of their computers to assisting an open search engine.
I would wait 30s for accurate results. It could also piggyback on a search aggregator.
There used to be an open source search aggregator, don’t remember what it was called
I think it was YaCY, but apparently it’s basically useless for everyday use. ~Cherri
Yeah that looks like it! Why do you say it is useless? I have cloud credits that I could theoretically burn hosting one of these
IIRC its results just aren’t that good? I haven’t tried it, this is just what I’ve heard. Maybe it’s gotten better? ~Cherri
Hmm… Interesting… That would be great… If only something like that exists now!
Search engine protocol:
Ignore first few results (ads)
Ignore next few results (bullshit spam comparison farms)
Ignore really annoying site you think is ok but is a usability nightmare
Ignore subsection of reddit links
Find 0-1 useful links on first page
Regret
The sad thing is the Reddit Links probably contain the most useful answers that google will show you
I know. But I’ll use them as a last resort
Use them, costs bandwidth and CPU cycles.
Yes but it will be offset by traffic boosts for advertisers
Use an adblocker. Unless, you mean people go on the internet without using protection?
They do. Either due to technical ineptitude (like approximately everyone’s parents) or, and that might be worse, with the conviction of doing “the right thing,” like a friend of mine.
Junk data that costs the advertisement without a return on investment
The internet is unsearchable at this point. I feel like 99% of websites are fronts.
What’s been pissing me off for years now is googling a specific company and getting a wall of advertisements for their competitors first. So. Dirty.
Google is trash. I guess people suck for doing SEO like asshats
SEO is an inevitable result of capitalism and the existence of search engines. If food and shelter for your family depends on it, you will become an asshat too.
idk - you can’t really blame website owners for optimizing their SEO, it’s google’s fault for using such a game-able system IMO
I ran a business, built my website and done SEO according to advice found on the internet practically just using keywords related to my business. My goal was not to be on page 2 or 3 when people look for similar businesses. The site ended up always as a first result. I did not tinker with it, never paid for adwords/adsense. I don’t think I was being an asshole, just trying to make a living.
The problem seems to lie with Google. I remember days when I could search it for topics of interest and get results that were informative and didn’t try to sell me shit. Google is now reminiscent more of a mall and search results are shop fronts in the mall.
Yeah I don’t think businesses doing SEO is really the issue here.
It’s the millions of low-quality, garbage blogspam websites that have SEOd their way into filling the first 10 pages of every single search.
What’s a good canister vacuum? What I can I do for fun in Sparks, Nevada? Why is my cat throwing up? It doesn’t matter what you search for, you’re going to get articles filled with 6000 words of barely-passable English that you have to scroll through, with an add between every paragraph, until you finally get to the part where they “answer” the question with the most common-sense, useless, vague pile of word vomit that proves the author doesn’t know any more about the topic than you do.
But it’s no accident that that’s what Google has tuned their algorithm to prioritize. They’ve got as much of an interest in making you look at those ads as the website, because the ads come from Google and that’s their entire business model.
Try duck duck go, brief subject, possibly include the word “forum” or “howto” or “Reddit” (I know I know) and then try to narrow down your search terms from there. Use quotation marks for keywords, and site: to denote specific websites that you want to limit your search to.
And that’s basically the magic right there. Another key term to use is if you get too many results of a certain type, like if you search the word constitution and keep getting the ship, include the term -ship and that should remove those results.
This. Searching for topic information back in the 1990s could be frustrating because you couldn’t find the sites until you found the one that had that links page that would lead you to a number of others about that topic. Searching today through the modern “search engines” means getting the same regurgitated, irrelevant and/or common sense non-answers from all the “top” sites. I don’t bother looking that way anymore because sites like SearXNG, Mojeek, even sometimes Brave Browser can often do better. It’s like we circled around to the same problem, but this time knee-deep in garbage, too.
Oh shoot, I had forgotten the “links” page
For certain questions/information, ChatGPT provides better summary information than standard search engines like Google/Bing
A slightly dangerous part is that ChatGPT makes up convincing texts that may be wrong due to misunderstanding and or biased.
Yeah I had a coworker say she likes to use ChatGPT to find answers and explanations to questions she has that you would normally Google.
This is a terrible idea. While it may contain legitimate info, ChatGPT was not designed to give factual answers. It comes up with convincing answers based on text it has read. You’re going to end up with some bad information and it’s a bit dangerous to hear that people are starting to use it that way.
my lil trick is I’d just add “Reddit” after most searches to find others in a similar situation or maybe a solution
Maybe that does work again after the thing with subreddits going nsfw has been somewhat resolved but not sure. It was my thing too. I heard good things about bing of all places. In general search just got worse over the last 5-6 years.
People talk about Bing and duck duck go like they’re good replacements, and I’ve given them honest good faith tries.
I always switch my search engine back to Google after simply not getting the results I’m looking for
you can use Google or Bing from duckduckgo using !bangs. g! (for google) or b! (for bing) then whatever you are searching for. I use g! all the time for non privacy related things. and since duckduckgo doesn’t use trackers and all that the results can be terrible so sometimes I just resort to using g!
Using DuckDuckGo to search through Google seems pretty damn pointless if you ask me. If the search engine is shit and I am just roundabout using Google then why even bother?
I know you said the thing about trackers, but a lot of us don’t really care about that. If the end result is just using Google anyway then I’d rather just start with Google and not use another site to use Google.
oh yeah. if you don’t care, there really is not a point to use duckduckgo. I should say IMO because I’m sure a much more technically minded person will have a better answer.
It’s pretty amazing to search for something and actually see things you searched for.
Damn, I’ve gotten so many good alternatives lately. Thanks for posting that.
Oh fuck man, that’s a great find! Thank you for sharing that. It’s actually providing really substantiative results which I haven’t seen from Google for at least 5 years.
I have definitely bookmarked that website, even though I use duck duck go I will probably use that as an alternate now.
Another good search engine that’s less useful for searches but for providing information is of course Wolfram alpha
Does this work any better than DuckDuckGo? People praise DDG, but imo it’s results are pretty shit and I could never end to sticking with it. It can’t even get basic quoted text syntax correct.
Yeah ddg is as bad as google imo. This works like the net used to be.
Once AI is handling search for us, many may never learn the concept of “search term”
“AI” is already handling the search for you. The big search engines are probably the first mass scale adopters of machine learning.
And they have lost the war with SEO spam to a hilarious extent. What makes you think the same won’t happen with chat bot AIs? Bad actors (including PR agencies) will inevitably figure out where and how to spam comments in order to bias the AI models in favor of their agendas or products.
If the data they consume is filled with something like “fossil fuels don’t cause global warming because XYZ”, the chat bots will repeat it. They don’t have the capacity to reason.
There hasn’t been a reason to flood the internet with low effort spam because it’s easily detected by humans who read it. But the ML algorithms will be a lot easier to trick.
Apologies, I used the overly vague term “AI”. Any company creating an LLM that has web search + scraping capabilities will be at the mercy of the search results.
That said, LLMs are actually quite skilled at ignoring noise (repetitive data), so gaming SEO may lose popularity. Hell, the practice will DEFINITELY lose appeal once LLMs are just browsing for relevant content and summarizing without any citations (links to the sites). And even of they do cite, no one will click them.
Convenience > Fact
tldr; This additional layer of obfuscation between search and result will reshape the fabric of the internet with time
Injecting stuff into the data consumed by LLMs is the new type of SEO.
I used to work for Google. Now I pay for Kagi.
What are “SEO spam tactics”? I would google, but am afraid of that now.
I think I just figured it out, Search Engine Optimization?
Yes. Google popularized it and now it has ruined Google search.
Removed by mod
you should shoplift them from the book store instead
