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Compared to 10 years ago, in terms of being able to find useful content, do Google search results feel better or worse to you? Anonymous poll
Poll
Significantly worse
882
0%
About the same
138
0%
Significantly better
0 people voted. 12
0%
Voting ended 4 Dec 2023 at 19:22. 52 comments
@Nifflas@mastodon.gamedev.place @danluu@mastodon.social And automatically "correcting typos". Sometimes it's a "did you mean" link, that's fine and genuinely helpful if it actually was a typo, but it's infuriating when they allegedly correct my spelling and give me results for something so irrelevant they might as well have randomized the search, at least that would give me a chance at something useful.  @danluu My take on this: - Way more spammy bullshit content now. - They now try a lot harder to provide results on a "do what we thing the user means" way - A lot of the advanced search features that were useful have been removed or weakened - More content in walled gardens now @danluu The way I am actively blocking Medium articles nowadays in my search results is simply ridiculous...  @kajer @danluu In my experience modifiers can only make it omit some junk content that's crowding out results, but don't expose any text search access to pages that contain tje exact text you're looking for but that don't already get categorized by the ML shit as associated with the semantic-munged query.     @regehr I just had my water heater break and get water everywhere and two of the articles about what might be wrong included a paragraph on why it’s good to not get water everywhere in a house because it is possible it could cause water damage, which might hurt the value of the home. I often wondered how people “know” something is written by an LLM. But with “why is this leaking” articles there is no doubt. I used to think the results were more-or-less as good as they ever were, but after I started using the "site:reddit.com" trick that's often suggested and saw the remarkably helpful results, I'm often very frustrated by default results @danluu You forgot “Stopped using Google in favor of DuckDuckGo, because of privacy concerns with Google.” @danluu I don’t think Google is worse, I think the internet in general is worse. I would say Google is at least the same as it was before. Maybe better. But if you’re searching through rubbish all day, no matter how good you are at searching you’re going to mostly find rubbish  Except all the good stuff that used to be there is mostly still there. You just can't find it through Google. This is one of the reasons I am so religious about using a bookmarker. Once I lose a URL, at this point I have to assume there's no search on earth that will ever bring it back up. @siderea @danluu I dunno, especially with the majority of internet traffic being consolidated across like 10 domains I don’t feel like that same level of diversity, of creativity, of authentic sets of folks posting exists to the same degree it did even a decade ago. I feel like this consolidation has vastly decreased the quality of the independent web as we know it. It is significantly less interesting than it was as I remember it before consolidation  @Darriengineer This reads like one of these "Kids these days..."-posts, but it still feels correct. @Darriengineer Oh I can believe it. Part of the problem is even if there is exactly as much quality new content being generated, it's lost in an ever-increasing flood of sewage. But I also think people who would otherwise be inclined to generate quality new content are less likely to do so in the context of an ever-increasing flood of sewage. For a variety of reasons. @danluu@mastodon.social way worse. search is dead, and we killed it. (cc @ben_zen@social.sdf.org, who has a rant about this I believe)  @danluu@mastodon.social Switched to Kagi. Google became borderline useless. @danluu I’ve used duckduckgo almost exclusively for about five years, and either way I’m usually looking for one specific thing rather than a general topic. DDG has gotten slightly worse. Anything niche is impossible to find, but that was already the case before the AI spam apocalypse, it’s just become slightly more common that I’ll be unable to find something. And broader topics and specific pages are still usually findable.  @danluu I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine and have done so for a decade+. I don't like how Google search results are contaminated by "what can we also sell you" results. Every search on "rivets" is not answered by "where can I buy more rivets". But you know what? I still keep google as an optional "search with" option because occasionally I have a weird question with a weird word in it and I don't want the most popular partial match. And their "People also ask" feature does work.  @danluu it’s all ads now. Using the advanced search settings help, but it’s still all adds now.  For me it's about the same in terms of results because my eyes glaze over the adverts and I reflexively scroll down. What is worse is the the MFing spam and tracking in it. I elect to use duckduckgo quite often now. It does the job just as well with less hassle.   @danluu For me it started to get worse when they started to regionalize results: the same search made from different countries are giving different results, and this sucks. It started more than a decade ago, if I'm correct. And then it was even worse when they prioritized certain types of websites over others: for certain searches it's almost impossible to have anything else than newspapers or ecommerce. @danluu I'm looking to replace google local search because it can't find older articles on the site.  @danluu I don't use google at all anymore. I use DuckDuckGo, and most often just for !w and such directed searches. Google's results are worse than bing's in the rare event I try !g  @danluu @purplepadma It’s not a question of “feel”. There have been many demonstrations that the results are objectively worse, by a wide margin. @danluu I find myself using ChatGPT more and more for all kinds of silly questions that Google has no answer for. I don’t know if that’s bad or not though 👀  |
Gregory's Server
@danluu I think worse. It's probably better today when searching for something quite broad and common.
But for very specific less popular topics (especially very precise technical problems), Google keeps ignoring words that are essential to my search, and it seems to think it's way better to show me irrelevant results than telling me there are none. I'm losing a lot of time because of this.