Has search gotten worse?

[ToroidalBoat]

When searching for "Kiwi Farms" on Japanese Google, this shows up on the side:

ジョシュア・ムーン​

ウェブサイト

英語から翻訳-以前はCWCkiフォーラムとして知られていたKiwiFarmsは、「lolcows」と見なされるオンラインの人物やコミュニティの議論を専門とするアメリカのインターネットフォーラムです。 ウィキペディア（英語)

Joshua Moon
website

Translated from English-Formerly known as the CWCki Forum, Kiwi Farms is an American internet forum that specializes in discussions of online people and communities considered "lolcows." Wikipedia

 

[Lyle Delmar Chipperson]

Brave Search has definitely dipped in quality over the past couple months and the news and video tabs are especially bad. I think it's time for me to watch a couple Luke Smith videos and set up my own SearX instance.

 

[Bongocat]

Brave Search has definitely dipped in quality over the past couple months and the news and video tabs are especially bad. I think it's time for me to watch a couple Luke Smith videos and set up my own SearX instance.

I don't know, maybe we should write Eich and say "what you were doing was great but now it's fucking up". I imagine he would listen to his users a lot more than a big tech corp will.

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

Depends on what you're searching for and what search engine you're using. Google has gotten worse and worse over the years. I've noticed that in the past five years if I go and search for certain people or events the results become more and more limited so I avoid Google search engine like the plague. Image searches are all Pinterest now so that just pollutes searches.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

It's this vicious cycle of people metagaming every imperfect innovation to death. The problem now is manipulating the language processing search engines do to appear as a "credible source", meaning everything has to have this page long Wikipedia introduction bullshit even when the relevant content is 3 sentences. Can you combat that somehow? Maybe, but something else will take its place. Like posting blatantly false factoids as novel information not found anywhere else, for example.

I have encountered problems when looking for a fix for Y, top 10 results are guides with a list 5 ways to solve the problem. Number one suggestion will be to download MetaTurd Solver Pro that fixes it for you and what is the domain name... MetaTurdSolverPro.com, what a coincidence.

I have seen soooo many sites that does this and they are always shilling their program that will solve a very niche problem that you have a 5% chance of encountering ONCE per computer when using specific programs and hardware. They drown out actual information. Some time ago I searched for a registry key that I had forgotten the name of and googles top results were "top 5 solutions" sites in the style of NicheRegistryThingSolver.com and there I was was advised to download and install NicheRegistryThingSolver.exe, for changing a value that you do once during the lifespan of your Windows installation.

 

[Dick Justice]

How do people even find new websites these days? I have fleeting, dying memories of finding new stuff through affiliate links and webrings but nobody does that anymore. Web surfing was an actual pastime I could do, coasting along until I occasionally hit something cool that linked to something else, now everything is a dead end. The modern internet feels like a soulless city where the family stores have finally been choked out by all the big retail chains. But there is one silver lining - it's become such a corporate glorified adspace that I may finally choose to unplug and touch the grass outside. Fuck being online.

I tried to make a thread for exactly that, but no one was interested probably because it's not a topic conducive to complaining.

I have encountered problems when looking for a fix for Y, top 10 results are guides with a list 5 ways to solve the problem. Number one suggestion will be to download MetaTurd Solver Pro that fixes it for you and what is the domain name... MetaTurdSolverPro.com, what a coincidence.

I have seen soooo many sites that does this and they are always shilling their program that will solve a very niche problem that you have a 5% chance of encountering ONCE per computer when using specific programs and hardware. They drown out actual information. Some time ago I searched for a registry key that I had forgotten the name of and googles top results were "top 5 solutions" sites in the style of NicheRegistryThingSolver.com and there I was was advised to download and install NicheRegistryThingSolver.exe, for changing a value that you do once during the lifespan of your Windows installation.

And the best part is you always get a UAC prompt when you try to run it.

 

[skjora]

Tried to look up how they make cyan ink (in CMYK printing) - like the ingredients that goes into it.

I'm 99% sure the color comes from a phthalocyanine variant, but printing ink can use different pigments/dyes and binders depending on use case.
Here's some info about what they may contain other than pigment: https://letterpresscommons.com/types-of-inks/

 

[ToroidalBoat]

https://letterpresscommons.com/types-of-inks/

Thanks for finding that.

(I confused "pthalocyanine" with "anthocyanin" for a moment and thought they found a way to somehow make the latter stable.)

 

[Phalanges Mycologist]

Here's some info about what they may contain other than pigment: https://letterpresscommons.com/types-of-inks/

Thanks for that I've been curious about small scale printing and that site covers all my questions.

 

[Grundlejungle]

Every time I search "name of a product followed" by "review" you would expect I would get reviews of that specific product.
No, I get results for reviews of probably every other thing under the sun except that particular product. It's even worse if I want to specifically read a written review as opposed to a 20 minute YouTube video with some idiot babbling on about his personal life for 19 minutes of it, with the one remaining minute of it being the review of actual God damn product.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Every time I search "name of a product followed" by "review" you would expect I would get reviews of that specific product.

As far as I can tell, review websites have been been entirely subsumed by SEO spam sites and affiliate marketers. If you actually want to know if a product is any good, your best bet is to search a specialty forum or, God help you, Reddit.

 

[Pee Cola]

I tried to make a thread for exactly that, but no one was interested probably because it's not a topic conducive to complaining.

Maybe the thread needs to be pinned? It's too good to be buried deep in the bowels of the I&T subforum.

 

[skjora]

As far as I can tell, review websites have been been entirely subsumed by SEO spam sites and affiliate marketers. If you actually want to know if a product is any good, your best bet is to search a specialty forum or, God help you, Reddit.

The only two ways I've had *any* sort of luck finding real reviews/advice written by human beings recently are combing through 2- and 3-star reviews in webstores like amazon, or indeed fucking reddit.

Worse is trying to find "How-to" guides, where the cancerous, seeping teratoma of a website known a pinterest is usually all you get.

 

[Pee Cola]

Worse is trying to find "How-to" guides, where the cancerous, seeping teratoma of a website known a pinterest is usually all you get.

I'm at the point where I now type out "-pinterest" by default whenever I do a search.

 

[ditto]

Has anyone else noticed KiwiFarms appearing more and more in Google results? Used to only appear on later pages if at all, but lately it's been at the top and even saw it in Videos once.
Guessing this won't last though.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

All search engines are shitty, I could search a paragraph from an article verbatim & get zero results or totally unrelated shit clogging the results.

 

[Un Platano]

After trying various alternative search engines for a while I must regrettably conclude that google is still vastly superior to the rest. All too often I'd find myself looking for something and be unable to find it, switch to google, and the first result it gives is exactly what I'm looking for. Sometimes it was because I didn't know how to spell something and only google could figure out what I meant and sometimes it's because duckduckgo and co were only pulling results from pinterest, quora, and fandom due to the sheer volume of useless information contained therein. It's even worse there than it is on google. Image search on those browsers is especially bad. The worst example I can think of was when I was looking for a picture of a ladybug and the search engines that weren't google returned nothing but porn.

Meanwhile, google has screwed up their image search in a different way. They've been trying to phase out their regular search by image and replace it with google lens. First they hid the option on the mobile version of google images, and then they replaced search by image with lens on mobile when you long press on an image, and now they've removed the option from their desktop browser when you right click. You used to be able to bypass this by opening the picture in an incognito window and the search by image reappears, but now that doesn't work either. They've quietly made it more and more inconvenient to use the regular image search for no reason and replaced it with lens.

The big problem with lens is that it's too smart. It's actually very good at what it's designed to do, which is identifying things in the picture. The problem is that this is very different from the old functionality of image search which is to find similar copies of a picture elsewhere on the internet. Google lens doesn't do this, and instead it returns hundreds of different pictures of the thing you searched for instead of giving you hundreds of versions of the same picture. This is annoying because more often I'm searching for a picture not because I want to know what's in it but because I'm looking for that picture with higher resolution and better quality. It's infuriating not that google lens exists, but that they have replaced image search with it despite them being very different tools. There's no reason google lens needs to be implemented to the exclusion of image search, but they did. Search by image is still around, but they removed a very streamlined shortcut to doing it and have turned it into a slog through the amount of pages you have to click through due to its removal from the right click menu.

Google has this habit of obfuscating less used functions for no reason as if real estate on their UI is at a premium. I've seen it before like with the function of only returning results within a certain date range on mobile. This still exists on desktop, but it was removed from the search options on the mobile version of their website. Someone asked why they did this and they said it was because that option wasn't used very often, which is bullshit. It's a working function that they removed because it comparatively wasn't used as often as most others. But they didn't actually remove it, you just have to make it request the desktop version of google. So then what's the point of doing it at all? Similarly I believe they pushed search by image out of the way for the same reason. Few people used search by image as a means of finding better quality versions of images because any visit to social media will show you that the vast majority of people don't give a fuck about image quality.

 

[Equivocal_Iki]

Google reverse image search was better than trace.moe for anime (and everything else). The only reason it's not good for finding source now is because google doesn't want you to find the source. Apparently it was for some DMCA reason. I only use yandex for reverse image search now.

 

[Happy Fish]

The consequences of centralization are everywhere. It's really dumb.

 

[jje100010001]

I think with some degree of search engine optimization knowledge, the results aren't that bad on some topics yet; but the yield is rapidly dropping.

I think that the incident with Google with "Mass Formation Psychosis" is proof enough of the fact that the tech giants and governments will always try to have their hands on the scale.